All quiz questions are from short and simple article on
human experimentation linked below -
1. How old was the
child Edward Jenner infected with smallpox?
2. What was being
tested in the Porton down Experiments?
3. (T/F) Research involving humans is intrinsically dubious.
4. What year did a
U.S government funded trail treat pregnant HIV patients with placebos?
5. What does REC
stand for and what is its purpose?
6. Under what
circumstances is it necessary to experiment on vulnerable subjects such as
children, or the cognitively impaired.
Nowadays
Americans and other 1st world citizens live in a world of doctors and drugs.
Hundreds of years ago when one became sick they had to rely on the oral
traditional medicines of their area or be lucky enough to have an elder or
shaman who has dealt with the illness enough to be effective. Through the
natural progression of knowledge we now can rely on very well trained
physicians, and that's if we cannot identify the ailment ourselves and buy over
the counter drugs to solve our ills. The question is, how do we know these
medicines work the way they advertise? If this question is followed to its
roots then the answer usually becomes human experimentation. In all of its
various forms, from good and well to evil incarnate, human experimentation is
the only way we can safely pursue medicine.
Early hunter gatherers naturally saw
similarities between the mammals they hunted and themselves, and indeed much
can be learned from dissecting animals, but to solve the complex and varying
ailments that face humanity requires a complex and varying knowledge of the
human body. From animals society’s knowledge of the human body grew from the
dismemberment and analysation of prisoners and criminals. From this grizzly
work came the first anatomists whose, by modern standards, unethical actions
allowed real medicine to be born and flourish.
From
the early doctors who bled to heal and did not wash their hands we eventually
moved on to discover things such as vaccinations and the cause of cancer. This
leap as well was largely thanks to human experimentation. Doctors working with
willing or unwilling patients allowed us to reach the wealth of knowledge that
we have today.
Most
people are of the mind that so long as the subjects are informed and consenting
then the experimentation is ethical. And indeed most drugs are the product of a
large number of informed and sometimes compensated subjects whose risks allow
drugs to reach a very fortunate public. Yet not all issues surrounding human
experimentation are so cut and dry. For instance, many debates center around
experimentation on children or the cognitively impaired. In most cases the only
way to discover ways to treat impairments or childhood exclusive conditions are
to test the methods on those individuals, yet they cannot give the same kind of
informed consent that most would want out of a human experiment. Issues
surrounding consent, self experimentation, the use of immorally obtained data,
for-profit experimentation, and the consent of terminal or otherwise disparate
subjects are just some of the issues that make human experimentation a very
real bioethical issue in modern times.
Modern
clinical trials often face very fair critique on their actions thanks to the
grim history of human experimentation. I do not ask that anyone ignore the
actions of Dr. Mengele or the 731. However, i would suggest that anyone
consider the lives of those who suffer from incurable ailments and attempt to
search for a golden mean that will allow us to continue solving medical issues
that face humanity without sliding down the slippery slope toward the
compromisation of human rights.
I think that the Golden Mean in this situation lies within contrarianism. People can always volunteer for medical research. There are a lot of people seeking euthanasia for themselves that would probably donate their bodies to science. The research only crosses the boundary to unethical whenever what the subject agrees to is violated. Say, if a person agreed to research as long as they were permanently anesthetized and then the researcher kept them awake the whole time.
ReplyDeleteThis is from Stanford's philosophy page... Contractarianism, which stems from the Hobbesian line of social contract thought, holds that persons are primarily self-interested, and that a rational assessment of the best strategy for attaining the maximization of their self-interest will lead them to act morally (where the moral norms are determined by the maximization of joint interest) and to consent to governmental authority. Contractarianism argues that we each are motivated to accept morality “first because we are vulnerable to the depredations of others, and second because we can all benefit from cooperation with others” (Narveson 1988, 148). Contractualism, which stems from the Kantian line of social contract thought, holds that rationality requires that we respect persons, which in turn requires that moral principles be such that they can be justified to each person. Thus, individuals are not taken to be motivated by self-interest but rather by a commitment to publicly justify the standards of morality to which each will be held. Where Gauthier, Narveson, or economist James Buchanan are the paradigm Hobbesian contractarians, Rawls or Thomas Scanlon would be the paradigm Kantian contractualists. The rest of this entry will specifically pertain to the contractarian strain wherever the two diverge.
I meant contractarianism instead of contrarianism in the first line, it auto-corrected me.
DeleteI think this is a very interesting argument. I actually heard a very interesting recounting from a survivor of one of the Nazi concentration camps where she and her twin underwent many physical experiments. Also, Louis Zamperini in his book unbroken told tales of how Japanese soldiers performed medical experiments on the prisoners of war during World War II. Your post brought these two sad scenarios to mind. I think its crazy to think that this only occurred within the last century. Personally, this is why I see the necessity in some animal testing (such as on rats) or using human simulated tissues, so that no human is subjected to being used as a "guinea pig" for medical experimentation.
ReplyDelete"experimentation on children or the cognitively impaired" AND on those whose socio-economic circumstances force them into undertaking risks they would prefer not to take, whether they understand the full dimension of risk or not. Perhaps the only truly fair way to pursue human experimentation would be by lottery, independent of socio-economic circumstance. Would people in John Rawls's Original Position be more likely to favor such a system than we are, I wonder?
ReplyDeleteZack, I think that in the next twenty years we will develop methods to test drugs without the need to use human test subjects until the very end of the testing process. Scientist have developed many advance methods such as tissue cultures to see the effects of drugs on different organ systems. They will continue to develop more advance methods to test drugs. I do feel until those methods are reached we as a scientific community should work together to do the most ethical research and give informed consent. I enjoyed reading your paper.
ReplyDeleteZack, I think that in the next twenty years we will develop methods to test drugs without the need to use human test subjects until the very end of the testing process. Scientist have developed many advance methods such as tissue cultures to see the effects of drugs on different organ systems. They will continue to develop more advance methods to test drugs. I do feel until those methods are reached we as a scientific community should work together to do the most ethical research and give informed consent. I enjoyed reading your paper.
ReplyDelete