Marc Parry
March 18, 2020
A basic calculation governs research on human beings: How do the benefits stack up against the risks?
The coronavirus pandemic doesn’t much alter that calculation for studies that can directly improve the health of seriously ill participants, such as trials of new cancer treatments.
But the pandemic could stall other researchers: neuroscientists who put people in MRI scanners to study normal brain functions, business professors who gather them for focus groups, oral historians who take their testimonies, criminal-justice scholars who interview people coming out of prisons. Those kinds of studies, which didn’t previously expose the participants to any risk, could now sicken them with Covid-19.
