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The article focuses on the guideline issued by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW), entitled Institutional Guide to DHEW Policy on Protection of Human Subjects. The guideline formally issued by the federal government codifies a policy that has already been widely implemented. Since the government itself does not seek the role of arbiter, it has decentralized responsibility by placing it in the hands of review committees in the local research institution or university. Each institution is to establish a review committee to screen all applications for grants and contracts in light of the DHEW guidelines. Of course much of the animus here involves medical research, including the celebrated birth control experiment in which several women in the control group received placebos rather than birth control pills. All of this raises important issues. For example, what is the proper balance between protecting subjects and hindering researchers? It is possible that uninformed zeal on behalf of protectionism will cause unnecessary harm to the research process itself, just as the callous pursuit of research on its own terms can indeed cause harm to subjects. Certainly social scientists generally and perhaps sociologists in particular should be represented in all pertinent local review committees.

The difficulties encountered in attempts to apply directly some of the standard network analysis techniques to the planning of research programs are discussed. The particularized requirements for a planning system suitable for research efforts are identified, and a technique developed specifically for the planning and programming of research efforts is described. Basically, the technique involves the formulation of a series of flows and arrays depicting major program elements and individual projects, sequentially ordered on the basis of research logic, and graphically represented by a matrix which relates research performance to resources required (including personnel, materials, equipment and facilities, and funds). Because of the nature of research, the technique was developed to avoid the formulation of tight networks with sharp time-to-completion estimates for each project. The application of this technique to two biomedical research programs of the National Cancer Institute is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]