A call to advocate ethics in research was emphasized to research buffs during the conduct of the Basic Ethics Research Training in Iloilo City.

“Our duty to experiment does not mean doing research under any type of condition”, Dr. Ricardo Manalastas, Jr. of the Philippine Health Research Ethics Board (PHREB) said.

He equipped that these researchers should embark on full accountability for the scientific and ethical integrity of a research.

“The conscientious researcher has ultimate responsibility and accountability for the research, especially for the integrity of data and welfare of participants and is expected to be ethical in all aspects of the study, from its inception to its dissemination, and maybe even after this.”

Researchers were further advised to consider the community impact on which participants embody both during and after research.

Citing that there is an increased number of researches, Dr. Manalastas, however, disclosed that there is also a lack of trained researchers and Ethics Review Committees (ERC).

Meanwhile, Dr. Doris Benavides discussed topics on Principle of Non-Maleficence, Principle of Beneficence, Principle of Respect for Person/Informed Consent, Principles of Justice, Institutional Controls, and Revisiting Review and After-Review Processes.

The PHREB, being the national policy making body in health research ethics, attributed research ethics to the 1947 Nuremberg Code which regarded the voluntary permission of the human subject in the experimentation as of great value. Moreover, research ethics was discoursed in the Declaration of Helsinki documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1974 Belmont Report, the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences – World Health Organization (CIOMS-WHO) International Guidelines in Biomedical Research, and the 1996 International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use – Good Clinical Practice (ICH-GCP) Guidelines in the conduct of clinical trials.