Talk:Human subject research

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 January 2019 and 16 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Carmela055.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:40, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Alexandria97.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:01, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Stanford Prison Experiment needs edits
This sentence, for example, is incomplete: "Due to the fact that prisoners could lack respect for the law and guards could behave in a hostile manner due to the power structure of the social environment that are within prisons." And then there is this one, which is just bad. "Human subjects are the most way to get successful results from this type of experiment." Amnion (talk) 20:00, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Beecher report
I've removed the following from the article: "In 1966, anesthesiologist Dr. Henry K. Beecher published an article, "Ethics and Clinical Research". Beecher estimated that "unethical or questionably ethical procedures are not uncommon" and in detail outlined 22 examples of controversial studies that have been published in major journals. Beecher wrote, "Medicine is sound, and most progress is soundly attained..." He believed that unethical research is not "sound" and instead it can "do great harm to medicine.""

This is essentially a primary source about Dr. Beecher's opinion; what is really needed is a secondary source discussing why it is important and how it impacted human subject research. A multitude of articles have been published discussing HSR, why is this one special? It's not immediately obvious by the context, it just looks like someone likes the opinion. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 01:32, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with your characterization of this section, it gives no hint that Beecher's paper was significant. I inserted a rewritten paragraph on the Beecher paper supported by a secondary source that describes its importance. However I am open-minded on the question, and am willing to explore it here if I am getting it wrong. M.boli (talk) 05:48, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * It's definitely better (the note that someone thinks it significant is helpful) but even better would be a discussion of how it impacted practice. If it didn't result in a specific new set of guidelines named after Beecher, this information may be better placed in the history section.  Right now it's under the superheading "guidelines" but it is not itself a guideline.  It certainly appears significant, but the choice of section does not appear appropriate.  My inclination is to move it to either Human subject research or Human subject research.  WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 13:09, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Righto, I don't disagree. Later today I can move it to US section, and change it a bit to make more clear how it contributed to historical understanding of the issue.  (I have another reference which describes that.)  FWIW: Beecher's paper seems to be the one that researchers cited when they wanted to make the point that the problem was rampant in contemporary (at that time) medical research.  Google Scholar lists about 1200 cites, there are reprinted copies all over the web, and people publish papers with names like "Beecher Revisited" in the title as if everybody in the field would know what that means. This is what persuaded me that it might be worthwhile to find out if the paper was historically significant. M.boli (talk) 17:04, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Sounds good, I look forward to seeing the changes. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 18:43, 2 June 2011 (UTC)


 * If the current Human subject research passes muster, I will wiki-link to it from inside the Henry K. Beecher article and declare this task done. M.boli (talk) 06:26, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I've made some minor adjustments (the use of cite pmid apparently allows some advantages in page loading speed, in addition to being a lot easier to include on the page, so I used it where I could). It otherwise looks an excellent addition, good work.  WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 12:49, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you, both for the edits and the kind word. I'll learn more about template cite pmid, how to work with it correctly. M.boli (talk) 10:12, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Middle ages
I've removed the section on the Middle Ages, which was primarily a contribution of Middle Easter doctors. As I said in my edit summary, the work discussed wasn't really about human subject research - Avicenna's work was to determine drug effects (the focus was on the drugs, not the humans), and the dissections were for knowledge of anatomy, not experimentation. It's possible there is material that could be included here, but I don't see that version as being appropriate. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 12:53, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * ...and given this and this, it's probably a good thing I did. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 16:26, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Potential Revisions
It is my intention to do a revision on this article. I feel that it has a good framework but improvements could be made to increase the coherence of the entry. Since this article focuses a lot on the abuse component of human subject research I feel that this article should specifically demonstrate that this form of research is not inherently bad. Rather, issues arise when unethical practices come into play. I also agree with a previous contributor that the cases used as evidence are outdated. Presently, human subject abuses have become further scrutinized as many pharmaceutical companies outsource to the developing world. I will show the domestic and international magnitude of this problem so that readers can understand the seriousness of this issue. I will also incorporate potential policy reforms and regulations. B4change1 (talk) 07:01, 9 March 2012 (UTC)B4change1


 * These are good suggestions; I am also concerned that the article concerns only abuses of human subject experimentation, although its Lead suggests that the topic is not that limited. At the very least, there should be addition of content that provides some context of the state of medical research and medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (which was rather primitive), as well as acknowledging the many changes and advances in medicine that enabled some people at least to believe that experimentation was warranted. At the same time, according to some accounts, by the 1930s, major US hospitals were developing their own protective guidelines. At this time, doctors and scientists had considerable authority and prestige.Parkwells (talk) 22:55, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Suggested revisions
This article is extremely thorough and comprehensive already, so a lot of my edits are spelling- and grammar-related. I do have a few conceptual/content-related suggestions however: In the Human Subject Abuses section, specific instances or researchers should obviously be listed if they were incredibly influential on the practice of/the guidelines for human subject research, but removed if they are less remarkable. For example, the story of Johann Jorg doesn’t seem to have any particular significance to the article.

You might also want to expand the sections on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, Ongoing human subject abuse, and Guidelines. Consider branching out from your focus on medical research conducted on human subjects to flesh out the psychology section and include information about sociology, anthropology, etc. because these research fields still fall under the purview of the IRB.

Now, onto line-edits: The introduction to the article says “can be either oriented or clinically oriented and. . .” which is somewhat redundant. I would rephrase this and say “can be research- or clinically-oriented and.” You might also want to add hyphens in words that look like this: “_______-oriented.” In the phrase “Ethical guidelines which govern the use of human subjects,” replace “which” with “that.”

I suggest changing “Additionally, informed participation consent became a requirement and rules were established for the investigation of drugs” to “Additionally, informed consent became a participation requirement and rules were.”

In the sentence, “The three tenants that it established were respect for persons, beneficence, and justice,” “tenants” is a typo and should be replaced with “tenets.” The sentence is also in passive voice, so I would rewrite it as, “It established three tenets: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.”

Also, the section header “Israel” is misspelled towards the end of the article.

Hope this is helpful! Weatherby551 (talk) 05:10, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Under the Introduction for "Ethical guidelines...", the second sentence uses "wasn't" so get rid of that contraction. Also under "Ethical Guidelines..." I think you should put the international section before the US section. Under the introduction for "Human Subjects" I think it would look better if you took the terms you are defining out of quotation marks. I really like how you have human subject abuses listed chronologically and by country. Under the "ongoing human subject abuse" you should give a brief 1-2 sentence summary of the North Korean situation instead of just linking to the page. Overall, this is a very comprehensive approach to the topic, and it was very well written. ChloeCBlaskiewicz (talk) 21:59, 10 April 2012 (UTC)ChloeCBlaskiewicz

Changes planned
I plan on re-organizing this article's subsections and adding quite a bit of new information. As previously stated, this article could benefit greatly from expanded sections and the inclusion of ethically sound research in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Also, one important piece missing from this page is the extensive use of human subjects in Africa. There's an entire article here on Wikipedia on human Medical Experimentation in Africa. I plan on summarizing most of that article's relevant material and integrating it into this one. Tentatively, I plan on moving the definition of human subjects to the top of the article and then delving into the ethical guidelines later. Dividing the article into both ethical and ethically questionable human subject research, the rest of the information can be provided, although with a different structure. I also want to expand the sections such as Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Project MKUltra. I'm relatively new to Wikipedia editing, and I'm implementing these changes as a Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities student. If you have questions or advice, feel free to post on my page. I'll soon add a detailed list of my proposed changes to my sandbox if there are any remaining questions or suggestions.

All the best! Jakejohnston1 (talk) 01:53, 9 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Agree that this needs material about appropriate human subject experiments, as well as the advances that made some people think a few sacrifices along the way were worth it. In the early 20th century, for instance, mortality from some infectious diseases was very high. Also, there's an existing WP article devoted only to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and this topic is also covered in the existing article on Unethical human experimentation in the US (or whatever it's called), so perhaps the Tuskegee Experiment should not be expanded here. Having too much in too many places makes it very difficult to keep the content of these different articles aligned and up to date in terms of scholarship.Parkwells (talk) 22:55, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Response to suggested edits
Thanks for your suggestions Amanda and Chloe. I will definitely fix the grammatical errors. I still have some edits to do towards the end of my page with regards to the actual cases. I will build on this very soon. The cases that prove not to be that noteworthy will also be deleted. Some of these cases were a part of the original contribution which I am further revising. Thank you for your suggestions!! They are greatly appreciated. B4change1 (talk) 04:02, 11 April 2012 (UTC)b4change1

Subjects vs. Subject
Should this be titled "Humans subjects research" rather than "Human subject research"?

For example, NIH runs the Office of Human Subjects Research. http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/about/index.html Darrylsturrock (talk) 21:34, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Index of Human Radiation Experiments (Declassified)
The is too large of an addition for me to tackle. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet1/brief1/br1n.txt

I am working on Operation Red Hat, Project 112, Project SHAD if any pros want to help an amateur wikipedia editor make 100% verifiable military historical A class articles with the no copyright gov info, photos and videos that I gather please message me on my talk page.Johnvr4 (talk) 03:36, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
 * The document for which you provided a link does seem to be a review of a field of research. I did not look deeply into it but it seems like an excellent source from which one could get information on some large-scale specific government actions. Thanks for sharing this link here - it is worth developing.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   12:41, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Alternative titles
Currently, Human experimentation, as well as Human Subject Research (HSR) and Human Subject Use (HSU) – formerly noted in the lede, including the abbreviations – as well as various other terms redirect here, along with various other terms. Human subjects research, a widely used alternative, and the alternative capitalisation Human subject use, in contrast, have not been created yet. Should they be created? Should any alternative terms be listed in the lede? Should any of the abbrevations be listed?

Another former version of the lede noted a distinction between interventional studies (experiments) and observational studies within human subject research. I think that older versions of the lede were superior in some points or phrasings to the present version, and that these parts were too quickly discarded. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:40, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
 * My impression is that Human subjects research is the most commonly used term in academia, and it may make sense to change this page's title to that. I like the idea of mentioning experimental versus observational studies, as that is a major difference in terms of research protocol and IRB approval of studies. Thosjleep (talk) 00:06, 17 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Google Scholar yields 15,900 hits for "human subjects research" as opposed to 6,730 results for "human subject research". That's not an overwhelmingly wide margin, so I think it's best to treat them as valid alternatives. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 10:58, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I have no objection to the creation of these redirects. I do not think the name should be changed to "human subjects" without more evidence. I hear "human subject research" in my area, and we also say "primate research", "mouse research", and "insect research" rather than the plurals of any of those. When I think of departments in a research facility I would expect the name to pluralized - "human subjects division", "primates division", and so on. The human subjects division or the human subjects department does human subject research.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   12:53, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Eastern Germany
Eastern Germany sold access to experimental subjects to major Western medical companies. E.g., a man suffering from a heart condition got some "special pills" from his doctor, which he assumed were better than "normal pills". However, he died, and after Die Wende his widow had left-over pills analyzed; they were placebo. -- I heard about this in a radio programme in Denmark, and have not researched for propoer sources. If someone can find sources, it obviously belongs in this article.--Nø (talk) 20:25, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Bias in Germany Section
I have found some important bias in the section on experimentation in germany during ww2. The author employs words with emotional subtext such as cruel and murdered. Needs revision 64.175.80.68 (talk) 16:53, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm just going to remove it, the page is about human subject's research, not how awful Mengel was. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 10:04, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Major article reform
User:Jakejohnston1 just did a major reform of this article. Thanks, Jake. Jake, could you please respond to some questions I have?


 * Mentions of the Herero people were removed. Why?


 * In the 1904 Herero and Namaqua Genocide in present day Namibia, people were used as test subjects in medical experiments.


 * Sterilization experiments were initially conducted on Herero women in German-occupied South West Africa (Namibia) by Dr. Eugen Fischer.




 * You provided summaries of the very famous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Asch conformity experiments, Stanford prison experiment, and Milgram Experiment. From where did you get these summaries ? Did you write original summaries of these, or did you copy and paste them from elsewhere? If you wrote original summaries, then what do you think of the other summaries of these on Wikipedia?


 * Please provide a citation for the statement "Throughout most the 20th century, Africa has been the site of clinical testing for large pharmaceutical companies."


 * In the section you made on the "South African Aversion Project" the link you provided does not work. Can you fix it? Also, can you please provide a reference for every sentence in this section? If you would like to repeat a citation, use Ref. Finally, can you please comment on the quality of the source from which you are drawing this shocking information? To what extent is this source WP:reliable?

Thanks.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   02:08, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Question of POV
A US article is titled "Unethical human experimentation", or something like that, but this one simply is titled "Human subject research". But, it mostly is a listing of abuses, many of them covered in the US article. Early 20th c. discoveries included the use of insulin to control diabetes. If editors want to write only about unethical research, do so, but, unless the article is moved to a new title, I think there needs to be some coverage of advances that were made because of the research. Parkwells (talk) 20:38, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
 * It would be easier to move the title or content than it would be to request coverage of more content. I would support anyone else adding content here but am unable write now to lead the writing of lots of new sections. I would be delighted if you were able to add a few sentences about early diabetes research.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   13:57, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Places for improvement
To improve this page, I would recommend that someone add more information about clinical trials that have occurred in each country in the “International clinical drug trials” section. Most subsections don’t have a lot of content at the moment. It would also be great to add some more countries—right now it is very focused on African nations.

It would also be nice to find some more information on the history of clinical trials in different countries; for example, some of the subsections are very sparse, such as the US and the UK before WWII. If someone could add more countries to the history section that would also be helpful. I think it would be good to add a quick summary-style paragraph to subsections with no information in them as well (MK Ultra).

(I should add that I am a student reviewing this article for a class: Education Program:Rice University/Poverty, Justice, Human Capabilities, Section 2 (Fall 2013)). — Preceding unsigned comment added by S.A.Weinzimmer (talk • contribs) 03:47, 7 November 2013 (UTC) Saira Weinzimmer (talk) 00:30, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Additional comments
The article is heavily focused on instances of abusive human experimentation, which is very thorough. I think more could be done to add to the “ethical guidelines” section – historical and geographical guidelines could be added.

The “human subjects” section has a dictionary of the US DHHS terms. This seems unnecessary. I think the rest of the “human subjects” section could be transferred to the “ethical guidelines” section.

More illustrations would be a nice addition. Some phrases are a little longer or more cumbersome than necessary – whenever you see this, try to condense the wording; it makes the whole article easier to read. Overall, an excellent article. (Cebrown721 (talk) 02:12, 7 November 2013 (UTC))

Nazi occupation of South West Africa?
There's no evidence that I can find that Germany, which administered South West Africa (modern Namibia) up till the end of the First World War, re-occupied it during the Second World War. This is what the current segment on "Namibian sterilization" implies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jperrylsu (talk • contribs) 00:14, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Very nicely written article
I was not able to read the full article, but by seeing the sections, it seems very well written article. Thanks. -- Abhijeet Safai (talk) 11:55, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

What is difference between this and Clinical Research?
-- Abhijeet Safai (talk) 07:57, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Clinical research is a type of human subject research which is health related. An example of controversial human subject research which was not clinical research was the Netflix Prize. Netflix is an online movie distributor and they did research to find a process for recommending movies to their users. During their research, they revealed personal information about their users in a way that caused problems. This case is discussed as an example of controversy in human subject research but not clinical research.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  11:08, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Ok. I understand. But then should we call this as 'research involving human subjects'? --Abhijeet Safai (talk) 11:26, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * It is "research involving human subjects" but in the United States at least, "human subject research" is a technical term. So far as I know, every university in the United States has a "human subject research" department called by that name, so unless there is some name more popular than this one, I would expect this to be kept.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  11:46, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Review by Wiesencl
Overall, there were a lot of great changes made to this article! Three suggestions I have is to add more citations from a variety of articles within the leading section. This will allow for many opinions. I would maybe suggest that there be some research into human subjects in other countries besides the United States to give a world-wide view and incorporate other countries beliefs. Lastly, it could be helpful to expand on human subject rights. Some are self explanatory but others could be helpful to explain. As a whole the corrects were awesome and made a positive move in the right direction! Wiesencl (talk) 17:17, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Student editing
Hello Wikipedia community! I am a student in a post-bacc program bioethics class and I have a few contributions to add to the wikipedia page. Please give your feedback and own edits! Thank you. Carmela055 (talk) 01:17, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Righto! If you feel like testing out paragraphs and edits before putting them live, you can put them in the comments to see what other people suggest. I predict one issue you will encounter is that the topic isn't well organized within Wikipedia. The articles Human subjects research, unethical human experimentation, human subject research legislation in the United States, and maybe a few others are sort of a hodge-podge, with overlaps. Possibly some material is overlooked. Somehow the administrative part of the human subjects research story (for the U.S.) is much better organized, look at the the see-also section at the end of institutional review board to get a list of those articles. M.boli (talk) 16:06, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes! I've skimmed through the whole article a few times. There's a lot of great content on here but I agree, could use a bit of organizing here and there. Without changing the content, I might do a bit of rearranging as I come across things, in addition to adding my own information that I've gathered from some preliminary research. My sandbox is also where I'm drafting some paragraphs to add, feel free to take a look!Carmela055 (talk) 20:36, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Rice University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2013 Fall term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 15:40, 2 January 2023 (UTC)