USC Law Professor’s Work Highly Commended

Prof. Alexander Capron’s Book Recognized by British Medical Association

by Lori Craig

A book co-edited by Prof. Alexander Capron was honored at the annual British Medical Association’s Medical Book Competition ceremony in London Sept. 14.

Casebook on Ethical Issues in International Health Research, co-edited by Capron, Richard Cash, Daniel Wikler and Abha Saxena for the World Health Organization (WHO), was awarded Highly Commended in the Basis of Medicine category.

Prof. Alexander Capron

“The best thing about being honored is that it will help to bring the book to the attention of more people conducting programs to improve the capacity of clinical investigators and research ethics committees, especially in developing countries, to grapple with a variety of ethical issues,” said Capron, the Scott H. Bice Chair in Healthcare, Law, Policy and Ethics, and professor of law and medicine.

Capron, who served four years as director of Ethics, Trade, Human Rights and Health Law at the WHO, said the casebook grew out of a collaboration with the WHO’s Department of Research Policy and Cooperation, which runs WHO’s research ethics committee. Capron and colleagues developed the casebook as a training tool in seminars on research ethics for members of review committees at WHO headquarters and regional offices and in research centers in a number of countries.

Intended for members of research ethics committees, researchers, physicians and the teachers who will train them to identify ethical issues and provide them with the tools to analyze and resolve the issues, the book includes 64 cases that span concerns as diverse as evaluating the cost-benefit ratio of long-term care services and changing breastfeeding practices to avoid mother-to-child HIV transmission.

“Unlike a law school casebook where the cases are judicial decisions, these are cases that we have written up from real examples of research, framed to bring out the ethical difficulties,” Capron said. “The cases were picked and edited in such a way that there usually isn’t one obviously right thing to do. It’s a matter of being able to analyze the situation and come to an ethically defensible resolution in light of globally recognized principles.”

The cases in the book are grouped in chapters based on the principal ethical topics encountered in the field – such as issues in study design, standard of care, or privacy and confidentiality – and complemented by striking photographs from the WHO portraying children and families from across the globe.

“Members of research ethics committees will have to look at research protocols and be able to see how they present ethical dilemmas,” Capron said. “So the cases in the book are intended to familiarize them with the processes that one can use to resolve such issues.”

Capron has taught at USC Law and in the Keck School of Medicine at USC since 1985 and is co-director of USC’s Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics. He is a trustee of The Century Foundation, Commissioner of The Joint Commission, past president of the International Association of Bioethics, Secretary of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, and a member of the Institute of Medicine and of the American Law Institute.

Co-editors Cash and Wikler are both faculty in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. Cash, a physician, is a senior lecturer who has participated in major public health efforts in a number of countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, and has run research ethics workshops throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. Wikler, a philosopher, is the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and created the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health, which addresses health ethics at the population and global levels. Saxena, a physician from India, has managed WHO’s Ethics Review Committee in Geneva since 2002.