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> October 22, 1999:
Hour Two: Secret Medical Experiments
Doctors are supposed to protect health. However, there have been cases in which doctors have put other motives ahead of the welfare of their patients. The most notorious incidents, of course, were the experiments performed on some prisoners in Nazi prison camps. But unethical medical experiments haven't, sadly, been limited to war. | In the U.S., the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is perhaps the most well-known of such experiments. Over a period of decades, poor, black men in Alabama were told that they were receiving medical treatment - when the doctors really only wanted to observe what happens to a patient infected with syphilis over time. Even after it was known that penicillin could cure the disease, the drugs were withheld from patients in the study. Several years ago, President Clinton formally apologized for the government's behavior, and agreed to pay reparations to those involved. | 
Atomic scientists used plastic dummies for
some atomic tests... but they used ill-informed
humans for some other experiments.
(DOE image.) | The Tuskegee experiment is by no means the only one, however. During the height of the Cold War, unsuspecting patients were secretly injected with radioactive elements to attempt to see how they would travel through the body. Children in an were given oatmeal laced with radioactive compounds. Prisoners in jails across the country received experimental drugs - sometimes knowingly, and sometimes not. And murky allegations about CIA-sponsored experiments involving LSD and other hallucinogens carried out on unsuspecting citizens still linger on.
On this hour of Science Friday, we'll talk about ethics in medical research, and find out about some cases in which the people wearing the white coat weren't wearing white hats.
Guests:
Jonathan Moreno
Author, " Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans"
Director
Center for Biomedical Ethics
University of Virginia
Charolttesville, Virginia
Eileen Welsome
Author, "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War"
Alberquerque, New Mexico
Books/Articles Discussed:
Related Links:
- ACHRE Report (human radiation experiments)
Testing Drugs in People--FDA Special Issue on New Drug Development
The Doctors Trial (Nuremberg)
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Online NewsHour: Tuskegee Experiment and Apology -- May 16, 1997
Office of the Special Assistant for the Gulf War Illnesses: Pyridostigmine Bromide
National Bioethics Advisory Commission
Center for Bioethics, UVA -
- This segment produced by:
Annette Heist
Web producer:
Charles Bergquist
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