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Protection of Human Subjects

In recent years there has been increasing concern in the literature regarding the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects in biomedical, behavioral, and social science research. The initial concern seems to have developed with reference to biomedical research, perhaps because potential damage to the subjects is more clear-cut. The issue was raised after World War II at the Nuremburg trials because of Nazi experimentation on human subjects. The Hippocratic Oath requires first that physicians do no harm, but there is ample evidence that medical doctors have carried out risky and at times fatal research on human subjects without their consent or even their awareness in settings more normal than the Nazi concentration camps (Katz 281-291). It was outrage at the Nazi experiments, however, experiments performed on defenseless political and war prisoners, that led to the Nuremburg trials and that made explicit for the first time in the Nuremburg Code the ethical principles for biomedical research on human beings. This code also formed the basis for the Declaration of Helsinki adopted by the World Medical Association in 1964 and the "Ethical Guidelines for Clinical Investigation" adopted by the American Medical Association in 1966 (Bower and de Gasparis, 3).

In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of ethically questionable research designs came under public scrutiny, raising the issue of ethics for all types of research. The most infamous of these studies was probably the Tuskegee Syphilis Study conducted by the U.S. Health Service. This design involved withholding treatment from a group of black males infected with syphilis for 40 years. The purpose of the research was to identify a sample of men with syphilis and to observe the consequences of untreated syphilis over time. The researchers did not infect the men with syphilis, but once the research was under way the researchers actively altered the men's lives and chance...

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Protection of Human Subjects. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:56, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681251.html