Another committee of scientists -- another IRB board -- probably would have not allowed the study. Therefore, the parent's appeal to the IRB process as the har

Another committee of scientists -- another IRB board -- probably would have not allowed the study. Therefore, the parent's appeal to the IRB process as the harbinger of ethics is misguided. If any IRB would deem a study ethical, then there's probably consensus among the scientific community on the cost-benefit tradeoff of the study. If one IRB deemed the study ethical, and if there're probably a lot of other potential IRBs that would not, then appealing to some sort of scientific consensus on the matter is a misnomer.