President's Advisory Committee Research Articles

NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation for Faculty Diversity

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) proposes to implement an Initiative for Institutional Change with the goal to serve as a model for other institutions that desire to increase the representation and advancement of women, including underrepresented minorities, in academic science and engineering careers. Because of its talented faculty and Hispanic-majority student population, UTEP is the ideal setting to create, implement, and document interrelated processes for diversifying the academic workforce and contributing to the national goal of creating positive and sustainable change in academic climates. To increase the total number of female faculty, in particular those from underrepresented groups, in tenure-track and tenured positions, UTEP will establish an Initiative with three integrated and mutually supportive components: 1) a policy and recruitment process that formulates faculty support and retention policies, supports recruitment efforts, and provides research support; 2) a faculty development process that expands an existing faculty mentoring program for women, introduces a seminar series to help faculty develop plans for career success, and fosters synergy between tenured and tenure-track faculty; 3) a collaborative leadership process that works with departments to remove barriers to recruitment, retention, and advancement of women faculty by assessing departmental climates and sharing best practices that encourage diversity and promote leadership. To sustain the components and provide for continuous refinement of processes, an Institutional Action Board will initiate and define change policies and offer advice on grant initiatives. A multi-faceted evaluation process will include both formative and summative self-assessments and review by an external Advisory Board. This innovative structure weaves together processes, relationships, and multiple lines of communication among all ranks of faculty and administration. The five co-PIs bring broad leadership and coalition-building experience to the Initiative: Dr. Evelyn Posey is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Elizabeth Anthony is the past President of the Faculty Senate, Dr. Tine Reimers is Co-Director of the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning, Dr. Ann Gates is Associate Chair of the Computer Science Department and Chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Diversity, and Dr. Patricia Witherspoon is Chair of the Department of Communication and Director of the Sam Donaldson Center for Communication Studies. Through implementation, documentation, and on-going assessment of the Initiative, UTEP will contribute to a better understanding of how to create collaborative climates that result in greater diversity. The intellectual merit of the Initiative is the breadth of its integrative structure, involving university administration as well as coalitions of change agents at the individual, departmental, college, and institutional levels. In this process, decision makers at the grass roots drive institutional change. The Initiative is designed to promote a holistic view of faculty life, address the different stages of faculty careers from entrance into the academe to advancement to leadership positions, and to develop faculty for each of these stages. The Initiative is designed for broad impact. It is a series of processes that includes involvement of all ranks of faculty as well as participation by individuals at the highest level of the institution. It is built with knowledge of universities' structures and interrelated processes that can be easily adapted to universities throughout the UT System and those around the country.

An Endless Frontier Postponed

N ext month, U.S. scientists Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will receive computing's highest prize, the A. M. Turing Award, from the Association for Computing Machinery. Their Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), created in 1973, became the language of the Internet. Twenty years later, the Mosaic Web browser gave the Internet its public face. TCP and Mosaic illustrate the nature of computer science research, combining a quest for fundamental understanding with considerations of use. They also illustrate the essential role of government-sponsored university-based research in producing the ideas and people that drive innovation in information technology (IT). Recent changes in the U.S. funding landscape have put this innovation pipeline at risk. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded TCP. The shock of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 led to the creation of the agency, which was charged with preventing future technological surprises. From its inception, DARPA funded long-term nonclassified IT research in academia, even during several wars, to leverage all the best minds. Much of this research was dual-use, with the results ultimately advancing military systems and spurring the IT industry. U.S. IT research grew largely under DARPA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF relied on peer review, whereas DARPA bet on vision and reputation, complementary approaches that served the nation well. Over the past 4 decades, the resulting research has laid the foundation for the modern microprocessor, the Internet, the graphical user interface, and single-user workstations. It has also launched new fields such as computational science. Virtually every aspect of IT that we rely on today bears the stamp of federally sponsored research. A 2003 National Academies study provided 19 examples where such work ultimately led to billion-dollar industries, an economic benefit that reaffirms science advisor Vannevar Bush's 1945 vision in Science: The Endless Frontier. ![Figure][1] CREDIT: GEORGE B. DIEBOLD/CORBIS However, in the past 3 years, DARPA funding for IT research at universities has dropped by nearly half. Policy changes at the agency, including increased classification of research programs, increased restrictions on the participation of noncitizens, and “go/no-go” reviews applied to research at 12- to 18-month intervals, discourage participation by university researchers and signal a shift from pushing the leading edge to “bridging the gap” between fundamental research and deployable technologies. In essence, NSF is now relied on to support the long-term research needed to advance the IT field. Other agencies have not stepped in. The Defense Science Board noted in a recent look at microchip research at the Department of Defense (DOD): “[DARPA's] withdrawal has created a vacuum … The problem, for DOD, the IT industry, and the nation as a whole, is that no effective leadership structure has been substituted.” The Department of Homeland Security, according to a recent report from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, spends less than 2% of its Science and Technology budget on cybersecurity, and only a small fraction of that on research. NASA is downsizing computational science, and IT research budgets at the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health are slated for cuts in the president's fiscal year 2006 budget. These changes, combined with the growth of the discipline, have placed a significant burden on NSF, which is now showing the strain. Last year, NSF supported 86% of federal obligations for fundamental research in IT at academic institutions. The funding rate for competitive awards in the IT sector fell to 16%, the lowest of any directorate. Such low success rates are harmful to the discipline and, ultimately, to the nation.[*][2] At a time when global competitors are gaining the capacity and commitment to challenge U.S. high-tech leadership, this changed landscape threatens to derail the extraordinarily productive interplay of academia, government, and industry in IT. Given the importance of IT in enabling the new economy and in opening new areas of scientific discovery, we simply cannot afford to cede leadership. Where will the next generation of groundbreaking innovations in IT arise? Where will the Turing Awardees 30 years hence reside? Given current trends, the answers to both questions will likely be, “not in the United States.” [1]: pending:yes [2]: #fn-1

Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott and Lara Marks (eds), Useful bodies: humans in the service of medical science in the twentieth century, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp. vii, 217, £31.00 (hardback 0-8018-7342-8).

Over the past fifteen years, the topic of research on human subjects has attracted considerable interest among medical historians. Following on from earlier work on the notorious human experiments of doctors in Nazi Germany, historians have turned to the practices and ethics of human research in other periods and countries. Among others, we have now such studies on the USA before the Second World War (Susan E Lederer, Subjected to science, 1995), on nineteenth-century Germany (Barbara Elkeles, Der moralische Diskurs uber das medizinische Menschenexperiment, 1996), and on France after 1945 (Giovanni Maio, Ethik der Forschung am Menschen, 2002). Much of this work focused on the professional and public discourses on human experimentation, with a view to the issues of information and consent. The present volume takes a somewhat different perspective. Providing seven case studies of British, Australian and US American human trials from the 1930s to the 1970s, this book's focus lies on the legitimating factors, especially the role of government committees initiating or overseeing such research. Moreover, there is an emphasis on the attitudes and justifications of individual experimenters. In the aftermath of the 1995 Final report of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, three case studies examine radiation research (uranium injections, radioisotope studies, atomic weapons tests), while the remaining four discuss experiments on malaria, jaundice and hepatitis, and germ warfare. It is nowadays undisputed that any serious evaluation of past human experimentation must derive from its specific historical, ideological and social contexts. As the essays of this volume make very clear, however, there is no simple recourse to an earlier lack of risk perception or of ethical awareness. This is illustrated on several levels. As Margaret Humphreys shows in her study of Mark Boyd's research in the 1930s on malaria therapy in neurosyphilis patients in a Florida mental hospital, there was an obvious tension between his role as a physician and as a scientist. Jenny Stanton, in her contribution on the work of the British MRC Jaundice Committee during the 1940s, highlights concerns about risk, expressed by medical staff involved in hepatitis studies on experimentally infected patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis (who were believed to benefit from attacks of jaundice). Or, Glenn Michell, in his study of the “Indoctrinee Force”, a large group of senior officers that was made to watch atomic blasts at Maralinga, Australia, in the 1950s, emphasizes curious differences between the assessments of safety given by scientific advisors in public and in private. Finally, Brian Balmer, discussing British large-area spray trials with non-pathogenic bacteria as part of a defensive policy on biological warfare in the 1960s and 1970s, points out that the secrecy surrounding the tests was not only due to obvious security reasons, but also to fear of potential political embarrassment. Such evidence of the perceived moral ambiguity of human experimentation could have been supported by paying more attention to the historical debates on the subject or to the development of ethical guidelines on human research after the Nuremberg Code of 1947. While Henry Beecher's whistle-blowing article of 1966 on the ethics of clinical research is repeatedly mentioned in this volume, there is no sustained discussion of his efforts, nor of the similar criticisms voiced about the same time by Maurice Pappworth in Britain. Also, there is no detailed discussion of the Helsinki Declaration of 1964, or, for example, of the guidelines of the British Medical Association and the Medical Research Council of 1963. However, the strength of this collection consists in discussing the forces that legitimated human trials in various contexts: potential therapeutic improvements (for example, in malaria and venereal disease treatment), development of new medical technologies and specialties (such as radiation therapy and medical physics), the contribution to the war effort and national security (Second World War and Cold War), occupational and public health. The underlying utilitarianism of human research transformed human subjects into “useful bodies”, so that risks, information and consent appeared less important. Therefore, this volume can be recommended to anyone interested in the dynamics and motivations of human research in the twentieth century.

Building the national health information infrastructure for personal health, health care services, public health, and research.

BackgroundImproving health in our nation requires strengthening four major domains of the health care system: personal health management, health care delivery, public health, and health-related research. Many avoidable shortcomings in the health sector that result in poor quality are due to inaccessible data, information, and knowledge. A national health information infrastructure (NHII) offers the connectivity and knowledge management essential to correct these shortcomings. Better health and a better health system are within our reach.DiscussionA national health information infrastructure for the United States should address the needs of personal health management, health care delivery, public health, and research. It should also address relevant global dimensions (e.g., standards for sharing data and knowledge across national boundaries). The public and private sectors will need to collaborate to build a robust national health information infrastructure, essentially a 'paperless' health care system, for the United States. The federal government should assume leadership for assuring a national health information infrastructure as recommended by the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Progress is needed in the areas of funding, incentives, standards, and continued refinement of a privacy (i.e., confidentiality and security) framework to facilitate personal identification for health purposes. Particular attention should be paid to NHII leadership and change management challenges.SummaryA national health information infrastructure is a necessary step for improved health in the U.S. It will require a concerted, collaborative effort by both public and private sectors.If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. Lord Kelvin

Toward increased public representation on bioethics committees: Lessons from Judging the cold war human radiation experiments*

The process of judging the Cold War Human Radiation Experiments illuminates a need to develop a model for an appropriate public role on bioethics committees. A citizen representative was appointed to the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and the Committee solicited broad public participation in their investigation. However, many members of the affected and interested public desired further representation on the Committee, as they tended towards stronger ethical condemnations of the experiments than the Committee expressed. I offer an account of a testimony before the Committee by a radiation experiment subject's survivor to illustrate this contrast in moral perspective. I consider some the contributions that “non‐expert”; public members can add to committee deliberations, and suggest that concerns about public representatives may be overcome with the guidance of clearer principles for selecting public members. Further efforts to increase membership by the general and affected public on bioethics committees will enhance deliberations and help realize the democratic ideals of bioethics.

AIDS Vaccine Development

In recent months, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) human immunodeficency virus (HIV) vaccine research program has been criticized by a few activists and public health figures who serve on, or have provided testimony to, the President's Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) (M. Balter, News, 30 Jan., p. 650). It has been proposed that responsibility for the development of an HIV vaccine should be removed from NIH and transferred to other federal agencies. It has been suggested that an effective HIV vaccine would be available much sooner if only NIH would support efficacy trials of currently available candidates, notably of glycoprotein 120 (gp120) subunits, on an empirical (“trial-and-error”) basis.

A little too much of the buchenwald touch? Military radiation research at the university of Cincinnati, 1960–1972

From 1960 through 1972, Dr. Eugene Saenger oversaw the experimental administration of lethal and near‐lethal doses of radiation to hospital patients at the University of Cincinnati. These experiments were funded by the US Department of Defense, and were specifically designed to acquire military information on the effects of radiation in combat soldiers. Although Saenger's research was terminated after public exposure in 1971, a full and detailed account has not been available until now. The account provided by the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) in their Final Report of 1995 was incomplete. Our account is based on a reanalysis of all the material available to ACHRE, including highly critical peer reviews by U.C. faculty members. We also present, for the first time, several case histories taken from the medical records of Dr. Saenger's subjects.

Ethical aerobics: ACHRE's flight from responsibility

The President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) was charged to perform a comprehensive ethical evaluation of US government‐funded radiation experiments. In these experiments, several hundred thousand people were used as experimental subjects in several thousand experiments. This paper reviews ACHRE's Final Report, issued in October 1995. ACHRE recommended no apology or compensation to the vast majority of victims. Their rationale for this decision was plagued with inconsistencies. Whenever facts could not be recontextualized to reduce the apparent misconduct of the government‐funded researchers, ACHRE constructed ethical loopholes to avoid judgment of the perpetrators. We critique ACHRE's recommendations by a careful analysis of their own records and transcripts. We. provide an accurate history of informed consent standards in human subject research, in contrast to ACHRE's inconsistent history. We also give a detailed review of ACHRE's erroneous risk analysis in two representative groups of experiments.

Radiation experiments on children at the Fernald and Wrentham schools: Lessons for protocols in human subject research

abstract The Massachusetts Task Force on Human Subject Research has so far been the only serious attempt to investigate radiation experiments on humans. No other federal, state or private agency has looked at a specific experiment in detail. The President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) provided an overview of the entire nationwide research project, but without a thorough evaluation of any single experiment. The Massachusetts Task Force examined a group of experiments using institutionalized children at two state facilities, the Fernald and Wrentham schools, from 1943 to 1973. The experiments were performed under supervision by scientists at Harvard and MIT, and were funded by several federal agencies. The Task Force found that these experiments were conducted according to the ethical and protocol standard of their day. This did not prevent the Task Force from judging that the experiments violated human rights, and recommending apology and compensation to the victims.

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (Ruth Faden, Chair), The human radiation experiments: final report of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxi, 620, $39.95 (0-19-510792-6).

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (Ruth Faden, Chair), The human radiation experiments: final report of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxi, 620, $39.95 (0-19-510792-6). - Volume 41 Issue 2

The Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report of the President's Advisory Committee

HomeRadiologyVol. 202, No. 2 PreviousNext ReviewsThe Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report of the President's Advisory CommitteeDavid S. GoodenDavid S. GoodenDavid S. GoodenPublished Online:Feb 1 1997https://doi.org/10.1148/radiology.202.2.458MoreSectionsPDF ToolsImage ViewerAdd to favoritesCiteTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked In Article HistoryPublished in print: Feb 1997 FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsRecommended Articles RSNA Education Exhibits RSNA Case Collection Vol. 202, No. 2 Metrics Altmetric Score PDF download

An administrative approach to personal safety on a university campus: The role of a president's advisory Committee on Women's Safety on Campus

Improvement of the physical environment of the campus is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure full access for women to the University's facilities. Studies on the incidence of sexual assault and other experiences of violence with acquaintances indicate a need for programs to address the social climate of campuses. Unless both the social and physical aspects of the university environment are addressed, threats of violence can limit the accessibility of higher education and professional careers for women. UBC has established a President's Advisory Committee on Women's Safety on Campus which brings together University administrators and campus users to explore the safety concerns of women and possible solutions to these problems.

Program Review: The Experience of a Canadian University

ABSTRACT For various reasons the practice of reviewing programs in universities is gaining increasing acceptance. After a three‐year period of discussion and planning, reviews of all academic and support units began at the University of Alberta in 1980. These reviews are organised by a four‐member President's Advisory Committee on Campus Reviews (PACCR). After the unit to be reviewed has prepared a self‐study report, discussions among PACCR, the President and the unit head lead to appointment of a Unit Review Committee (URC), usually of four members, which spends two to four days on campus. The URC report, the unit's self‐study report, and the unit's response are discussed by senior administrators and the Planning and Priorities Committee. Many changes have resulted from the reviews, including hiring of new staff members. Several important issues have been identified including how teaching loads should be assessed and how the special problems related to reviews of support units can be accommodated.

Systematic Reviews of University Programs and Units

Because universities in Canada, the U.S.A., and other Western countries are facing declining real income and increasing demands for greater accountability, they need to use resources more carefully and undertake planning activities more seriously. By obtaining information from reviews of academic and support units, universities are in a better position to meet these challenges. Most experts agree that reviews aimed at improvement of programs and activities are more successful when conducted under the authority of the university rather than an external agency. Attention needs to be paid to the establishment of an appropriate administrative mechanism that can maximize benefits relative to costs. This article describes the policies and procedures adopted in 1980 by The University of Alberta to allow for a continuous system of reviews of all academic and support units. Establishment of a President's Advisory Committee with a minimum of formal procedures has led to a successful system under which 51 units are now in various stages of the review process. The procedures used at The University of Alberta may be worthy of scrutiny by other universities contemplating such activity.

Report of the President's Advisory Committee 1976–1978

Report of the President's Advisory Committee 1976–1978

Report of the President's Advisory Committee 1974–1976

Report of the President's Advisory Committee 1974–1976

The Presidency and Management Improvement

In its final report of December, 1952, the President's Advisory Committee on Management concluded that there was single, sure-fire, and practicable panacea to guarantee the improvement of management in the Federal Government. The Federal establishment is so varied that no uniform program would be feasible or desirable. Rather, the aim should be to keep unrelenting pressure on administrators to devise and adopt programs suited to the tasks under their jurisdictions.l What is needed to improve federal management, the Committee asserted, are the following ingredients: a chief that cares about getting a job done, adequate machinery and staff, a management system that produces results, and systematic review and appraisal of performance. The story of management improvement in federal government is mainly an account of how successive efforts since I92I to improve the quality of federal management have failed or have fallen far short of their objectives.

President's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy

President's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy

President's Advisory Committee

The President's.

Improvement of Management in the Federal Government: Report to the President of the President's Advisory Committee on Management

Improvement of Management in the Federal Government: Report to the President of the President's Advisory Committee on Management