Several weeks ago, while researching for her new book on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th Century, Professor Susan Reverby of Wellesley College discovered in one of the files of a researcher from that case that he also led a study in Guatemala that involved forcibly infecting prisoners with STIs. In the 1930s, Tuskegee syphilis experiment began under the oversight of the government of the United States to investigate the progression of syphilis in African-Americans who had contracted the disease prior to the study. This experiment horrified the world population in the early 1970s when it was revealed not only because it was horribly racist, but because the government, in order not to interfere with the study, did all it could to disallow these African Americans treatment for their syphilis for fifty years. The revelation of this study in Guatemala in the late 1940s, though, illuminates an entirely more sinister health research system during this period. In this study, United States researchers forcibly infested Guatemalan prisoners' genitals with STIs in an attempt to study the utility of penicillin.
I argue that this study demonstrates a clear, compelling reason for as much legislation regarding human experimentation and ethics in general as possible. The study in Guatemala began less than a year after the Nuremberg trials concluded. Judging from the overtly unethical human experiments in Nazi Germany and their publication during these trials, one would think that researchers realized that this type of medical practice was wrong, but this was not so! The studies of Philip Zimbardo have also provided evidence for an overwhelming possibility for researchers to not appreciate ethical inconsistencies in their work.
The public knowledge of the Tuskegee experiment was enough to spark a revolution in experimentation ethics in the 1970s. How much change can we bring about wielding the knowledge of a historical study that was possibly ethically worse?
Sources:
http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/10/the-real-lessons-from-medicines-long-history-of-human-experiments-in-syphilis.html
http://www.hindu.com/2010/10/03/stories/2010100354070900.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XydKHo8FNl4&feature=player_embedded
3 comments:
My answer to the question that you posed at the end of post: probably not very much. Bearing in mind that the Guatemala studies were conducted before there was a set of international guidelines on the type of human experimentation research that can be done, the researchers would have been less likely to think that the . Even if the researchers have conducted the study knowing that it was wrong, it would have been difficult for them to resist the influence that caused them to continue to participate in the study. Since then, there has been research that revealed how the power structure in a prison can corrupt (Stanford Prison experiment) and how people can be influenced to obey unethical orders (Milgram experiment).
The fact that this happened in the 1940s tells us that we should not take ethical human experimentation for granted, but at the same time it doesn't tell us anything more about how we can prevent it in future that we don’t already know. The present is different from the past in a few important ways: we now know how power corrupts and influences, and thus researchers are better equipped to resist complying to unethical demands on them. Also, due to the education now given to researchers, there is more awareness on the ethics of human experimentation, so researchers are more aware of what is unethical and therefore less inclined to initiate or comply with unethical studies. Moreover, institutional ethical reviews are required for experiments done on humans, so nowadays it would be a lot harder for a hypothetical mad scientist to be able pull off something like that.
(By the way, the above deleted comment was mine. It was missing a space when I published it.)
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