"Questions arise as scientists use offspring for research" by Pam Belluck, New York Times | January 18, 2009
Even before his son was born, Pawan Sinha saw unique potential.
At a birthing class, Sinha, a neuroscience professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stunned everyone, including his wife, by saying he was excited about the baby's birth "because I really want to study him and do experiments with him." He did, too, strapping a camera on baby Darius's head, recording what he looked at.
Sinha is one of a new crop of scientists using their children as research subjects. Historically, some researchers, including famous ones, have studied their children, but these days some scientists are using sophisticated technology to collect new types of data. Others say that their access to their children allows them to do more in-depth research and that their children make reliable participants in an era of scarce research financing.
"You need subjects, and they're hard to get," said Deborah Linebarger, a developmental psychologist at the Children's Media Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, who has involved her four children in her studies of the effect of media on children.
Arthur Toga, a neurology professor at the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying brain change, scanned his three children's brains using magnetic resonance imaging. Stephen M. Camarata at the medical school at Vanderbilt, has involved all seven of his children in studies of learning problems and speech.
And Deb Roy, at MIT, embedded 11 video cameras and 14 microphones in ceilings throughout his Arlington house, recording 70 percent of his son's waking hours for his first three years, amassing 250,000 hours of tape for a language development study he calls the Human Speechome Project.
Some research methods are clearly benign; others, while not obviously dangerous, might not have fully understood effects. Ethicists say they would consider participation in some projects acceptable, even valuable, but raise questions about the effect on the child, on the relationship with the parent and on the objectivity of the researcher or the data.
"The role of the parent is to protect the child," said Robert M. Nelson, director of the Center for Research Integrity at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Once that parent becomes an investigator, it sets up an immediate potential conflict of interest. And it potentially takes the parent-child relationship and distorts it in ways that are unpredictable."
Researchers themselves acknowledge the challenge of being simultaneously scientist and parent. "I don't want them to feel uncomfortable, like I'm invading their privacy," said Linebarger, who ultimately set some boundaries. "When you mix being a researcher with being a parent, it can put your kids in an unfair place."
Children have been subjects for some well-known scientist-parents, including Jean Piaget, the child-development theorist. But some past examples would probably not pass ethical muster today. Jonas Salk injected his children with his polio vaccine. Clarence Leuba, a psychologist, wondering whether laughter in response to tickling was learned or innate, forbade tickling of his infant son and daughter, except when he tickled them, wearing a mask to hide his expression.
These days, scientists using human subjects are expected to seek approval from institutional review boards, which consider federal regulations on risk, coercion of subjects, and researcher bias. Toga said some nonscientists have said: "Why would a parent subject their kid to the dangers of MRI? You should be ashamed of yourself." His response: "All I'm doing is taking a picture. Nobody loves my kids more than me. Would I ever do something that would endanger them?"
--more--"
In the past, this is the point where I would go to the New York Times and seeif the story could be embellished with further writing that the Globe edited:
You clear with me, readers?
