This has been an extremely busy week.

We hired three people to work on different projects. The first two are current Fulbright grantees to the United States, and they will be at the Fulbright Academy in Maine for three months this summer. The third will work for a month on one of our projects based at Indiana University-Bloomington.

The first has two law degrees – from the University of Wroclaw, Poland and from the University of Berne, Switzerland. For the past year, she has been at the European Legal Study Center at Columbia University, examining patent protection for inventions in the field of industrial biotechnology, particularly related to bio-fuel. At the Academy, she will be involved in activities relating to intellectual property, technology transfer, and energy issues.
The second earned a Master of Law degree from Ghent University. As part of her Fulbright in the US, she has been an intern at the United Nations in New York, conducting research on global development and peacekeeping issues. Some of the work has been with the UN Delegation from Fiji, and because they have a very small delegation, she has been able to attend some interesting high-level meetings. At the Academy, she will be working on some of our international projects.

The third is graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington. FAST is part of a three-year $500,000 project based in Bloomington and funded by the National Science Foundation. Our portion of the project is to help educate the public on the benefits of bacteria - that bacteria are in and around us every day, and so anti-bacterial products are not necessary. One of the principal investigators is at IU, and we needed a talented local person to help out with some background research this summer.

The hiring process for the summer interns started with an internet posting to a listserv used primarily by current Fulbright grantees. We had seven candidates based at universities in Ohio, Texas, Florida, and New York. It was a strong pool, so we conducted two rounds of telephone interviews. While we could not have them all come to Maine as interns, all of the candidates were given complimentary memberships in the Academy, and several expressed an interest in working on projects from their home base, where ever that may be.

My only problem now is that I do not yet have all of the funds in place to pay for their housing and their stipends. So seeking individual or corporate sponsors has risen to the top of my to-do list.

On the more personal side, I had a very interesting afternoon on Wednesday - I volunteered to be a participant in a research study of cognitive, perceptual and biological functioning and physical features in families. It is a long-term study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). As a participant in the study, I got to take the famous Rorschach Ink-blot Test (what do you see in this amorphous blob). There also was a multiple choice questionnaire, a computer-based test to examine the speed of my thought processing, and an interview that followed the standard psychology evaluation methodology. I could not do a second computer-based test which measures eye movement - the equipment is in Greece getting repaired - so I have to go back in a month or two.

My participation was quite relevant to FAST - we received funding earlier this year to participate in an international research project on clinical research ethics. What are the appropriate guidelines that scientists should use when conducting research on human subjects? The consent form for my participation in the study at McLean Hospital was nine pages long, and then there was another eight page notice on how the information collected may be used or disclosed.

These forms bring up many interesting legal and policy questions, starting with educational background. Would a high-school dropout understand such forms, as well as the benefits and risks of participating in a study? (There are no particular downsides to this study, but other studies can damage your physical or mental health). If this was an international project with researchers from the US, Europe and Africa, whose informed consent guidelines would be used? In countries where husbands and wives do not have equal rights, could a wife give consent to participate herself or consent to her child's involvement in a scientific study?

You can learn more about the Fulbright Academy's project at www.ClinicalResearchEthics.com.