Barbara Seaman, an author, and patients’ rights advocate who was one of the first people to bring women’s reproductive health to wide public attention. She was an energizing influence on hundreds of younger writers and organizers for nearly half a century. Barbara Seaman persistently challenged the medical establishment and pharmaceutical…
Richard Smith, MD. Former Editor British Medical Journal (BMJ), a founder member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, a trustee of the UK Research Integrity Office. Dr. Smith is a fervent critic of current research and publication practices. In a provocative recent article in Times Higher Education (2015) he states,…
Thomas Szasz, MD, “Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field” — He trained at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis; served in the military at the US naval hospital, Bethesda; but “felt viscerally upset” by “the dehumanized language of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.” His 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness questioned…
John W. Thompson, MD “must be counted among the saints of his century and of medicine, a person who could confront horrors that others ignored and devote his life to rectifying them.” (Paul Weindling. John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust, 2010) Dr. Thompson was a deeply…
“No name in contemporary English medicine is greeted with such polarized reactions as that of Dr. Andrew Wakefield” *read: L’affaire Wakefield: Shades of Dreyfus & BMJ’s Descent into Tabloid Science Andrew Wakefield, MD, an academic gastroenterologist, trained at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, the fourth generation of his family to do…
1967-1968: Grünenthal executives were put on trial in Aachen, Germany The indictment charged the company with intent to commit bodily harm and involuntary manslaughter. The central defendant was Dr. Heinrich Mückter, an indicted Nazi war criminal, who was the company’s chief scientist and head of research. Mückter was credited with…
“How Men Who Blighted Lives of thousands Evaded Justice.” The post-WWII horror story of thalidomide begins in the picture-book town of Stolberg, near Aachen, in western Germany, with the establishment of Chemie Grünenthal, a Wirtz family-owned pharmaceutical company. After WWII, Nazi scientists stared down their pasts and searched for career opportunities;…
2010: U.S. Inspector General report: 78% of human subjects in clinical trials lived outside the U.S. The Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services report found that 78% of human subjects in drug trials lived outside the U.S where safeguards and inspections are rare; 13,000 Peruvians were…
Part 3 of 4. Though bioethicists self-consciously avoid using the term — because of its inextricable link to Nazi ideology. . . .
Part 2 of 4. The Medical Research Enterprise: a confluence of self-interest groups: government officials, academic researchers. . . .
“The OHRP and SUPPORT — Another View” by a group of 45 physicians, ethicists, and scholars in allied fields who have stepped up to the plate to express their support for OHRP’s determination. . . .
“In real ethics, there are some things that must never be done. Bioethics is . . . enticed onward by the question, Why not?. . .
