Comment by kwdc
4 years ago
It would be fascinating to see the ethics committee exemption. I sense there was none.
Or is this kind of experiment deemed fair game? Red vs blue team kind of thing? Penetration testing.
But if it was me in this situation, I'd ban them for ethics violation as well. Acting like a Evil doer means you might get caught... and punished. I found the email about cease and desist particularly bad behavior. If that student was lying then that university will have to take real action. Reputation damage and all that. Surely a academic reprimand.
I'm sure there's plenty of drama and context we don't know about.
I didn't read this bit: "The IRB of University of Minnesota reviewed the procedures of the experiment and determined that this is not human research. We obtained a formal IRB-exempt letter"
Um. Ok.
Some people are questioning whether banning the entire university is an appropriate response. It sounds to me like there are systemic institutional issues that they need to address, and perhaps banning them until they can sort those out wouldn't be an entirely unreasonable thing to do.
I think banning them for now is appropriate. Its a shot across their bow to let them know they have done something wrong. Moving forward if it was me I'd later re-evaluate such a wide ban because of the collateral damage. But at the same time, there needs to be redress for wrongdoing since they were actually caught. I'd definitely not re-evaluate until apology and some kind of "we won't waste time like this again" agreement or at least agreed-upon understanding is in place. Whatever shape that needs to be.
As for systematic issues, I'm not sure. But moving forward they'd want to confirm there aren't glaring omissions to let this happen again. Giving them suitable Benefit-of-doubt niceties might imply these are isolated cases. (But both of them?! Perhaps isolated to a small group of academics.)
Messy situation.
The university should be policing its researchers. Banning the whole university reinforces the incentive to do so. Otherwise the fact that a contribution comes from a university researcher would bear no added trust versus a layperson.
The ban was 100% political. Greg wanted to shine the spotlight as negatively as possible on the bad faith actors so enough pressure can be out on them to be dismissed. I guarantee hell reinstitute it the moment these people are let go.
Kernel maintainers are not human. TIL
this is the comment I came for, and perhaps the most damning oversight from the IRB that could put the university in a liable position.
How does an IRB usually work? Is it the same group of people reviewing all proposals for the entire university? Or are there subject-matter experts (and hopefully lawyers) tapped to review proposals in their specific domain? Applying “ethics” to a proposal is meaningless without understanding not just how they plan to implement it but how it could be implemented.
I'm guessing its a committee of people almost operating just via a checklist, questions and their own general/specialist experience. They aren't necessarily specialists in what is being considered and are just there to provide basic sanity checks. But if some-complex-issue is not explained well in general terms, I'm sensing that this checking process fails in various ways.
Kind of like:
A: we're going to experiment with humans.
C: are you going to extract fluids?
A: no.
C: (ticks no) are you going to cut into them?
A: no.
C: (ticks no) ...
And so on.
Perhaps a new set of questions might help.
C: is what you are intending going to anger the subjects to the point they will take retribution?
A: yes
C: (ticks yes) how will it anger them?
....
And then expand from there. I'm sure they don't just stay within the checklist like robots.
Then again I'm probably wrong. Its just my imagination. But it could be true.
I'm gonna guess the committee didn't realize the "patch process" was a manual review of each patches. The way it's worded in the paper you'd think they were testing some sort of integration testing or something.
The ethics committee issued a post-hoc exemption after paper was published.
Wow. That is a flagrant violation of research ethics by everyone involved. UMN needs to halt anything even close to human subjects research until they get their IRB back under control, who knows what else is going on on campus that has not received prior approval. Utter disaster.
Someone made a good case that the IRB may have just been doing their job, according to their guidelines for what is exempt from review & what is "research on human subjects".
Nevertheless it is clear that UMN does not have sufficient controls in place to prevent this kind of unethical behavior. The ban & patch reversions may force the issue.
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Institutional review boards are notorious for making sure that all of the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed on the myriad of forms they require, but without actually understanding the nature of the research they are approving.