Institutional Review Board (Human Subject Protection)
Faculty and student research is governed by the Institutional Review Board, who oversees the process of human subject protection. The Belmont Report, released in 1979 by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, provides the ethical framework for the federal regulations designed to protect human research subjects.
The Belmont report summary is as follows:
On July 12, 1974, the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) was signed into law, there-by creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. One of the charges to the Commission was to identify the basic ethical principles that should underlie the conduct of biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects and to develop guidelines which should be followed to assure that such research is conducted in accordance with those principles. In carrying out the above, the Commission was directed to consider: (i) the boundaries between biomedical and behavioral research and the accepted and routine practice of medicine, (ii) the role of assessment of risk-benefit criteria in the determination of the appropriateness of research involving human subjects, (iii) appropriate guidelines for the selection of human subjects for participation in such research and (iv) the nature and definition of informed consent in various research settings.