Even some Committee members have doubts. Reid Hastie, assistant professor of Psychology and a member of the CUHS, says, "The Committee does affect the kind of research that's done, and I think often those effects are bad. I don't think people should be cowed."

Such doubts certainly account at least in part for Pattullo's relaxed attitude toward review. In its nine-year history, Pattullo's committee has not rejected a single proposal.

The CUHS has enormous power to affect psychology research, but Pattullo prefers to emphasize deference and compromise. "We've always been able to work out changes in the procedure," he says, "or the investigator has been able to be persuaded to do something else." Here Pattullo emphasizes "persuaded" -- not, he says, "intimidated."

But in its tolerance, the CUHS opens itself to criticism from the other side. Some feel that the Committee is not vigilant enough, that it fails to take its task as seriously as it should and that researchers in the department respond by treating the CUHS and its responsibility with less than total respect. In fact, the Committee is less strict, both in policy and practice, than may similar groups at other institutions.

Last summer, a graduate student in psychology, Joanne Martin, wanted to conduct some pilot experiments for her thesis on relative deprivation. Martin planned to recruit subjects from a summer school psychology class: in return for their participation, she says, she promised to help subjects prepare for their examinations.

But Martin wanted to conduct her experiment without CUHS approval. She had "unexpectedly got funding," she says, "and the Committee wasn't meeting--and I really wanted to run just a couple of pilots." So Martin went directly to Pattullo to request permission. Pattullo told her to go ahead with her research.

"There's really nothing about the study which would be morally debatable," Martin says. But it does involve deception, and Martin says that, in general, she sees "lots of problems" with deceiving subjects. "I was very leery of doing it in this study, and I'm still considering other options," she says. "I guess I feel very uncomfortable lying to anybody."

Because of the deception involved, Pattullo told me, he should have waited for the next CUHS meeting. "I simply sort of overstepped the bounds a bit, acting beyond my authority." But it is "fairly common" for Pattullo to approve proposals for researchers who cannot wait until the CUHS returns to session in the fall.

But it is its official policy that the CUHS permissiveness becomes more evident. In some ways, the Committee sets looser standards for non-government research than the government-- that is, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare--sets for its own. For example, HEW tends to view informed consent--the concept that, before participating, subjects should clearly understand both the risks of a study and their right to withdraw from it at any time-- as the keystone of regulation. But at Harvard, according to Pattullo, informed consent forms are "seldom required."

Most striking, perhaps, is that the CUHS does not require that all research projects be reviewed. The Committee must, by law, review any HEW-funded study at least once a year. But for other research, much is left to the discretion of the investigator.

"We don't automatically require that they come to us," Pattullo explains. "We rely more heavily on the good judgment of the investigator than HEW does." Pattullo believes the Committee reviews about three-fourths of the research actually performed at William James.

But the CUHS has no way of knowing exactly how much or what kind of research is going on. Elizabeth Hepner, a recent addition to the Committee, seems puzzled that the Committee does not review all research in the same way: "If you're looking at the rights of subjects, it shouldn't matter who funds it."

Some confusion has resulted. "It's been hard to find out exactly what kinds of research have to go through the Committee," says assistant professor of Psychology Peter A. de Villiers. Many department members routinely bring any project involving human subjects to the Committee's attention. But others are either not sure of the Committee's rules or not eager to cooperate.

"There's doubtless a few people who just never bother to ask the Committee when they should," says Hastie. "It's quite possible that there are stressful experiments going on that the the committee simply hasn't heard about."

Another committee member, Gartrell, has "known a couple of cases" of potentially risky research never having been reviewed. And Pattullo himself acknowledges the problem: "There's quite a lot of research that goes on which should come to our attention but which never gets reviewed."

For now, however, the CUHS has no intention of changing the regulation which allows researchers to bypass the Committee in certain cases, if they so choose. Many tend to see the problem as one of education, not stricter regulation. "I'd rather handle this through an education process than through a stronger policing effort," Kelman says. And Pattullo believes that he has a "considerable" educational responsibility. "It's a task which is never done," he says.

Certainly, sensitivity to ethical problems in research has grown enormously during the decade since HEW required committee review. If a Leary came to Harvard wanting to experiment with psilocybin or LSD, the CUHS--if it knew of the tests--would certainly interfere, and few would mourn the assault on Leary's academic freedom. "The Committee has raised everyone's consciousness during the last few years," Bales says.

But the consciousness-raising process is far from complete. Whether or not a review committee should exist is no longer disputed, but many complex problems remain--whether to permit the deception involved in a heart attack study, for instance, or the manipulation in couples research. On these, the CUHS has yet to provide strong leadership. If the Committee tries to do so in the furture--if it opts for a more active role in the protection of human subjects--it is sure to encounter resistance from many Harvard researchers