Honey, I'm experimenting on the kids: is it ethical for scientists to use their own children as test subjects?

• Author: Belluck, Pam
• Position: SCIENCE

Rebecca Toga, 18, still remembers the first time her father scanned her brain. "It was kind of claustrophobic" in the noisy scanner, she says. her bead covered with a "cage kind of thing," her body wrapped tight in blankets.

"The first time I kept talking because I was nervous, but then they just calmed me down and I got used to it," she says. But by age 8 or 9, she was so accustomed to it that she would fall asleep.

Rebecca's father, Arthur Toga, is a neurology professor at the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles. In a study of brain change, he scanned the brains of all three of his children using magnetic resonance imaging (M.R.I.).

Toga is among a new crop of scientists using their own children as research subjects.

Other researchers have studied their own children in the past, but today's sophisticated technology allows scientists to collect new and more detailed data. Plus, the scientists say that the children make reliable--and free--participants in an era of scarce research funding.

"You need subjects, and they're hard to get," says Deborah Linebarger, a psychologist who directs the Children's Media Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and has used her four kids in her studies of the effect of media on children.

Pawan Sinha, a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), saw potential even before his son was born. At a birthing class, Sinha stunned everyone--including his wife--by saying he was excited about the baby's birth "because I really want to study him and do experiments with him." And he did, strapping a camera on baby Darius's head, recording what he looked at.

At Vanderbilt University's medical school in Nashville, Stephen Camarata has involved all seven of his children in studies of learning problems and speech.

And Deb Roy at M.I.T. embedded 11 video cameras and 14 microphones in ceilings throughout his house. He recorded 70 percent of his son's waking hours for his first three years, amassing 250,000 hours of tape for a language-development study he calls the Human Speechome Project.

Ethicists said they would consider participation in some projects acceptable, even valuable, but raised questions about the effect on the child, on the relationship with the parent, and on the objectivity of the researcher or the data.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST?

"The role of the parent is to protect the child," says Robert M. Nelson, director of the Center for Research Integrity at...