Part Seven of Seven-Part Blog Series by Guest Blogger Patrick Taylor

A suggestion runs through the debate on the NPRM to amend the Common Rule that the proposed changes are a tribute to Henrietta Lacks, a necessity so her story is not repeated.

That story was told in a the national bestseller  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a moving biography of the young woman whose  aggressive tumor was the source of the ubiquitous HeLa cells (probably without her consent, certainly without her awareness of what followed); her family;  the  cells’  (and her) dehumanization into a research tool to be exploited unthinkingly; and the poverty, disconnection, racism,  lack of health care and lack of concern for her family. Society and scientists received a bonanza, and did nothing for her family in return.  The book criticizes phony consent, and advocates sharing  cell line proceeds with donors and their families. It rekindled discussion of consent and racist legacies, while urging that injustice required social change.

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Part Six of Seven-Part Blog Series by Guest Blogger Patrick Taylor

Reading the NPRM and its government commentary, one is subtly, slowly led to a sense of inevitability.  Arguments from abstract principles emerge, leave a footprint and then, in the wake of another tide of interests and arguments, another principal supplants them.  But we are to believe that each previous  footprint endures intact.  There’s “autonomy,” said to require expanding opportunity to consent to honor individual preferences, overtrodden by scientific convenience, which demands just one-time consent, and suggests that world-changing choices to be privacy-bare may be irrevocable.  There’s privacy demanding that information meet HIPAA deidentification standards at least some of the time; but there is some undisclosed vector requiring that there is no limit on who government may share your medical information with.  Surrender to the illusion that these are not inconsistent,  and the proposal is the best of all possible worlds, in which every inconsistent good is maximized and every tradeoff ignored.  Surrender the illusion itself and one sees a mix of juxtaposed  partial-prints going different directions, each incomplete.

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Part Five of Seven-Part Blog Series by Guest Blogger Patrick Taylor

The preamble to the NPRM justifies requiring consent for data and specimen research by contending  that studies indicate that people want to be asked for permission.  However, the literature on this topic is relatively thin.  Available evidence suggests that many people, upon being informed that their heath data and tissues could or would be used in research without their consent (and nothing further is said to prompt the idea that research might delve into controversial matters) are generally fine with such use.  But when also queried whether they would prefer to have been asked, people say they would.  What the literature does not show is that people say: “I object to any use without my consent,” let alone “and I choose that over all the advantages of minimal risk research involving analysis by a computer of digitized files not humanly readable limited to disease-gene associations of thousands of medical records where consent would not be possible but the results will be essential or important to my health, the health of others, and the national health.”  Pluralistic discussion of tradeoffs over time, or an extended, candid national dialogue about the reasons for the present rules, were not in the mix.   Yet still, people said the opposite of “This must not occur without my consent!”

We have already seen one way in which the claim to be respecting the preference to be asked is untrue – it applies to only some research by some organizations.   Now here is another. The commentaries to the NPRM celebrate as fact that a patient need be asked only once, for all time, and then the only acceptable “yes” answer grants permission for any research by anybody.    It seems doubtful that a one-time consent to any future scientific research by any researcher for any purpose, without ever going back to inform or re-query,  without any regulatory provisions ensuring it was revocable, was what  participants meant by  “being asked.” Rationally, that option is far worse than no consent, for reasons we shall come to. Read More

Part Three of Seven-Part Blog Series by Guest Blogger Patrick Taylor

In the previous post of this series, we took a look at how comprehensively certain proposed revisions to human subject research regulations would apply and whether they would, if effective, really fulfill a broad goal of enabling the consent of everyone to researchers’ use of their clinical data.  The answer is a big “No,” based on their scope.  If public trust in science depends, as the government claims, on individuals’ consent reliably and consistently governing research use of their data, then science is in trouble; all the government has proposed is a restriction on the institutions a supermajority of the people trust already to protect their privacy: healthcare providers, researchers funded by the NIH, and a handful of other federal agencies.   Everyone else, from Google to spymaster, drug company to next-door neighbor, is unaffected except to the extent that those entities, or reviewing IRBs, require contracts that say something more, which in this case is left to chance.

The proposed regulations call for government to draft a general blanket consent to govern tissue banking and banked data.  “Blanket” means that it covers everything, in undifferentiated language, with no opt outs – all or nothing.   Such an approach will eliminate most or any choice about what one is consenting to.  It will require consent to any research by anybody using any technique, with any goal in mind.  The options will be to consent to that or not consent at all. Read More