Is Russia's Research Ethics Culture Reliable?

Abstract

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to the imposition of economic sanctions intended to isolate Russia from much of global commerce, which implicitly includes the medical research enterprise. The prospect of ongoing isolation of Russia's substantial research enterprise raises issues related to but distinct from the more familiar problem of corruption. In this paper, we identify reasons that the culture of research ethics in Russia may have been weak even before the war, contributing to hard questions about its future role in the global clinical research community.