The Ethics Joke

The Health Sciences University has laid down a rule that every dissertation proposal for a postgraduate degree must be approved by the institution’s ethics committee. Principally it is correct. Research on live human beings must be approved by ethics committee. Unfortunately, the ‘research’ carried out on the clinical side is often collection of data of investigations and treatment that are carried out on patients as a part of their management. The management will be carried out, whether the ethics committee will give permission for the data collection or not. Our institute has an ethics committee about which you can read here on my website. This new workload proved to be unmanageable for the existing ethics committee, which was already overworked handling the research proposals of the staff members. So they formed a sort of junior ethics committee to handle the dissertation proposals. The new members probably were quite enthusiastic with this newly found source of power over others. They scrutinized the proposals with a zeal that was not seen in the previous ethics committee’s work. Unfortunately they did not have the knowledge and maturity required of members of ethics committee. I understood this when they returned my student’s proposal with a suggestion to change the title. The original title was “Laparoscopic oophorectomy with vaginal hysterectomy”, meaning removal of the woman’s ovaries using an endoscope passed abdominally, and the uterus vaginally. They suggested “Laparoscopic abdominal vaginal hysterectomy (LAVH)”. The joke was that LAVH is a short form used for laparoscopy assisted vaginal hysterectomy, while the ethics committee was suggesting a combination of all three possible routes of hysterectomy (which was not only present anywhere in the proposal submitted, but was also unheard of world over), and calling it LAVH. I admire the guts of the committee to suggest a ridiculous correction in the title of a proposal from a student and teacher, when the teacher is a specialist of his subject, author of 23 books and 99 scientific papers, and also head of the department. I am not saying there cannot be any scope for improvement in my work, but the suggestions need not be ridiculous, made only because there is the backing of the institutional committee.