For nearly 40 years, the federal government has enforced the “Common Rule.” The rule required researchers in the social and medical sciences to get the approval of an independent review board, or IRB, for their federally funded experiments. The purpose of the boards, which are usually set up by the researchers’ universities, is to protect human research subjects—college students, usually—from potentially harmful experiments. The most infamous example is the Tuskegee syphilis study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, which allowed syphilitic patients to go untreated for decades in the name of medical research.

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