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IRB Submitted & New Team Member

We submitted the IRB proposal Friday and got a new team member last week. IRB stands for institutional review board, and it's the committee that makes sure our project is ethical and does no harm to human subjects. We've all had specific training in human subjects research and do these proposals for every project, which have to be renewed every year of the project or resubmitted if we make any modifications. I submitted a modification/renewal because we are due to renew the protocol that was approved last year. Plus, we have changed the location from American Samoa to the Northwest Tatau Festival in Tacoma, WA. Many consider IRB a necessary "evil," not because they don't agree that human subjects should be protected, but because IRBs can be bureaucratic snafus that slow down or even undermine research (sometimes Research Compliance kicks back proposals to me for spelling issues before they even send them to the committee). For instance, Wash U in St. Louis has recently started charging for the service of IRB reviews, which I think will seriously jeopardize research among non-biomedical/big pharma researchers like ourselves. On the other hand, living in working in Alabama, I always try to keep in mind the atrocities of the Tuskegee experiments and that a little bureaucracy is a small price to pay to protect human subject rights.

Our new team member is Grey Caballero (great name, right? "Grey gentleman"). I have only met him on Google Hangouts, but he is an undergraduate student in Anthropology at UNCW with Michaela. He's going to tattoo studios in Wilmington to get some ethnographic jobs and reading up on the lit in preparation for this summer. I'll have him send some bio info to share. Welcome Grey!

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About This Project

Our team studies cultural impacts on health, specifically those of tattooing on the immune system. We expand on our previous study that suggests tattooing may "inoculate" the immune system. Our research takes place among Polynesian tattooists, who retain some of the oldest and most extensive tattooing practices in the world. We will collect saliva samples from over 100 people receiving tattoos at the Northwest Tatau Festival to examine multiple immunological factors.

Blast off!

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