Findings may be useful to academics and professionals responsible for organ procurement. Additional research is necessary for practical application of findings. Generalizing these findings beyond Europe may be problematic because of external validity constraints.

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function is the objective. The more difficult cases wait, regardless of the seriousness of their need.Theologian Paul Ramsey pointed out some years ago that military or disaster triage has a clear objective: to save the most salvageable so that they can contribute to the common goodÂ-which, in battle, is victory; in earth-quake or fire, is public safety. The common good provides the criterion for selection. According to Jonsen, then, the practice Larrey dubbed "triage" was a utilitarian allocation scheme designed to save the most salvageable patients in order to provide for the common good. Standard treatments of the subject substantially agree with the Engelhardt-Jonsen-Ramsey account.Cementing this view of triage in the minds of most scholars is the wellknown and vivid first-hand account of penicillin triage during World War II penned by Dr. Henry Beecher:When the wonders of penicillin were new, but recognized, and the supply heartbreakingly meager, a small shipment finally arrived in North Africa during World War II. The hospital beds were overflowing with wounded men. Many had been wounded in battles; many also had been wounded in brothels. Which group would get the penicillin? By all that is just, it would go to the heroes who had risked their lives, who were still in jeopardy, and some of whom were dying. They did not receive it, nor should they have; it was given to those infected in brothels. Before indignation takes over, let us examine the situation.First, there were desperate shortages of manpower at the front. Second, those with broken bodies and broken bones would not be swiftly restored to the battle line, even with penicillin, whereas those with venereal disease, on being

Findings may be useful to academics and professionals responsible for organ procurement. Additional research is necessary for practical application of findings. Generalizing these findings beyond Europe may be problematic because of external validity constraints.

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Several training programs sponsored by the NIH/Fogarty International Center’s International Research Ethics Education and Curriculum Development Program offer online graduate-level courses in research ethics to participants in low- and middle-income countries. This paper describes the evaluation of four of these online courses and recommendations for improvements to achieve the highest-quality design and delivery. We used an evaluation matrix consisting of 95 criteria based on recommended best practices in eLearning. Our results showed that these courses are developing or meeting nearly 73% of the criteria, while they are not meeting approximately 21% of the criteria. Together, one or more of the courses are developing or meeting 89 of the 95 criteria. These results suggest that the necessary skills and expertise exist in these programs to bring all of the eLearning courses close to 100% proficiency by sharing a common set of best practices. This paper is part of a collection of articles analyzing the Fogarty International Center’s International Research Ethics Education and Curriculum Development Program.

We analyse the system of ethical review of human research in the Baltic States by introducing the principle of equivalent stringency of ethical review, that is, research projects imposing equal risks and inconveniences on research participants should be subjected to equally stringent review procedures. We examine several examples of non-equivalence or asymmetry in the system of ethical review of human research: (1) the asymmetry between rather strict regulations of clinical drug trials and relatively weaker regulations of other types of clinical biomedical research and (2) gaps in ethical review in the area of non-biomedical human research where some sensitive research projects are not reviewed by research ethics committees at all. We conclude that non-equivalent stringency of ethical review is at least partly linked to the differences in scope and binding character of various international legal instruments that have been shaping the system of ethical review in the Baltic States. Therefore, the Baltic example could also serve as an object lesson to other European countries which might be experiencing similar problems.