As Coronavirus Spreads, Universities Stall Their Research to Keep Human Subjects Safe

A basic calculation governs research on human beings: How do the benefits stack up against the risks?

The coronavirus pandemic doesn’t much alter that calculation for studies that can directly improve the health of seriously ill participants, such as trials of new cancer treatments.

But the pandemic could stall other researchers: neuroscientists who put people in MRI scanners to study normal brain functions, business professors who gather them for focus groups, oral historians who take their testimonies, criminal-justice scholars who interview people coming out of prisons. Those kinds of studies, which didn’t previously expose the participants to any risk, could now sicken them with Covid-19.

That reality is prompting research institutions including Columbia University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the California Institute of Technology to suspend much face-to-face human-subjects research.

Coronavirus Hits Campus

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

• Here’s Our List of Colleges’ Reopening Models
• Students’ Trust in Their Colleges Held Steady During Covid’s Early Days, Study Finds
• As More Stressed-Out Students Consider Dropping Out, Surgeon General Pushes College Leaders to Ramp Up Support

Faculty members at Columbia received an email last week from Amy Hungerford, executive vice president for arts and sciences, announcing that “the risk/benefit ratio of each of our human-subjects research protocols must be reassessed” in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. For studies with little or no benefit to participants, researchers must refrain from in-person contact with those subjects in the New York City area, according to a memo from Columbia’s Institutional Review Board office, which oversees human-subject studies. Researchers may contact subjects by phone or otherwise collect data remotely.

Similar steps are expected at research universities nationwide.

The uncertainty will be especially tough for graduate students trying to complete research in time to go on the job market or assistant professors trying to complete their tenure applications.

“I’m sure many people feel this is an overabundance of caution,” Michael Shelanski, senior vice dean for research at Columbia’s medical school, said in an interview. “But with pandemics, the faster you stop the transmission, the fewer cases you have and the fewer deaths you have. So it really is important to act aggressively.”

The shutdowns of in-person human-subject interactions are part of a broader curtailment of research that also affects lab-based scientists who study cells and animals. At Harvard, for example, researchers in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences must reduce lab work to essential operations for up to eight weeks.

For scholars whose laboratory is the social world, though, the shelter-in-place dictate is uniquely difficult.

In historical moments, natural disasters, and periods of crisis, how people react is revealing. It allows researchers to answer narrow questions: Will the coronavirus disproportionately affect certain populations? But it can also expose deeper societal divisions and inequalities that social scientists want to understand.

“Those moments can be very powerful for us,” said Shamus Khan, chair of Columbia’s sociology department. “I don’t think we should always value, or even ever value, research over the safety of people. This is what IRBs are there for. But it is something that people have to grapple with.”

‘Ultimately We Are Researchers’

Sharon Cornelissen saw the power of such moments firsthand while living in a neighborhood of Detroit from 2015 to 2018 to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for her sociology dissertation at Princeton University. Initially she found it hard to talk with residents about racial tensions. That changed with the political rise of Donald J. Trump. White residents began openly expressing xenophobia, she said, and black residents responded. She ended up writing about racism in the community through the lens of Trump’s election.

M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle

Cornelissen, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, thinks the coronavirus pandemic could be a similarly important moment in her new project, about challenges faced by first-time home-buyers of color in Brockton, Mass., a city 25 miles south of Boston. In this time of community solidarity, who is included and who is excluded? How is the community treating its many undocumented immigrants? How are first-time home-buyers weathering the economic turmoil?

Cornelissen’s research has involved weekly trips to Brockton to do in-depth interviews with residents and to spend time in public spaces like restaurants and city meetings. Last week Brockton residents struck her as less worried about Covid-19 than people at Harvard did. But she decided to cancel this week’s fieldwork, even though Harvard had yet to offer firm guidance, because of the chance that she might sicken the Brockton retiree who was scheduled to give her a tour of the community.

“As fieldworkers, sometimes we can delude ourselves into thinking that we are truly members of the community,” she said. “This crisis really puts into focus that ultimately we are researchers” who represent universities. “That comes with different responsibilities.”

That line is harder to draw for researchers living in their field sites.

Ryan Parsons, a Princeton grad student in sociology, bought a house in a small town in the Mississippi Delta region to pursue his doctoral research about barriers to economic mobility facing persistently poor rural black communities. He works with an afterschool program for students hoping to attend college. He visits small-claims courts. He runs a Wednesday-morning church-based bingo game for about 40 elderly women, distributing bags of fruit as prizes and lunching with them.

All of that was before the pandemic. Parsons, who recently traveled to the East Coast for conferences, making him more likely to carry the coronavirus, is now staying mostly indoors and restricting his interactions with research subjects. As the pandemic increases the vulnerability of his community, he worries about how to assist the people he is studying while ensuring that they don’t feel exploited for his research.

“I want to be genuinely helpful to my neighbor, for example, who is 86 and lives alone,” he said. “How do I help her in a way that doesn’t make her feel like I’m also being a spectator to the trouble that she may be experiencing because of all this?”

Parsons is also concerned about his career prospects. He hopes to go on the academic job market in the fall. But the market is seasonal. If the pandemic delays his research by even a couple of months, that could prevent him from making enough progress to compete for jobs on that timeline. He’d have to wait until the following fall.

Another uncertainty: how the economic downturn will affect the job market.

“I graduated college right in the middle of the 2008 recession,” he said. “It’s not exciting to think about doing that again.”