Human Experimentation – It has not been that long…
I am shocked, that people are shocked by the press releases and apologies last Friday.
Web link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html?_r=1
The problem is that gonorrhea and syphilis are hard to culture, so it made sense to make prisoners in Terre Haute, IN useful by injecting them with the disease and then see if anything worked to cure it. Fortunately the study was stopped because it was just too hard to infect the prisoners, I mean, “volunteers”. Realizing this wasn’t a good thing to do to US citizens, we headed to Guatemala to conduct syphilis research on some more prisoners, I mean, “volunteers”. Surely this was during the time of the Tuskeegee study which involved infecting or using known infected African American prisoners. The research subjects were not treated in order to better understand syphilis disease progression. (Even after treatment was available) Actually the Terre Haute and Guatemalan studies were conducted during 1944-1948. Apparently while we were over in Europe giving the Nazis a talking to; we were conducting our own human research right here in the US, with federally funded dollars. I’m not sure the general population has experienced tremendous ethical evolution over the past 60 some years. More importantly, appropriate checks and balances have been put into place. Although, interestingly, one could argue that a separate review by the peers of your institution are not exactly independent. I commonly get asked, “If I am paying your IRB for a review, won’t that generate a conflict of interest?”. Quite the opposite. You are paying for an answer, not always the one you want, just an answer. Always some room for discussion, learning and improvement…..