930 journal of law, medicine & ethics A Non-Paternalistic Model of Research Ethics and Oversight: Assessing the Beneits of Prospective Review Alex John London T o judge from the rash of recent law review arti- cles, it is a miracle that research with human subjects in the U.S. continues to draw breath under the asphyxiating heel of the rent-seeking, 1 cre- ativity-stifling, 2 jack-booted bureaucrethics that is the current system of research ethics oversight and review. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), some- times called Research Ethics Committees (RECs), have been accused of perpetrating “probably the most widespread violation of the First Amendment in our nation’s history,” resulting in a “disaster, not only for academics, but for the whole nation.” 3 One mem- ber of the President’s Council on Bioethics went so far as to assert, “There has been no greater damage to academic freedom in the United States in my life- time. And my lifetime encompasses McCarthy and it encompasses political correctness, both.” 4 Locked in the bureaucratic “iron cage” of IRB oversight, critics charge that researchers have been transformed into a vulnerable, exposed population, subject to domina- tion, 5 that has been likened in one case to a kind of “Tuskegee in reverse.” 6 Assessing the burdens of IRB review, critics point to a loss of creativity, spontaneity, academic freedom, and squandered time, money and even lives lost. 7 When it comes to the beneits of research oversight, they simply gape in outraged silence. We are told that “it is clear that the constraints imposed on academic inquiry have not been accompanied by an increase in public beneits” 8 and that “[t]here is no empirical evi- dence that IRBs have any beneit whatsoever.” 9 If these allegations are true, then we are living in a truly Orwellian dystopia in which “the problem is with the ethics industry, not the researchers.” 10 According to critics, IRBs restrict the liberty of researchers and participants, consume scarce social resources, and impede the ability of more nimble and knowledgeable agents to produce important social goods. If research ethics and the mechanisms of regulation and over- sight it has spawned have had such disastrous efects on the one social enterprise fundamentally dedicated to seeking truth and producing new knowledge, then we should all grab torches and pitchforks and take to the streets. Alex John London, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mel- lon University. An elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, he is a member of the Working Group on the Revision of CIOMS 2002 International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects, the Ethics Working Group of the HPTN, and the Steering Committee on Forensic Science Programs for the International Commission on Miss- ing Persons.