ethics committee

In medicine, review panel made up of both medical and lay people to facilitate medical research in the interests of society, to protect subjects from possible harm due to the research being undertaken, preserve the rights of research subjects, and to provide reassurances to the public on the safety of clinical research. Information provided by researchers should give sufficient detail to enable the ethics committee to evaluate the ethics as well as the scientific merit of the research proposal.

Research involving humans has been governed by protective codes since the 1960s. These codes include those of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) and the Medical Research Council in the UK. The development of ethics committees parallels the development of controlled clinical trials of new medicines and surgical procedures since the 1940s and 1950s.