3 The Immortal Life of Ethics? The Alienation of Body Tissue ... 75Our study participants possessed a strong commitment to contribute
to medical research, with 79 (92.9%) of respondents stating that this
commitment was the main reason for their participation. This altruistic
commitment to medical research was also recognised, and 118 (84.9%)
participants who stated they personally did not expect to financially
benefit from any discoveries derived from their tissues or iPSC derived
from them. However, 66 (47.5%) participants reported that they were
hoping to personally benefit from the study, in the sense of improved
medicines or treatments. Being personally affected by an inherited dis-
ease did not appear to significantly influence participant support of
human embryonic stem cell research (p = 0.26) or reproductive cloning
(p = 0.65).
Almost all research participants strongly supported stem cell science,
with 99.3% strongly supporting cellular therapy using stem cells and
113 (90.4%) supporting the use of donated excess IVF human embryos
in research. However, despite the strong support for stem cell science,
subgroup analysis confirmed that Catholicism was associated with
decreased support for human embryonic stem cell research (p = 0.005).
Exploring Informed Consent
Participants from our study into the recall of informed consent strongly
supported stem cell science. However, there were several instances where
important information about what would happen to the tissue samples,
and the iPSC derived from them, was not accurately recalled by the
majority of participants.
Although donation consent was not unimportant to participants,
they failed to recall important issues surrounding consent. Interestingly,
poor recall of ethics and consent procedures has been widely found in
medical research (Khan et al. 2014 ; Tam et al. 2015 ). Within the lit-
erature, many explanations have been given as to why recall of ethics
and informed consent procedures is poor. Some studies have suggested
that consent recall decreases with time (Lavelle-Jones 1993 ). Therefore,
it is argued that poor understanding of ethics and informed consent
procedures can partly be explained in terms of this time lapse between
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