ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a description of medical research ethics committees in Britain, setting out their historical context and the workings of the current day system. It argues that insights gained by considering the ethics committee application as part of the ethnographic process requiring analysis are inherently valuable for elucidating the contemporary creation and maintenance of social groups in Britain. The process of applying to an ethics committee, proposing an ethnographic study of people in a secure psychiatric hospital setting, resulted in deliberations that reflected the perception of this group by wider British society. Concerns about the ethics of medical research have existed throughout the development of specialist medical knowledge. The UK Medical Research Council published a report on research ethics in 1963 that emphasized the moral responsibility of researchers for their subjects. The language used by the ethics committees is rooted in the dialect of bio-medical research and the health service setting.
