Medical Ethics Celebrates 50 Years at Wits
- L. Rautenbach
The Human Research Ethics Committee (Medical) (HREC) first meet as an ethics committee in October 1966. This year it celebrates 50 years in existence.
In June 1966 Henry Beecher, an Emeritus Professor at Harvard University, published a shocking article in the New England Journal of Medicine on ethics and clinical research. The article described unethical research carried out by unnamed but prominent researchers and research bodies. At this time no ethical screening of research existed.
Catching the attention of a young Professor John Hansen, the head of paediatrics at Wits, the article sparked the formation of a research ethics committee at the University to screen human medical research studies. Initially called the Committee for Research on Human Subjects, it was the very first research ethics committee (REC) to be established in Africa and the first in the Southern Hemisphere, nearly two decades ahead other countries in that hemisphere.
Fifty years later, as the Human Research Ethics Committee (Medical) (HREC), it’s a Wits success story. Since its first meeting as an ethics committee in October 1966, starting at time when there were no South African guidelines for medical research review, it pioneered parameters for research review until the South African Medical Research Council ethics guidelines for medical research in 1979.
The Wits HREC committee, by virtue of its long-standing and highly experienced membership, steered its active leadership role in ethics in South Africa by way of multiple and diverse engagement. Members of the Wits HREC committee served on the Interim National Health Research Ethics Committee; the Wits HREC Chair and a co-Chair were on the editorial team of the first National Department of Health research ethics guidelines entitled: Ethics in health research: principles, structures and processes (2004); and the Wits Chair served on the Medical Research Council Ethics Committee as a member and later as the Chair. In addition, at the request of the Human Sciences Research Council, the Wits Chair formed the HSRC Ethics Committee, serving as its Chair for three years and now as a member.
Wits did not limit itself to just human medical research. The University constituted the Animal Ethics Screening Committee in 1975 and the Human Research Ethics Committee (Non-Medical) in 1988.
In 2014 a sub-committee, the Biobank Ethics Committee was formed within the HREC (Medical), because of the growth of biobanks worldwide. The Department of Health issued ethics guidelines in 2000 for clinical trials and in 2004 for general research.
With the introduction of the South African Constitution enshrining in the Bill of Rights that “everyone has the right to bodily and psychological integrity which includes the right…(c) not to be subjected to medical or scientific experiments without their informed consent”, and the National Health it is a legal requirement to gain HREC approval prior to the start of research.
Professor Peter Cleaton- Jones, Chair of the HREC commented at the committee’s 50th anniversary event on Friday the 27 of January 2017, that over its 50 years the Wits HREC had played a key role in the medical ethics context, has challenging foreign sponsors refusing to pay compensation for patients, ferreting out fraudulent research and motivating for consequences for such lack of ethics, while developing the highest ethics standards possible for medical research undertaken by the Wits.
Today, housed within the Wits Health Consortium, which is a not-for-profit organisation and academic research vehicle, the Wits HREC (Medical) is the custodian of the ethics of hundreds of sponsored clinical trials.