Besides the University of California, Davis, other major universities and hospitals have undergone scrutiny – and have been penalized – for research activities involving human subjects. Cases include:
• October 1998: Federal regulators stop human research studies at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, accusing the hospital of using ineligible patients, badgering elderly people into participating in studies and failing to get adequate consent.
• March 1999:The federal government halts all studies at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health cite numerous procedural problems in experiments on mentally ill patients.
• May 1999: Federal regulators briefly suspend 2,000 human experiments at Duke University Medical School, citing numerous alleged violations of ethics and safety rules.
• January 2000: At the University of Pennsylvania the FDA suspends gene-therapy trials after a teenage patient dies.
• July 2001: Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore is ordered to cease all federally funded research on humans after a volunteer dies in an asthma experiment.
• August 2008: A federal investigation finds that the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in Little Rock has widespread problems within its research, including missing consent forms, secret HIV testing and inadequate follow-up by the institutional review board. A report issued by the VA's inspector general notes that the deaths of 105 veterans in four studies went unreported.
• September 2008: The Veterans Affairs Department admits being responsible for "unacceptable failures" in protecting soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder who had enrolled in a medical experiment to help them stop smoking. The VA finds that soldier volunteers had not been quickly notified that the drug might induce suicidal thoughts and erratic behavior.
Sources: U.S. News & World Report, Chicago Tribune, Journal of Social Work Education, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Ethics & Medicine, American Health Line, Raleigh News & Observer, Chronicle of Higher Education, Philadelphia Inquirer, Research Practitioner, IRB Advisor, Washington Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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