Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/22236

Browse

Filters

2009 - 200912010 - 20121

Settings

Subject: search.filters.subject.human research

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Eighty Years of Bad Blood: The Evolution of Human Research after the Tuskegee Study
    (2012) Cook, Brett D.; Jackson, Tahmika Ruth
    The year 2012 marks the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. Public Health Service’s (PHS) study on the effects of untreated syphilis in Tuskegee, AL, which lasted from 1932 to 1972. The research continued after penicillin became widely available and was known to be an effective treatment for syphilis. To justify the experiments, the PHS argued that the study was a never-to-be-repeated opportunity. Did the U.S. government continue to take advantage of never-to-be-repeated opportunities in medical research by using unethical justifications? This manuscript will explore how America’s growing understanding of human research and the rights of human subjects have mirrored the growth of regulatory law and jurisprudence since the Tuskegee Study. We will examine PHS human research experiments in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision not to prosecute members of the Japanese Army despite having received information on human experiments they conducted on World War II Prisoners of War (POWs). We recognize that numerous events have contributed to current human research practices and it would be impossible to discuss every significant topic. We submit that society’s ethical considerations regarding human research have progressed over the past eighty years. In this article we concentrate on the growing protections of the right to informed consent. We contend that constant and consistent oversight by the three branches of U.S. government is necessary to ensure human rights protection of those classes least able to protect themselves and prevent another Tuskegee Study.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Rectifying Institutional Bias in Medical Research
    (2009) Saha, Somnath
    Increasing the representation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in human research has become a national priority. Federal agencies have made inclusion of women and minorities an explicit criterion on which applications for clinical research funding are judged.1 The need for this affirmative action stems from a historical bias favoring white men. As with most other institutions in the United States, medical research no longer actively excludes women and minorities. But the history of these institutions, the way they were designed and built—predominantly by and for white men—slants them in a way that continues to limit access for other groups. Federal efforts to remedy this institutional bias have not been very successful. Data from cancer clinical trials suggest that minority representation in research has not only failed to increase but has actually declined over time.