Should Prisoners Be Used in Medical Experiments?
From the same type of thinking that brought you torture stories in "Prison of the Mind: Prisoners could serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours", now comes the press for medical experimentation on prisoners in jails.
Never mind that justice systems can be flawed and countless innocent people are incarcerated annually due to mishandling of cases, faulty and biased science, police corruption, and political state oppression. A biomedical ethicist at the University of Birmingham in England now suggests that doing medical experiments on prisoners doesn’t have to be exploitative or damaging, even though history can demonstrate a long and tragic list of exactly that happening time and time again.At least the ethicist seems to be announcing intentions first before doing experiments, which is more than Facebook can say about their own prisoners.
More from Scientific American...
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Should Prisoners Be Used in Medical Experiments?
By Dina Fine Maron | Scientific American
History is rife with unethical experiments on inmates. But with proper safeguards prisoner studies may hold the key to the accurate representation of vulnerable groups and lead to health benefits
The year was 1946, and under the guise of public health hundreds of Guatemalan prison inmates were deliberately infected with syphilis. Male prisoners were sometimes infected via direct injection—including right to the penis. Still other prisoners got sick after visits from prostitutes who were often also purposely infected. None of the research subjects were asked for their consent.
Some six decades later Pres. Barack Obama called Álvaro Colom, Guatemala’s president, to personally apologize for the abhorrent U.S. government–led research. But that case is just one of many egregious prisoner experiments that have occurred throughout history. Until the early 1970s most pharmaceutical research was conducted on prisoners—everything from studying chemical warfare agents to testing dandruff treatments.
In the years since, firm protections have been erected for prison populations in medical research, predicated on the idea that even when prisoners volunteer for inclusion in clinical trials, coercion might still be playing a role. As a result, the U.S. and other countries have implemented such tight controls on prison population participation that inmates are often left out of research entirely.
Such routine exclusion may harm both prisoners and the public good, argues Heather Draper, a biomedical ethicist at the University of Birmingham in England. “Exploitation need not be inevitable,” she wrote in a study published June 23 in the Journal of Medical Ethics. She calls for a reexamination of current guidance on the matter in the U.K. and other countries.
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Participating in research “can be regarded as a public good,” and prisoners should be afforded the opportunity to contribute to this good if they want to, Draper wrote. Moreover, for the prisoner, “participation in clinical research may benefit participants directly by affording them access to cutting-edge interventions that are otherwise unavailable” or the “only meaningful opportunity for treatment.”
Safeguards against coercion
But the paper does not offer concrete proposals for how concerns about coercion could be overcome. “We do accept that additional safeguards may be necessary; but researchers have managed to strike a balance between inclusion and protection in the case of other potentially vulnerable participants,” Draper says.
Read the full article at: scientificamerican.com
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