Trust in the system

This book focuses on Research Ethics Committees (RECs), a way of regulating research involving humans, found all across the developed world (in the US they are known as IRBs, Institutional Review Boards) and increasingly in developing countries. These bodies regulate research in advance of it taking place, by deciding whether scientists should carry out particular experiments or not. Despite coming into existence in the late 1960s, and the considerable literature bemoaning the chilling effect such review has on biomedical research and the costs and challenges associated with getting approval - we don't know very much about how these bodies make decisions. Sitting on the border between Science and Technology Studies and medical sociology, this book provides one of the first empirical examinations of this kind of regulation, drawing on observational, interview and archival data to give in-depth ethnographic insight into RECs. -- .