It amazes me how many atrocities took place during this timeline in the pursuit of cures. What is even more surprising is the justifications that accompanied them. Having to prey on a persons guilt and fear in order to get them to participate in a study would seem unethical in every sense. For example the prisoners that were injected with cancer agreed to the study because of the guilt from their crime. If the prisoners were to voluntarily agree to the study in order to further cancer research is one story but to prey on their guilt is another. Their justification for these experiments was that they , as criminals, should participate in the study as a reconciliation. Another is example is the countless events that were endured by the Lacks family. After Henrietta passed away doctors convinced Day to allow them conduct an autopsy in the hopes that it would help his children if they were one day to get the same cancer. Hsu then would return to gather blood from family, not to screen the family for the cancer but to identify markers that can be used to identify HeLA contamination. The only reason all of these atrocities took place was due to the lack of knowledge of their subjects. The people that they conducted research on were poor, black and most of them were illiterate.
The fear that was shown by the people of Baltimore during that time period really says something about the research being conducted at this time. During our early childhood most children are afraid of characters they saw in a a scary movie , these children were scared of a hospital. A hospital should signify a place that a person goes when in need of medical help, to these kids it was a scary place were you were taken to be experimented on by "night doctors". These people even had to worry about corpses being stolen from their grave by these researches. Its unbelievable to what length these researchers would go to test a theory.
I agree, it makes you appreciate the times we live in now...sometimes I know I complain that life in the old days was so much simpler but I wouldnt want to live then.
ReplyDeleteYou're correct, the actions committed were very atrocious. However, as Niccolo Machiavelli said, "The end justifies the means." These atrocities were often necessary for the advancement of science. It's similar to killing one person to save millions.
ReplyDeleteIt's a utilitarian approach to medical ethicacy. Who's to say that our future generations won't look back at our practices and think of how atrocious we might have been carring out our research and treatments. I think we can only do what is best for humanity by learning as much as we can, all while staying within the relatively ethical standards that are in place today. We also should never forget the way research was handled in the past so we can grow from there methods and improve upon thier approches. Because lets face it, in order to understand the unusual and poorly understood, some boundaries need to be fringed in order for humanity to make breakthroughs.
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