The New Zealand cervical cancer study: could it happen again?

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Abstract
The author is one of the medical advisers to the judge who led a government inquiry into allegations that an experimental research program at the National Women's Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, to study the natural course of cervical carcinoma in situ had withheld conventional treatment from some patients. She argues that the research proposal should not have been approved at the outset, that consent should have been sought from the patients, that the study was not monitored adequately, and that the concerns of other doctors were not acted on. The reasons for this failure to protect the safety of patients go beyond the individual researcher and must be sought in the attitudes of doctors to science, to accountability, and perhaps to women.