3/19/10

The Controversy Magnet: PositiveID (Verichip) "Chips" Alzheimer's Patients, Quite Possibly Without Permission

"When is a medical experiment in which you implant microchips in 200 old people with Alzheimer’s disease not a medical experiment? According to PositiveID (PSID), it’s when you forget to get permission from an institutional review board, which oversees medical experiments on humans.

The omission will be seized upon by the company’s legion of critics, writing yet another gloomy PR chapter for a company that can’t do anything without triggering negative headlines.

The murk surrounding whether PositiveID got proper permission — either from a panel of experts or the patients themselves — for implanting the Florida senior citizens with microchips linked to their healthcare records was revealed by Penn Bullock in a story on James Randi’s web site for pseudoscience skeptics." ...more