Human Experimentation And Research

This title was first published in 2003: As new medical technologies and treatments develop with increasing momentum, the legal and ethical implications of research involving human participants are being called into question as never before. Human Experimentation and Research explores the philosophical foundations of research ethics, ongoing regulatory dilemmas, and future challenges raised by the rapid globalisation and corporatisation of the research endeavour. This volume brings together some of the most significant published essays in the field. The editors also provide an informative introduction, summarizing the area and the relevance of the articles chosen.

During the 1950s, with the Cold War looming, military planners sought to know more about how to keep fighting forces fit and capable in the harsh Alaskan environment. In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Air Force's former Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory conducted a study of the role of the thyroid in human acclimatization to cold. To measure thyroid function under various conditions, the researchers administered a radioactive medical trace, Iodine-131, to Alaska Natives and white military personnel; based on the study results, the researchers determined that the thyroid did not play a significant role in human acclimatization to cold. When this study of thyroid function was revisited at a 1993 conference on the Cold War legacy in the Arctic, serious questions were raised about the appropriateness of the activityâ€"whether it posed risks to the people involved and whether the research had been conducted within the bounds of accepted guidelines for research using human participants. In particular, there was concern over the relatively large proportion of Alaska Natives used as subjects and whether they understood the nature of the study. This book evaluates the research in detail, looking at both the possible health effects of Iodine-131 administration in humans and the ethics of human subjects research. This book presents conclusions and recommendations and is a significant addition to the nation's current reevaluation of human radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War.

Science, as Andrew Goliszek proves in this compendious, chilling, and eye-opening book, has always had its dark side. Behind the bright promise of life-saving vaccines and life-enhancing technologies lies the true cost of the efforts to develop them. Knowledge has a price; often that price has been human suffering. The ethical limits governing use of the human body in experimentation have been breached, redefined, and breached again---from the moment the first plague-ridden corpse was heaved over the fortifications of a besieged medieval city to the use of cutting-edge gene therapy today. Those limits are in constant need of redefinition, for the goals and the techniques have become both more refined and more secretive. The German and Japanese human experiments of the 1930s and 1940s horrified the world when they came to light. These barbaric exercises in pseudoscience grew out of assumptions of racial superiority. The subjects were deemed subhuman; ordinary guidelines could therefore be suspended. What has happened in the decades since World War II has differed only in degree. Explicitly or implicitly, any organization or government that undertakes or sponsors scientific research applies some measure of human worth. Experimentation rests upon an equation that balances suffering against gain, the good of the collective against the rights of the individual, and the risk of unknown consequences against the rewards of scientific discovery. Everything depends upon who makes that equation. The sobering and gripping accumulation of evidence in this book proves exactly what has been justified in the name of science. The science of "eugenics" justified enforced sterilization. The need to gain an upper hand in the Cold War justified CIA experiments involving mind control and drugs. The desperate race to control nuclear proliferation was used to justify radiation experiments whose effects are still being felt today. Chemical warfare, gene therapy, molecular medicine: These subjects dominate headlines and even direct our government's foreign policy, yet the whole truth about the experimentation behind them has never been made public. Though not a cheering book, In the Name of Science is a crucially important one, and it deserves a wide audience. A biologist by training, Goliszek presents each topic clearly and explains fully its significance and implications. Connecting the history of scientific experimentation through time with the topics that are likely to dominate the future, he has performed an invaluable service. No other book on the market provides the research included here, or presents it with such persuasive force.

The author finds that these committees are predominantly influenced by members of research institutions and by the researchers themselves. Yet researchers, and their institutions, stand to gain considerable benefits from the experiments they conduct. Dr McNeill argues that committees of review, as they are presently constituted, cannot be relied on to ensure an equitable balance between the interests of researchers and the interests of the human subjects experimented on. He proposes a radically different rationale and model for committee review.

Susan Lederer provides the first full-length history of early biomedical research with human subjects. Lederer offers detailed accounts of experiments conducted on both healthy and unhealthy men, women, and children, during the period from 1890 to 1940, including yellow fever experiments, Udo Wile's "dental drill" experiments on insane patients, and Hideyo Noguchi's syphilis experiments.

Most of the essays appeared in the spring 1969 issue of Dædalus.

The use of human subjects in biomedical research has increased rapidly with scientific discoveries. However, the failure to achieve the highest - or even adequate - standards of professional moral concern and behavior is a serious side effect. Research on Human Subjects is based on four years of intensive research in which two studies were completed - one on a nationally representative sample of biomedical research institutions, the second on a sample of 350 researchers who actually used human subjects. The authors explore prevalent ethical norms, the actual ethical behavior of scientists, and the dilemma between the values of humane therapy and scientific discovery. They document the inadequate training that biomedical researchers receive in the ethics of research on human subjects, not only in medical schools but in post-graduate training as well. This landmark work makes very specific suggestions for policy change and reform for the biomedical research profession and its employment of human subjects.

This volume, which has developed from the Fourteenth Trans Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and Medicine, September 5-8, 1982, at Tel Aviv University, Israel, contains the contributions of a group of distinguished scholars who together examine the ethical issues raised by the advance of biomedical science and technology. We are, of course, still at the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of human biology; scientific medicine and clinical research are scarcely one hundred years old. Both the sciences and the technology of medicine until ten or fifteen years ago had the feeling of the 19th century about them; we sense that they belonged to an older time; that era is ending. The next twenty-five to fifty years of investigative work belong to neurobiology, genetics, and reproductive biology. The technologies of information processing and imaging will make diagnosis and treatment almost incomprehensible by my generation of physicians. Our science and technology will become so powerful that we shall require all of the art and wisdom we can muster to be sure that they remain dedicated, as Francis Bacon hoped four centuries ago, "to the uses of life." It is well that, as philosophers and physicians, we grapple with the issues now when they are relatively simple, and while the pace of change is relatively slow. We require a strategy for the future; that strategy must be worked out by scientists, philosophers, physicians, lawyers, theologians, and, I should like to add, artists and poets.