Medical Ethics
“The whole discipline of biomedical ethics rises from the ashes of the Holocaust…” Arthur Caplan The Nuremberg Code (1947) laid the foundation for biomedical ethics mandating that medical experiments conducted on human beings must conform to well-defined humane, ethical standards; foremost is immutable standard: “The voluntary consent of the human…
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) inaugurated the “Decade of the Brain” and sponsored Psychiatry’s Cruel and Inhumane Research Paradigm In the 1980s and 1990s increased federal funding accelerated clinical research into mental disorders. History has demonstrated that mental patients are most often exploited in experiments that disregard their safety…
1980: U.S. documents reveal criminal human experiments conducted by Japan’s Unit 731 American journalist John Powell brought to public attention the criminal human experiments conducted by Japan’s Unit 731. Citing U.S. government documents that he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Powell alleged that the U.S. government had pardoned…
1990: FDA issued a waiver from informed consent for military use of experimental drugs The FDA waiver from informed consent was to permit the DOD to use unapproved, experimental drugs and vaccines on enlisted soldiers—in violation of the foremost “absolutely essential” mandatory ethical principle defined by the Nuremberg Code. 1990:…
1993 Kathryn Hamilton died 44 days after being enrolled in Protocol 681 at the Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle Siix days later, Hamilton’s doctors submitted the journal article documenting what they had known for more than a year: The primary rescue drug didn’t work. Read “Unnformed Consent,” a monumental five-part investigative…
The Declaration of Helsinki defines ethical research: “In any medical study, every patient – including those of a control group, if any – should be assured of the best proven diagnostic and therapeutic method.” (1964; 1996) That standard for ethical research was reaffirmed by the World Medical Association in 2000:…
1998: Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill, a prize winning research expose by The Boston Globe In November, 1998, the first of a four-part series by Robert Whitaker and Dolores Kong shed light on the abusive research parameters of non-therapeutic experiments conducted on mentally incapacitated individuals. They focused on several…
1999: Experiments on the most vulnerable The research community has consistently demonstrated its disregard for individual patient-subjects’ safety. 1999: One hundred babies are test subjects of the drug, Propulsid One hundred infants were enrolled by Dr. Susan Orenstein at Children’s Hospital (Pittsburgh) in a clinical trial testing Propulsid for…
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s own scientific assessment reports (2004, 2009), Ultrafine particles (UFP) are considered more dangerous than PM2.5. EPA has determined that UFP can cause sudden death. “there is strong epidemiological evidence linking short-term (hours, days) exposure to PM2.5 with cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and morbidity.” Yet,…
Several major government-sponsored experiments conducted at major academic institutions highlight increasingly inappropriate clinical trial designs that disregard the individual survival needs of critically ill patients who cannot give or refuse consent to research. Their incapacity is exploited in experiments that increase the risk of death. 1996 – 1999: The National…
2000: Office of Protection from Research Risks (OPRR) was shifted from NIH jurisdiction to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), and was renamed Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP). OHRP posts letters of determination following investigations into ethical violations. See Government Investigations adapted from OPRR Compliance Oversight Investigations…
National Bioethics Advisory Committee Report: Ethical & Policy Issues in Research Involving Human Participants. The shift from “human subject” as defined by the Nuremberg Code to “participant” obscures the role & function of human subjects in medical experiments.
