Research on polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for common, genetically complex chronic diseases aims to improve health-related predictions, tailor risk-reducing interventions, and improve health outcomes. Yet, the study and use of PRSs in clinical settings raise equity, clinical, and regulatory challenges that can be greater for individuals from historically marginalized racial, ethnic, and other minoritized communities. As part of the National Human Genome Research Institute-funded Electronic Medical Records and Genomics IV Network, we conducted online focus groups with patients/community members, clinicians, and members of institutional review boards to explore their views on key issues, including PRS research, return of PRS results, clinical translation, and barriers and facilitators to health behavioral changes in response to PRS results. Across stakeholder groups, our findings indicate support for PRS development and a strong interest in having PRS results returned to research participants. However, we also found multi-level barriers and significant differences in stakeholders\' views about what is needed and possible for successful implementation. These include researcher-participant interaction formats, health and genomic literacy, and a range of structural barriers, such as financial instability, insurance coverage, and the absence of health-supporting infrastructure and affordable healthy food options in poorer neighborhoods. Our findings highlight the need to revisit and implement measures in PRS studies (e.g., incentives and resources for follow-up care), as well as system-level policies to promote equity in genomic research and health outcomes.

The nature of the review of local context by institutional review boards (IRBs) is vague. Requirements for single IRB review of multicenter trials create a need to better understand interpretation and implementation of local-context review and how to best implement such reviews centrally. We sought a pragmatic understanding of IRB local-context review by exploring stakeholders\' attitudes and perceptions. Semistructured interviews with 26 IRB members and staff members, institutional officials, and investigators were integrated with 80 surveys of similar stakeholders and analyzed with qualitative theme-based text analysis and descriptive statistical analysis. Stakeholders described what they considered to be local context, the value of local-context review, and key processes used to implement review of local context in general and for emergency research conducted with an exception from informed consent. Concerns and potential advantages of centralized review of local context were expressed. Variability in perspectives suggests that local-context review is not a discrete process, which presents opportunities for defining pathways for single IRB review.

Boron presents an important role in chemistry, biology, and materials science. Diatomic transition-metal borides (MBs) are the building blocks of many complexes and materials, and they present unique electronic structures with interesting and peculiar properties and a variety of bonding schemes which are analyzed here. In the first part of this paper, we present a review on the available experimental and theoretical studies on the first-row-transition-metal borides, i.e., ScB, TiB, VB, CrB, MnB, FeB, CoB, NiB, CuB, and ZnB; the second-row-transition-metal borides, i.e., YB, ZrB, NbB, MoB, TcB, RuB, RhB, PdB, AgB, and CdB; and the third-row-transition-metal borides, i.e., LaB, HfB, TaB, WB, ReB, OsB, IrB, PtB, AuB, and HgB. Consequently, in the second part, the second- and third-row MBs are studied via DFT calculations using the B3LYP, TPSSh, and MN15 functionals and, in some cases, via multi-reference methods, MRCISD+Q, in conjunction with the aug-cc-pVQZ-PPM/aug-cc-pVQZB basis sets. Specifically, bond distances, dissociation energies, frequencies, dipole moments, and natural NPA charges are reported. Comparisons between MB molecules along the three rows are presented, and their differences and similarities are analyzed. The bonding of the diatomic borides is also described; it is found that, apart from RhB(X1Σ+), which was just recently found to form quadruple bonds, RuB(X2Δ) and TcB(X3Σ-) also form quadruple σ2σ2π2π2 bonds in their X states. Moreover, to fill the gap existing in the current literature, here, we calculate the TcB molecule.

Our image recognition system employs a deep learning model to differentiate between the left and right upper limbs in images, allowing doctors to determine the correct surgical position. From the experimental results, it was found that the precision rate and the recall rate of the intelligent image recognition system for preventing wrong-site upper limb surgery proposed in this paper could reach 98% and 93%, respectively. The results proved that our Artificial Intelligence Image Recognition System (AIIRS) could indeed assist orthopedic surgeons in preventing the occurrence of wrong-site left and right upper limb surgery. At the same time, in future, we will apply for an IRB based on our prototype experimental results and we will conduct the second phase of human trials. The results of this research paper are of great benefit and research value to upper limb orthopedic surgery.

When reviewing a protocol, research ethics committees (RECs, equivalent to institutional review boards - IRBs) have the responsibility to consider whether the proposed research is justified. If research is not justified, it can waste participants\' time, researchers\' time and resources. As RECs are not constituted to cover all areas of scientific or academic expertise, it can be difficult for RECs to decide whether research is scientifically or methodologically justified especially in the absence of authoritative (often in the form of systematic) reviews. Where such reviews are absent, some have argued that RECs should insist on a new review of existing evidence as a condition of the REC favourable opinion. However, as RECs review a wide range of research, such requests must be proportionate to the type, and extent, of proposed projects. Risk is one factor that may influence the extent of evidence need for a REC to determine that the new project is justified, but not the only factor. The aim of the work described here was to determine whether REC members and researchers specifically link risk to the type of research methodology, and if so, whether this link could be used to help guide the need for systematic, or other, types of reviews.
We conducted a cross-sectional study, gathering data between November 2020 and January 2021, to examine whether proposed research methodologies impact how RECs perceive risk to participants. We presented 31 research methodologies to REC members and researchers in the form of an international survey.
We collected 283 responses that included both qualitative and quantitative data as to how research methodology impacts perceptions of risk to participants. We used the data to conclude that RECs did see a link between risk and type of research. We therefore constructed a hierarchy of risk with Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials, and clinical psychology/psychiatry intervention studies, at the top (i.e. viewed as most risky).
We discuss whether this hierarchy is useful for guiding RECs as to the level of scientific justification that they should seek when reviewing proposed research protocols, and present a one-page guidance sheet to help RECs during their reviews.

Teaching students about the ethics of Human Subject Research (HSR) should be a fundamental component of students\' education about research. In this article, we analyze the Institutional Review Board (IRB) websites of top-ranked Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) to examine their framing of HSR carried out by undergraduate students. Our descriptive quantitative analysis from 50 top-ranked LACs in the United States indicates that a majority of IRB websites provide information about undergraduate research, and most include information about students\' classroom-based research. Our qualitative content analysis of a subsample of ten colleges\' IRB websites provides information on how they inform and educate about issues including informed consent and highlight different resources for students including their research advisor, and disciplinary standards. We conclude by discussing recommendations for IRBs in their accessibility to undergraduates.

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies raise unique risks to user privacy and confidentiality that are often embedded in lengthy and complex Privacy Policies, Terms of Use, and End User License Agreements. We seek to improve the ethical review of these documents (\'user agreements\') and their risks in research using mHealth technologies by providing a framework for identifying when these risks are research risks, categorizing the key information in these agreements under relevant ethical and regulatory categories, and proposing strategies to mitigate them. MHealth user agreements typically describe the nature of the data collected by mHealth technologies, why or for what purposes user data are collected and shared, who will have access to the different types of data collected, and may include exculpatory language. The risks raised by data collection and sharing typically increase with the sensitivity and identifiability of the data and vary by whether data are shared with researchers, the technology developer, and/or third-party entities. The most important risk mitigation strategy is disclosure of the key information found in user agreements to participants during the research consent process. In addition, researchers should prioritize mHealth technologies with favorable risk-benefit balances.

The collaborative nature of citizen science raises important questions about managing ownership of its research outputs. Potential citizen science research outputs include data sets, findings, publications, and discoveries of new ideas, methods, products, and technologies. Unlike citizen science projects conducted in other disciplines, biomedical citizen science projects often include features, such as contribution of personal health data, that might heighten citizen scientists\' expectations that they will be able to access, control, or share in the benefits of project outputs. Here, we refer to moral claims of access, control, and benefit as ownership claims, and a project\'s management of ownership claims as its ownership practices. Ethical management of ownership is widely recognized as an important consideration for citizen science projects, and practitioners and scholars have described helpful recommendations for preempting issues and engaging stakeholders on practices. Building on this literature, we propose a framework to help biomedical citizen science projects systematically evaluate the ethical soundness of their ownership practices based on four considerations: reciprocal treatment, relative treatment, risk-benefit assessment, and reasonable expectations.

This paper interrogates the legitimacy of formal ethical regulation regarding people with dementia under the Mental Capacity Act, 2005 in England and Wales. Under the Act, research among people diagnosed with dementia must be approved by Health Research Authority committees, irrespective of whether that research engages with health organisations or service users. As examples, I discuss two ethnographic dementia studies that do not engage with healthcare services, but which nonetheless require HRA approval. These instances raise questions regarding legitimacy and reciprocity in the governance of dementia. Through capacity legislation, the state exerts control over people with dementia, automatically delineating them as healthcare subjects because of their diagnoses. This diagnosis functions as a form of administrative medicalisation, rendering dementia a medical entity and those diagnosed with it the property of formal healthcare. However, many people with dementia in England and Wales do not receive related health or care services beyond diagnosis. This institutional imbalance of high governance and low support undermines the contractual citizenship of people with dementia, wherein state-citizen rights and responsibilities should be reciprocal. In response, I consider resistance to this system in ethnographic research. \"Resistance\" here is not necessarily deliberate, hostile, difficult or perceived, but rather encompasses micropolitical effects that are contrary to power or control, sometimes emerging from systems themselves rather than individual resistive actors. Resistance can be unintentional, through mundane failures to satisfy specific aspects of governance bureaucracies. It can also be deliberate, through refusals to comply with restrictions that seem cumbersome, inapplicable or unethical, potentially raising questions of malpractice and misconduct. I suggest that resistance is made more probable due to the expansion of governance bureaucracies. On the one hand, the potential for both unintentional and intentional transgression increases, while on the other hand, the capacity for those transgressions to be discovered and rectified decreases, because the maintenance of control over such a system requires vast resources. Behind this ethico-bureaucratic tumult, people with dementia themselves are largely invisible. People with dementia often have no interaction with committees that determine their research participation. This further renders ethical governance a particularly disenfranchising facet of the dementia research economy. The state stipulates that people with dementia must be treated differently because of their diagnoses, without consulting those people. In response, resistance to unethical governance could be intuitively deemed ethical per se, but I suggest that such a simplistic binary is somewhat misleading.

Human-nonhuman chimeric research-research on nonhuman animals who contain human cells-is being used to understand human disease and development and to create potential human treatments such as transplantable organs. A proposed advantage of chimeric models is that they can approximate human biology and therefore allow scientists to learn about and improve human health without risking harms to humans. Among the emerging ethical issues being explored is the question of at what point chimeras are \"human enough\" to have human rights and thus be owed higher standards of research protection than that currently afforded to nonhuman animals. However, this question and other related questions assume that the ethics of experimenting on nonhuman animals have been settled, which they have not. In this essay, we argue that it is imperative to give adequate attention to familiar questions about nonhuman animal research as well as new questions about chimera research and that failure to do so will result in a distorted understanding of the ethics of chimera research.