Background: Research integrity has gained attention in the general public as well as in the research community. We wanted to investigate knowledge, attitudes, and practices amongst researchers that have recently finished their PhD and compare this to their responses during their PhD fellowship. In particular, we wanted to investigate whether their…

Background: Africa is increasingly becoming an important region for health research, mainly due to its heavy burden of disease, socioeconomic challenges, and inadequate health facilities. Regulatory capacities, in terms of ethical review processes, are also generally weak. The ethical assessment of social and behavioral research is relatively…

The profound advances in the biomolecular sciences over the last decades have enabled similar advances in biomedicine. These advances have increasingly challenged our abilities to deploy them in an equitable and ethically acceptable manner. As such, it has become necessary and important to teach biomedical and scientific ethics to our students who…

Some African higher education institutions (HEIs) were founded on the notion that they would serve the specific needs of African communities. Other HEIs have borrowed the concept of community-engaged scholarship (CES) from the USA as a strategy for achieving relevance. Nonetheless, African HEIs continue to be criticized as imitators of Western…

Professionalism and ethics have gained widespread recognition as competencies to be fulfilled, taught, and assessed within medical education. The role of the anatomy course in developed nations has evolved over time and now encompasses multiple domains, including knowledge, skills, and the inculcation of professionalism and ethics. The Medical…

There is growing recognition that science is not conducted in a vacuum and that advances in the biosciences have ethical and social implications for the wider community. An exercise is described in which undergraduate students work in teams to produce short videos about the science and ethical dimensions of current developments in biomedicine.…

This paper describes the development of a taught Master's course in biomedical diagnostics using a novel multi-disciplinary approach. This course, the first of its kind in Ireland, covers the science and technology underlying the development of medical diagnostic devices that detect early markers of diseases such as cancer. The ethical impact of…

After premature closures in 2004 of biomedical human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention trials involving sex workers in Africa and Asia, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention (AVAC) undertook consultations to establish better participatory guidelines for such trials in order to address…

The technology surrounding stem cells generates great excitement amongst scientists, media and the community. For science teachers, this means not only embracing and keeping track of the rapid growth and ongoing development in this field but also tackling the ethical and legislative issues surrounding the topic. So what are stem cells, what is all…

In many institutions, the institutional review board/research ethics board (IRB/REB) uses the traditional audit approach that emerged from the biomedical community (e.g., Nuremburg Code, Belmont Report) to review the ethical acceptability of research using humans as participants. This approach is guided by participant protection and risk…

A discussion of the relationship of politics and the welfare of research animals looks at the nineteenth-century history of the issue, current activism in Europe, recent legislative and political action in the United States, and the position of the biomedical community, and provides guidelines for political action. (MSE)