Medical experimentation on human beings is often a necessary component in medical discovery and progress, and the medical establishment recognizes this fact as well as the many dangers that come with such experimentation. As a result, the profession has developed stringent and specific regulations and requirements for allowing such testing, including the requirement for informed consent by the subjects of such experiments. Human experiments have been conducted without such consent and without other safeguards to protect either the subjects of the research or the integrity of the research itself. The most notorious instance in this century was probably that of the medical experiments conducted on prisoners by doctors and scientists of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany during World War II. This research is recalled from time by some who feel that in spite of the way the data was acquired, the information itself might be of value to medical science, while still others find that the data is tainted scientifically as well as ethically and should not see the light of day. The issue of the ethics and validity of medical testing without consent has been raised most recently in terms of radiation experiments conducted by the U.S. government without the knowledge of the test subjects in the 1950s. These and other instances of involuntary human experimentation will be considered to see why they were conducted as they were, the results, the ethics involved, and the value or lack of value of the data so developed. Also to be considered is whether there are different degrees of taint to be attributed to these different experiments.
THE NAZI EXPERIMENTS AND THE DEATH CAMPS
A variety of medical experiments were conducted on prisoners in the death camps of the Nazis during World War II. Clearly, it is not a big step from the presumption that an entire class of people is inferior and can be exterminated to the idea that these same people ...