Ethical misconduct with the Havasupai

[James Crippen]

The New York Times has a couple of articles about research misconduct
at Arizona State University. Researchers obtained DNA from Havasupai
people under the auspices of a research project on diabetes. Later
some Havasupai people discovered that their DNA was being used for
entirely different purposes, some of which were distasteful to them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/us/22dna.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/us/22dnaside.html

I haven't thoroughly investigated the situation of course, but it
seems like partly the consent form was too broad, partly the consent
wasn't adequately explained, and partly the researchers were just not
consciously considering implicit ethical issues in novel uses of the
DNA. It sounds like a tragic mistake on the part of the IRB which
should have caught this.

Fortunately, such things can't happen to linguists. Never, not at all. :-)

James