ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some aspects of the ways in which institutional review boards, the usually local committees that review research involving human subjects, conduct their reviews of specific projects. Local institutional review boards constitute a critical nexus in the shaping of research ethics across many disciplines. Local campus-based institutional review boards are made up primarily of academic members but usually include representatives of the nonacademic community as well. At UCSC, a campus without a medical school and on which the great bulk of research involving human subjects is in the social rather than natural sciences, the institutional review board includes primarily social scientists; a physician from the campus clinic participates, as does as a staff member of the Office of Sponsored Projects and a minister from the community. There are broad areas of difference between reviews of research proposals and reviews of human-subjects proposals.
