Silent Partners
Human Subjects and Research Ethics
Rebecca Dresser
Reviews and Awards
"There is an enormous literature related to research subjects' views and experiences. Dresser has provided a valuable volume drawing on insights from this literature. ... Certainly a book I am happy to recommend." - Erich von Dietze, Metapsychology
"Some omissions are so obvious it takes a special person to see them. An authority on medical ethics and someone who has suffered and recovered from a serious illness, no one is in a better position than Rebecca Dresser to identify the absence of the research subject's voice in clinical trials. Her sometimes painfully honest and always intellectually acute analysis opens up a new conversation about the way we conduct human experiments."- Jonathan Moreno, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania "
"Rebecca Dresser has for years been a leading legal and ethical scholar on human subject research. Building on her own experience as a cancer survivor, her book is a powerful and forceful argument to give human subjects themselves a central role in the research, particularly as new kinds of medical research, as with genetics, come to the fore. She makes her case with a sharp eye for nuance and troublesome dilemmas, adding to the power of the book."- Daniel Callahan, President Emeritus, The Hastings Center "
"Some omissions are so obvious it takes a special person to see them. An authority on medical ethics and someone who has suffered and recovered from a serious illness, no one is in a better position than Rebecca Dresser to identify the absence of the research subject's voice in clinical trials. Her sometimes painfully honest and always intellectually acute analysis opens up a new conversation about the way we conduct human experiments." - Jonathan Moreno, David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania "
"[P]rovides a thorough review of the ways clinical researchers can ignore the perspectives of research participants, the resulting negative effects, and some of the ways the situation can be improved."- Norman M. Goldfarb is Managing Director of First Clinical Research LLC"
"Much scholarly writing seems like a bare tree festooned with strings of citations. Dresser's argument flows on its own, and the reader can travel on its currents; the references help guide the flowwithout demanding notice. What this accomplishes is straightforward: it makes the book accessible and potentially interesting to many audiences, from institutional review board (IRB) reading groups to students at many levels to clinicians learning to be investigators." - Nancy M.P King, IRB: Ethics and Human Research, October 2017
