...The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Some Ethical Reflections 75 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Some Ethical Reflections Adebayo A. Ogungbure Department of Philosophy University of Ibadan, Nigeria philosopher.bayo@yahoo.com Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya (PAK) New Series, Vol.3 No.2, December 2011, pp.75-92 thoughtandpractice@gmail.com http://ajol.info/index.php/tp/index Abstract There are established ethical principles to protect human participants in biomedical research from undue exploitation by researchers. However, in the “Tuskegee Study” in the US, these principles were grossly violated. The task of this paper is to critically examine the ethical implications of that study on future practices in biomedical research, and to suggest ways of ensuring that such practices comply with appropriate ethical values. Key Words Bioethics, Biomedical research, clinical research, Tuskegee Study, paternalism, morality Introduction From time to time human beings experience health challenges, whether physical or mental. On its part, medical practice has made considerable progress towards combating or controlling many of these challenges. It is through research that the nature, symptoms and effects of ailments can be ascertained and remedies discovered. Medical researchers engage in both therapeutic and non-therapeutic research. Therapeutic research is that carried out with the purpose of treating disease. On the other hand, non-therapeutic...
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...The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Some Ethical Reflections 75 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Some Ethical Reflections Adebayo A. Ogungbure Department of Philosophy University of Ibadan, Nigeria philosopher.bayo@yahoo.com Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya (PAK) New Series, Vol.3 No.2, December 2011, pp.75-92 thoughtandpractice@gmail.com http://ajol.info/index.php/tp/index Abstract There are established ethical principles to protect human participants in biomedical research from undue exploitation by researchers. However, in the “Tuskegee Study” in the US, these principles were grossly violated. The task of this paper is to critically examine the ethical implications of that study on future practices in biomedical research, and to suggest ways of ensuring that such practices comply with appropriate ethical values. Key Words Bioethics, Biomedical research, clinical research, Tuskegee Study, paternalism, morality Introduction From time to time human beings experience health challenges, whether physical or mental. On its part, medical practice has made considerable progress towards combating or controlling many of these challenges. It is through research that the nature, symptoms and effects of ailments can be ascertained and remedies discovered. Medical researchers engage in both therapeutic and non-therapeutic research. Therapeutic research is that carried out with the purpose of treating disease. On the other hand...
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...From time to time human beings experience health challenges, whether physical or mental. On its part, medical practice has made considerable progress towards combating or controlling many of these challenges. It is through research that the nature, symptoms and effects of ailments can be ascertained and remedies discovered. Medical researchers engage in both therapeutic and non-therapeutic research. Therapeutic research is that carried out with the purpose of treating disease. On the other hand, non-therapeutic research is aimed at 76 Adebayo A. Ogungbure furthering the frontiers of knowledge about human health. Furthermore, researchers and physicians often use human beings as objects of scientific investigation, raising certain ethical concerns, including the issue of informed consent and how consent is obtained, selection of participants in research, the welfare of human subjects involved in a research project, what the goals of research ought to be, and what ought to constitute proper procedure for an ethical research. These issues are central to an aspect of applied ethics which is now commonly referred to as research ethics. The aim of research ethics is to ensure that research projects involving human subjects are carried out without causing harm to the subjects involved. In addition, it provides a sort of regulatory framework which ensures that human participants in research are not exploited either physically or psychologically. The need for ethical guidelines...
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...Elizabeth Reynolds Writing 5 Essay One Assignment: The Tuskegee Study Free at Last: the Center for Disease Control Ends and Ethical Research Practices Begin During the forty year Tuskegee Study, the government overstepped its duties and infringed on innocent African American lives. Researchers in Macon County, Alabama started this study in 1932 in order to examine the effects of untreated syphilis in African American men. The study began with 399 subjects with the disease and 201 without it; by the time the research was halted in 1972, over one hundred of the men had died (Jones 2). One government organization involved in this experimentation acted particularly irrationally: the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC knew exactly what was going on with the Tuskegee Experiment and understood that the subjects were being denied treatment. However, the CDC never questioned the morality of their experiment. Furthermore, the director at the time, Dr. David Sencer, was an advocate for continuing the research. Even when Dr. Irwin J. Schatz, staff member of the Henry Ford Hospital, first sent his letter to the CDC objecting to the Tuskegee study in 1964, Dr. Sencer allowed the CDC to set the letter aside and pretend it did not exist. When another opponent of the study, Peter Buxton, started his 1965 investigation of the study, Sencer’s first concern was not that the CDC was acting unethically, but that the CDC would get bad press (Jones 190). Clearly the CDC was not actually...
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...Human trial experiments had existed for a very long time. Informed consent should be made mandatory in this type of experiment to prevent innocent people suffering from injustice such as injury and death. This is because every human being has a right to their own body. Every injury or death cause by other people can cause commotion and indirectly lead to war. Informed consent was already mentioned by Claude Bernard in 20th century. He mentioned that the experiment involving human should never be carried out if it has harmful effects even though the benefits are large. Informed consent is a process whereby the patients, clients and research participants are all fully aware of every detail in a process including the potential benefits and risks. Consent must be given voluntarily for valid informed consent. Nazi’s experiment was the example of experiment that did not apply this concept. During World War II, Nazi’s doctors carried out abundance of cruel human experiments under force including freezing, twin, poison, artificial insemination and many more. In one twin experiment, Dr. Josef Mengele ripped out a baby directly from its mother’s womb and left the baby in an oven. From my points of view, there was no control over the Nazi’s experiment as there was no authority which stood up to prove that their action was wrong. Nazis felt that their action was legally correct as they carried out this experiment under the pressure of military needs. I think it also because of the victims...
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...Ethics Analysis Topics: The Tuskegee experiments. There are numerous ethical guidelines in Biomedical Research on human subjects. The increasing research in developing countries and the international guidelines released by the developed countries in 2002 had its focus on the observation of ethical norms for the protection of research subjects (Indian Council of Medical Research 9). The year 1932 was when the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) started its Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Biber 83). This study involved the inspection of untreated latent syphilis cases in human subjects and tried to find out the natural course of the disease. The sample for this study consisted of three hundred and ninety nine black males from Tuskegee, Alabama with late-stage syphilis and two hundred and one non-infected males. Along the years research has been undertaken without the consent of the subjects. The Weber State University website indicates their involvement in the formulation of research guidelines under the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Under the Public Health Service Act there is a regulation to protect human subjects of research and implement a guidance instruction on ethical issues. Three basic principles of ethics were formulated to protect human subjects in biomedical and behavioral research. One of the principle advocates for respect for persons which involves recognition of personal dignity. The second principle aims at ensuring that subjects are protected...
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...ID: 4276982 Log Out Help Search Search Knowledge Base Main Menu My Profiles CE Credit Status My Reports Support Main Menu › Quiz Results Defining Research with Human Subjects - SBE Quiz Results - Defining Research with Human Subjects - SBE You correctly answered 4 of 5 and received 4 of 5 possible points. Scroll down to review the quiz questions and the explanation of the answers. Question 1 Question : Which of the following studies is linked most directly to the establishment of the National Research Act in 1974 and ultimately to the Belmont Report and Federal regulations for human subject protection? Your answer : The Public Health Service Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Correct Answer : The Public Health Service Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Comment : Points Earned : 1 Question 2 Question : The Belmont principle of beneficence requires that: Your answer : Risks are managed so that they are no more than minimal. Correct Answer : Potential benefits justify the risks of harm. Comment : Points Earned : 0 Question 3 Question : Humphreys collecting data for the Tearoom Trade study under the pretense that he was a lookout is an example of a violation of the principle of: Your answer : Respect for persons. Correct Answer : Respect for persons. Comment : Humphreys collecting data for the Tearoom Trade study while posing as a lookout is an example of a violation of the principle of respect for persons...
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... 1 Introduction The United States has been known for its role in different research. The era of the 1960’s proved to bring some interesting practices in society. It was a time that curiosity found its way into science, psychotherapy, and experimental social pleasure. The 1960’s the United States saw the government; specifically the CIA conduct experiments on the hallucinogenic drug, LSD. They used a host of individuals from the military to the mentally ill. In an effort to justify the experiments they relied on earlier research and the potential for military warfare. Researchers did not inform participates of the fact that they were taking LSD. To add to the lack of honesty and integrity they were not aware it would expose their gametes to possible damage. Researchers also used information of participates data forms to track individuals thought to be dissident during a period of wars. After all the experiments and chances taken by research subjects; they compromised lives and future generation and made LSD illegal in the latter 1960’s. Final Assessment 2 1. To what extent did the government have an obligation to inform the research subjects of possible genetic damage to their future offspring? The United States Government is as any other...
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...When asked if Institutional Review Boards are necessary, or at least beneficial, for research teams to work with, most people will readily say yes. “For ethical standards” is the mantra for this, as indeed, there have been instances in the government research sector itself when projects, funded by federal money, violated the very principles that the nation was founded upon. Most notable of these is the Tuskegee Experiment. When the Washington Evening Star newspaper made public the existence of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in which dozens of black men were allowed to die without treatment, nearly everyone decried that there should have been an impartial board of people to oversee the experiment and, if necessary, terminate the project. Such is a prime example of how the existence of Institutional Review Boards would have helped ensure that experiments and studies seek to preserve the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and not undermine them. That being said, one can likewise understand how the presence of Institutional Review Boards can hinder and delay the research process. There is a pernicious enemy: bureaucratic red tape. Having to go through channels and procedures can hold up research and delay the oft-times crucial publication of results, or sometimes even muzzle it completely, as in the case of one researcher who was barred from using her own research despite it being privately funded. Instances like these raise some questions concerning the role of...
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...com/article/2012/5/21/harvard-lsd-project-leary/ ). Human experimentation's dark history began when the line between treatment and experimentation was blurred. In the early 1960s, the public began to notice the ethical neglect for test subjects by their experimenters. Those charged with administering research funding, took not of the public furor generated by the exposure of gross abuses in medical research; doctors and scientist alike began to use the data and notes gather from the Nazi experiments before and after World War II, in order to conduct these unethical experiments. People who unknowingly and willingly volunteered to participate in these experiments, were placed into unkempt conditions and unsanitary environments. The promotional and uncontrolled distribution of thalidomide throughout America, labeled as an experimental drug; the administration of cancer cells to senile and debilitated patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital (Katz, 1972). As a result, the public was very sensitive to these experiments since the US government had imprinted the crimes committed by the Nazi doctors throughout the war into their minds. When the public became aware that their own government was capable of the same devious unethical experimentation, two fears arose; the frightening power of some political ideologies to demand that no private interest impede the accomplishment of the public good, and the acute fear...
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...results • Failing to maintain participants’ confidential information • Using participant information for unintended purposes such as selling goods or services Summarize the article you researched. Write a 750-word paper in which you address the following questions: • What unethical research behavior was involved? • Who were the injured parties? • How has the unethical behavior affected the organization, the individual, and society? • How could the unethical behavior be avoided or resolved? In the 1932 case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a 40-year project administered by the US Public Health Service in Macon County, Alabama. The study consisted of 400 men being promised free treatment for an epidemic of bad blood in their county. The treatment was withheld from the men and was never given. The study was tested on a group of African American men who were told they had bad blood and never received standard treatment for syphilis,. Syphilis is a sexual transmitted disease. It can lead to a range of painful, chronic and deadly symptoms, such as infection in the nerve-system, or cardiovascular-complications. Even-though the cure of penicillin was available the men were never informed of the research design or it's risk to them. What made this case highly unethical is that the experimenter's never received informed consent, the participants were unaware of the known dangers, Scientist denied the treatment to some patients to observe the progression of the fatal disease...
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...Bioethics- Tuskegee Syphilis Study BACKGROUND FACTS In the early 70s, the Washington Evening Star newspaper published this headline on its front page: "Syphilis Patients Died Untreated." (CDC) This headline revealed one of America's most dishonorable medical studies, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. From this very moment, the public knew the long-hidden truth about this notorious study. In 1932, the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) initiated the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Their goal was to investigate stages in advancement of syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease caused by bacterium that may cause death if untreated. (CDC) Furthermore, the study wanted to investigate how syphilis affects blacks compared to whites. They hypothesized that whites experienced more neurological complications while blacks experience more cardiovascular complications. The study used 399 poor black sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama with dormant syphilis. An additional 201 healthy, unaffected men that were part of the study served as control subjects. Many bioethical values were largely violated. The physicians conducting the study misled the men from the beginning of the experiment. They purposely told men that they had “bad blood” and that they would treat them. Instead, these men were given a placebo. Physicians made sure that they did not receive treatment or help from anyone else. The reward for this “therapy” was free meals, free medical examinations and free burial insurance...
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...information concerning the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, there is a small assortment of books to choose from. I chose The Tuskegee Syphilis Study by Fred Gray because he was the lawyer in the lawsuits against the government, and I thought that he would be able to provide the most in-depth analysis of the event because he was actually involved in it. It was also written fairly recently, so that enables the book to analyze the long term effects that it has had on African-Americans, the South, and history in general. Gray’s book provides a very informative study, but if you’re looking for more information, check out James Jones’ Bad Blood. Gray takes a lot of information from this book which was written about 20 years before his. When searching the web for information on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the results were quite slim. Most of the results involved syllabi for college classes or websites much like our own that were prepared for a class. The website that I reviewed is from the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics, which was actually created from President Clinton’s apology and ideas for improvement of racial relations and medical testing. The webpage’s main purpose is to educate the public about the atrocities that were performed on African-Americans in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and to help prevent an event like this from ever happening again The Tuskegee Syphilis Study by Fred D. Gray examines a medical study that occurred in Tuskegee, Alabama which dealt...
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...Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Name University of Phoenix Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was a 40 years study from 1932 to 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama. The experiment was conducted on a group of 399 impoverished and illiterate African American sharecroppers. This disease was not; however revealed to them by the US Government. They were told they were going to receive treatment for bad blood. The study proved to be one of the most horrendous studies carried out that disregarded the basic ethical principles of conduct. It symbolized medical and disregard for human life. Standard medical treatment at the time were toxic, dangerous and, often time questionable in respect to effect. Some of the studies were being addressed to determine if a patient was better off not being treated at all. Researchers also tried to prolong any treatment to study the different stages of syphilis so they may be able to find a more suitable means of treatment. Medical ethics during this time did not have standard for informing patients. Information often withheld regarding their condition so patients often went through testing and treatment with little knowledge of consequences. By experiencing the study the participants were kept in the dark about the disease so they would co-operation. During this time these men were considered subjects, not patients. They were not considered patients, but clinical material instead of sick people. Most of the experiments...
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...research endeavor. Two marker events stand out (among many others) as symbolic of this consensus. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial following World War II brought to public view the ways German scientists had used captive human subjects as subjects in oftentimes gruesome experiments. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study involved the withholding of known effective treatment for syphilis from African-American participants who were infected. Events like these forced the reexamination of ethical standards and the gradual development of a consensus that potential human subjects needed to be protected from being used as 'guinea pigs' in scientific research. By the 1990s, the dynamics of the situation changed. Cancer patients and persons with AIDS fought publicly with the medical research establishment about the long time needed to get approval for and complete research into potential cures for fatal diseases. In many cases, it is the ethical assumptions of the previous thirty years that drive this 'go-slow' mentality. After all, we would rather risk denying treatment for a while until we achieve enough confidence in a treatment, rather than run the risk of harming innocent people (as in the Nuremberg and Tuskegee events). But now, those who were threatened with fatal illness were saying to the research establishment that they wanted to be test subjects, even under experimental conditions of considerable risk. You had several very vocal and articulate patient groups who wanted...
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