On Wednesday, October 19, 2005, the Committee on Ethical Considerations for Revisions to DHHS Regulations for Protection of Prisoners Involved in Research will hold a brief public session, which will take place from 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. in Room 110 of the National Academies' Keck Center in downtown Washington, D.C.

During this session, the committee will meet with the project's sponsors in order to review the charge to the committee.

This is the fourth of five meetings that the committee will hold to collect information and conduct their deliberations. 

The committee is interested in receiving written comments and other materials that might be of assistance in addressing the four-part charge.  Thus, if you wish to submit such materials that address the committee tasks, please submit them to the project's staff officer, Andrew Pope, at apope@nas.edu.  Your comments will be considered by the committee during the study period. Any comments submitted will be put in the public access file.

The committee will examine the information and material obtained during this, and other public meetings, in an effort to inform its work.  Although opinions may be stated and lively discussion may ensue, no conclusions are being drawn at this time; no recommendations will be made.  In fact, the committee will deliberate thoroughly before writing its draft report.  Moreover, once the draft report is written, it must go through a rigorous review by experts who are anonymous to the committee, and the committee then must respond to this review with appropriate revisions that adequately satisfy the Academy's Report Review committee and the chair of the NRC before it is considered an IOM/NRC report.  Therefore, observers who draw conclusions about the committee's work based on the discussion at this meeting will be doing so prematurely.

Furthermore, individual committee members often engage in discussion and questioning for the specific purpose of probing an issue and sharpening an argument.  The comments of any given committee member may not necessarily reflect the position he or she may actually hold on the subject under discussion, to say nothing of that person's future position as it may evolve in the course of the project.  Any inference about an individual's position regarding findings or recommendations in the final report is therefore premature.