I have no plans to dress up as a sea turtle and bang on a drum at an anti-globalization protest. But this outrageous medical experiment that in Paul Farmer's book "Pathologies of Power" caused me to wonder how we can start to set some global standards on ethics.
The experiment took place in Africa in the 1990s. The "doctors" wanted to find out if the risk of transmission of AIDS increased with an increase in the viral load. So, they found couples where one person was infected with AIDS and the other partner was not infected. They tested both partners regularly for viral load, but never told the HIV- subjects. They also did not treat the HIV+ subjects. The predictable result of the experiment was that human beings became infected with a preventable disease. Neither the original HIV+ nor the newly HIV+ partners got treatment. The results of the research study were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It refers to the process of the other partner becoming infected as "seroconversion." That's a nice scientific word for 15-19 year old women contracting a deadly and preventable disease while helping scientists to get their data.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/342/13/921
Here's another place where I think liberals in this country are getting it wrong. Cultural relativism is not the answer to everything. The Nazis had a culture. The American doctors who performed the above mentioned experiments had a culture.
Think about it this way. In the United States, we have matters that are left up to the individual--religion, speech, etc and we have matters that are left up to the government--when it is OK to kill another human being and when it is not OK to kill. In the world community, there could be a similar division of decisions between nation states and the world community. Using people in medical experiments without their consent as to the nature of the experiment is just so wrong that it should never happen anywhere. Torture is just so wrong that it should never happen anywhere. Genocide is just so wrong that it should never happen anywhere.
OK, I promise to find something light for the next post.
2 comments:
Hi Margie. Have we discussed Paul Farmer before? I'm a big fan, but not a cult follower. I dig the blog. What about the research journals? If they refuse to publish papers that don't uphold ethical standards, unethical research will be unpublished and highly discouraged. The currency of science is research literature, and if editors uphold rigorous ethical standards it would solve a lot of our problems
Andrew
You would look cute as a sea turtle. . .and you could probably get a used drum in Berkeley.
Awww. . .wittle sea tuwtle
Post a Comment