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From: Nan Bernstein Ratner
Date: 13 Oct 2010
Time: 22:09:47 -0500
Remote Name: 71.178.51.75
Such a design would not pass Human Subjects Protection in any country that I know (most have signed an international agreement). Since we do not know what causes stuttering or how to cure it without fail, any proposal to induce it without a guarantee that it could be "undone" would violate the dictum that human subjects research cannot do harm. For the non-researchers out there, fear over human subjects abuse has risen to the standard that if I even try to record a child who stutters telling a story to look at patterns of disfluency (e.g., as in a bilingual using two languages), it is not considered exempt from review, and I am not allowed to say that it cannot cause harm, only that the potential risks are those associated with every day life. We put up with such "craziness" because, unfortunately not everyone sees human rights in the same way, as the recent flap over studies of venereal disease in Central America shows. This is, in fact, why the study being discussed is called the Monster Study. Even at the time, it crossed a line. That is why it is now covered more in ethics books than in discussions about the cause of stuttering. Nan