Using the concept of “deserved trust” to strengthen the value and integrity of biomedical research

ABSTRACT

It is commonplace for science leaders and others to claim that the future of biomedical research rests in large part upon the public’s trust. If true, it behooves the biomedical research community to understand how it avoids taking chances with that trust. This commentary, which builds upon comments of noted trust scholar Russell Hardin about how best to enjoy trust, assumes that the key to being trusted is deserving to be trusted. Thus, it proposes using “deserved trust” to identify ways that the public’s trust in biomedical research could be better supported. Employing deserved trust to support the public’s trust leads us to consider what it is that the biomedical research community should be trusted to do, examine the evidence about the effectiveness of current safeguards meant to assure that those things routinely get done, and identify new ways to equip individual researchers, research teams, and research institutions to assure that the public’s trust in their research is deserved rather than misplaced.

KEYWORDS:

• Public trust
• research integrity
• translational research
• responsible conduct of research

Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to Sarah Perrault, PhD for helpful comments and suggestions she made about prior versions of this essay, David Carter, JD for conversations we shared about the questions found in Table 2, and journal reviewers for the many helpful suggestions they made on prior versions of the manuscript. I would like to thank Fondation Brocher for the support it provided in the form of a Researcher Stay during the preparation of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ulrich Dirnagl compiled the list of references, which was first used in a previous publication (Yarborough et al. 2018).

Additional information

Funding

A portion of the author’s time was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, through Grant Number UL1 TR001860.