My Institutional Review Board Nightmare
The author doesn't seem to take the history of medical research ethics (e.g. the Tuskegee syphilis experiments [1]) seriously. Having a sophisticated understanding of the ethical risks of research is a huge part of doing good science, and this post certainly doesn't communicate a high level of sophistication. If the author thinks that ethics review is "Blindly trusting authority to make our ethical decisions for us", then he clearly doesn't understand what ethics review is or how it works.<p>IRBs have well-documented flaws (for a more comprehensive look, read Laura Stark's book on IRBs [2]) but "IRBs are bad because they say I can't do whatever I want even though it's obviously the right way to do it" is not one of them.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo12182576.html" rel="nofollow">http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo1218257...</a>