Saturday, October 8, 2011
Eugenics
I was shocked to find out that Carrel was a eugenicist. Today, we regard eugenics as being widely unethical-- does that mean we don't allow people to experiment with the practice even though they might produce results that are greatly beneficial to science. (Should Carrel's experiments have been supported knowing his true intentions for doing them?)
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It is tough to know what Carrel's true intentions were. He has made some great contributions to medicine such as vascular suturing. I think that during his era many scientists were promoting Eugenics and that is why his experiments were supported. However I do not think we could dismiss his contributions to medicine because we do not know if all his practices were for his Eugenic agenda.
ReplyDeleteThough I don't like touching many things of this nature, it should be noted that due to his connections with eugenics and "immortal" cell lines, whether his was one such line or not is as the book puts it debatable, also alienated the public after many years of lackluster advancement and brought many false hopes and unnecessary fears to the practice of cell culturing. So, I’m not sure the public over his tenure as a researcher truly condoned the behavior and he was later shunned for his support of the Nazi party.
ReplyDeleteWe see medical research carried out with a utilitarian approach quite a bit of the time in the past. We can thank alot of these approaches for givng us vaccines, noval medical treatments, and knowledge that may not have been discovered otherwise.
ReplyDeleteBut there is also the fact that we can't just deny the existance of medical ethics. Eventhough we benifit greatly from the medical practices of old, those things would never be approved today; however, this also may be why we are behind the rest of the world in medical discoveries when it comes to Stem Cells.........so whats the happy medium??
I see your point. I guess our happy medium is a 25,000 page submissions to the FDA to allow a treatment to enter phase II clinical trials...
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