Data from Unethical Experiments?

Abstract

These ethical questions are given even more consequence by the concern about what to do with data which has been garnered from experiments that are judged to be clearly unethical. This question has been an important one since the doctors’ trials at Nuremberg. We might imagine, for example, a researcher today, whose protocol had been declined by an ERC in the country of origin, simply deciding to take that same protocol to a different part of the world where there are no formal requirements for ethical review, or at least where there are much less strict requirements, and there simply conducting the research outside the purview of strict ethical oversight. In this situation, a protocol that has been formally judged ethically inadequate might still manage to be conducted and to gather some data. What should be done with the data garnered from that experiment?