National Context
Just like there are
examples of exploitation of people for medical research around the globe, there
are definitely some in the United States. The book Medical Apartheid talks about history of medical experimentation
specifically on blacks from colonial times all the way to present times in the
U.S. There are examples all the way from the 1800’s involving a 40-year long
experiment in which black men that had syphilis were left to die, instead of
trying to treat them, just so that their dead bodies could be used and research
could be done on the cadavers. There’s also another example from the 19th
century in which a gynecologist would perform painful procedures on female
slaves without anesthesia that led to medical breakthroughs. In 1991, an
experiment of birth control was done on teens in Baltimore that what they said
would help reduce the underclass. In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a California physician
working at a hospital injected six girls under the age of 12 with syphilis. In
1895, a pediatrician from NYC Henry Heiman intentionally infected two mentally
disabled boys with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment. In experiments
like this it is clear that the doctors/scientist don’t care for the people they
test on. They simply refer to them almost as materials for the research, do not
care if they get a disease or die, they just use them to learn more.
One of the most recent
experiments was in 1992 by Columbia University in New York City. The purpose of
the study was to see if there was genetic link to violent behavior, but the
thing was that the only people they were going to test that on was on young
black boys that were from poor neighborhood in NYC. Again, this was another
experiment with lack of consent. The parents of these children’s were not told
the truth or even the purpose of this experiment. All they were told was that “their
children were simply coming in for a series of tests and questions, when in fact
they were given potentially risky doses of the same drug found in the Fen-Pfen
weight loss pill” (Washington, 2006).
It seems like at the end of the day, when it comes to medical researches, the researchers do not care if they are not being ethical, if they do not have consent or even if they are not telling the truth. As long as they get the experiment going and receive results then to them it is all okay.
It seems like at the end of the day, when it comes to medical researches, the researchers do not care if they are not being ethical, if they do not have consent or even if they are not telling the truth. As long as they get the experiment going and receive results then to them it is all okay.