Alex John London To Give Lehman Medical Ethics Lecture

face_londonMarch 4, 2014 — Alex John London, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, will present the Lehman Medical Ethics Lecture 
at Allegheny College at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 12 in the Quigley Hall Auditorium.

The public is invited to this free lecture, titled “IRBs, What Are They Good For? Absolutely Nothing? Individual Integrity vs Institutional Design.”

Before researchers can conduct a study involving human participants they must submit their protocol to an Institutional Review Board (IRB). Recently, a number of critics have challenged the value of IRB review and charged that requiring it represents a violation of First Amendment rights that has had disastrous effects on academics and society as a whole. London’s talk will examine some of these criticisms and challenge the idea that the most basic function of IRB review is to protect research participants.

A recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), London focuses his research on foundational ethical issues in human-subjects research, issues of social justice in the trans-national context, and methodological issues in theoretical and applied ethics.

His papers have appeared in Science, The Lancet, PLoS Medicine, Statistics in Medicine, The Hastings Center Report and numerous other journals and collections. He is co-editor of “Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine,” one of the most widely used textbooks in medical ethics.

In 2012 he joined the Working Group on the Revision of the CIOMS 2002 International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects. In 2011 he was appointed to the Steering Committee on Forensic Science Programs for the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).

Since 2007 he has served as a member of the Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network.

London’s lecture is made possible
through the generous gifts of
 John W. Lehman, M.D., who graduated from Allegheny College in 1954, and Deborah J. Lehman.

It is also part of the Year of Civil Rights at Allegheny, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and explores the state of civil rights, broadly defined, in our world today.

For more information, contact Kirsten Peterson, director of pre-professional studies at Allegheny College,
 at 814-332-2845 or kirsten.peterson@allegheny.edu.