Sustaining Public Trust: Falling Short in the Protection of Human Research Participants

Maintaining public trust is absolutely crucial to the research enterprise. Without trust, volunteers will be impossible to recruit, and the public will be unwilling to fund research. Here I venture some preliminary thoughts on some of the central marks of public trust in the research enterprise: creating accountability in research, instilling confidence in the integrity of process, ensuring fairness and transparency in the research enterprise, and affirming a commitment to the protection of human participants by all involved in research.