Ethics committees must be more professional: Hall

Ethics committees helping to oversee bio-research need to be put on a more professional footing, according a leading member of Australia’s ethics community, Prof Wayne Hall.

One useful reform would be to pay committee members instead of pressing them to contribute their time on a voluntary basis, argues Hall, who is head of the Office for Public Policy and Ethics (OPPE) in Queensland.

Hall says committees providing the ethical oversights demanded by regulatory agencies are not well-resourced or funded.

A specialist on addictive behaviour, Hall had frequent contact with ethics committees during seven years he spent as director of the National Alcohol and Drug Research Center in NSW.

In general, people provide their expertise to such committees on their own time by doing the work on weekends or evenings. Either that or a sympathetic employer, often a university, is subsidising the cost, he says..

The debate over the pros and cons of professionalising ethics committees and retaining members on a non-volunteer basis is slowly gaining strength in Australia.

In addition to Hall, the issue has been raised by Prof Don Chalmers, a university law school dean and head of the Centre for Law and Genetics and a university law school dean.

The legal profession is well represented in what Hall terms “the ethics business.” Bodies showing an interest range from Chalmers’ group to the Australian Law Reform Commission to the Australian Health Ethics Committee.

Medical research entities such as the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute are also devoting attention to it.

Between all these groups, informal links are strengthening as “people recognise the need to collaborate in persuading governments to put more funding into the area,” says Hall.

Public interest in bio-ethics flared during the political debate that surrounded last year’s federal legislation restricting human cloning research and has died down since then.

“But I don’t imagine the issue will go away,” says Hall.

There have been a number of overseas claims to have cloned humans reproductively. So far none have been corroborated but if or when one is, he believes bioethics will resurface as a hot public issue.

The OPPE, a joint venture between the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and the University of Queensland, has been operational for 18 months with an annual budget of between $300,000 and $400,000.

Hall is attempting to supplement that budget with grants from the ARC and NHMRC, a task which is proving “more of a challenge than I thought it would be.”

Examining issues surrounding ethics committees, including professionalisation, is one of the projects being funded by his office.