My last choice

Abstract

Do you need approval from an ethics committee to ring up chief executives of hospitals and ask them questions? As a journalist, a member of parliament, or a confidence trickster you wouldn't, but if you are a researcher who has drawn up a protocol you might. Ethics committees, which were devised to protect vulnerable patients from some abuse, have forgotten why they were created and have begun to equate chief executives with the unconscious or the mentally incompetent. They have, in other words, spun out of control. No fewer than five sets of researchers describe a series of Kafkaesque experiences with ethics committees …