How liberal democracies in the late twentieth century have sought to
resolve public concerns over charged issues in medicine and science.
Ethics boards have become obligatory passage points in today's medical
science, and we forget how novel they really are. The use of humans in
experiments is an age-old practice that records show goes back to at
least the third century BC, and it has been popular as a practice since
the early modern period. Yet in most countries around the world, hardly
any formal checks and balances existed to govern the communal oversight
of experiments involving human subjects until at least the 1960s.
Ethics by Committee traces the rise of ethics boards for human
experimentation in the second half of the twentieth century.
Using the Netherlands as a case study, historian Noortje Jacobs shows
how the authority of physicians to make decisions about clinical
research in this period gave way in most developed nations to formal
mechanisms of communal decision-making that served to regiment the
behavior of individual researchers. This historically unprecedented
change in scientific governance came out of the growing international
wariness of medical research in the decades after World War II and was
meant to solidify a new way of reasoning together in liberal democracies
about medicine and science. But what reasoning together meant, and who
was invited to participate, changed drastically over time. In detailing
this history, Jacobs shows that research ethics committees were
originally intended not only to make human experimentation more ethical
but also to raise its epistemic quality and intensify the use of new
clinical research methods. By examining complex negotiations over the
appropriate governance of human subjects research, Ethics by Committee
is an important contribution to our understanding of the randomized
controlled trial and the history of research ethics and bioethics more
generally.