As many as 21 homeless people died in 2007 in a town in northern Poland during a test of a bird flu vaccine sponsored by a drug company in which subjects were paid by the dosage, according to local reports. A trial involving several health workers accused of testing the homeless without informing them of the nature or the risks of the experiment began in a Warsaw court in April.
With help from a $1 million National Institute of Health grant, Martin Strosberg ’68 is trying to build resistance to such practices with education. Strosberg and others have created a series of distance-learning courses at Union Graduate College that has trained 26 people living in Central and Eastern Europe. Trainees include scientists, clinicians, lawyers, academic bioethicists and philosophers.
“This grant will help create a critical mass of professionals dedicated to implementing international and national guidelines for the protection of human research subjects in the evolving democracies of Central and Eastern Europe,” Strosberg said.
Strosberg leads an online and on-site training program in partnership with Lithuania’s Vilnius University. The program is aimed at building an infrastructure of ethics and human rights that will protect those who participate in drug trials and other experiments.
With the cost of bringing a new drug to market in the United States at more than $800 million, pharmaceutical companies have found savings by taking human testing to Central and Eastern Europe and underdeveloped countries of the world, where drug trials can be carried out more cheaply. Governments in many of those countries have more compliant ethical standards for human testing than in America and Western Europe, a fact which plays a part in some advertisements designed to lure drug companies.
The program at Union Graduate College, called the Advanced Certificate Program in Research Ethics for Central and Eastern Europe, is composed of seven graduate courses developed and taught by teams of American and European faculty. Thus far, students have come from Armenia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Russia.
Former students have so far helped establish a National Center for Bioethics in the Polish Chamber of Physicians and Dentists; published and lectured on research ethics and scientific integrity in Lithuania and Poland; created bioethics positions in government, professional societies and universities in Moldova, Russia and Georgia; and organized conferences and online resources in research ethics in the Czech Republic, Russia and Armenia.
Several students have gone on to join the master’s degree bioethics program run by Union Graduate College and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Strosberg’s program took shape a decade ago when he and his colleague, Professor Robert Baker, were developing a distance learning master’s degree program in bioethics. At that time, a visiting Fulbright Fellow at Union College, Dr. Eugenijus Gefenas, of the University of Vilnius, introduced Strosberg to his contacts in Eastern Europe. Together, they responded to a request for proposals from the NIH.
“We had all the pieces in place and we decided to go for it,” Strosberg said.
The Union Graduate College program received a $1 million grant from the NIH’s Fogarty International Center in 2004. The NIH recently announced it would renew the grant for another four years. Last year, the institute invited Union Graduate College to present the program to other academic institutions as a model of effective distance learning.
Strosberg earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. He earned his master’s degree in public administration and public health from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.
For the past 25 years, Strosberg has been a professor of health policy and management at the Union Graduate College (formerly the Graduate Management Institute of Union College). He is also a professor of bioethics at the Union Graduate College – Mount Sinai School of Medicine Masters Program in Bioethics.
Strosberg is part of a family legacy at Union: his father, Irving ’31, a physician; brother, James ’63, also a physician; and niece, Ruth ’98. His son, Nathaniel ’02, is a planner for the city of Round Rock, Texas, just north of Austin. Father and son were both political science majors who did their senior theses with Professor James Underwood.