Ethics in Research
Jaclyn Bzdusek
HSC320 – Applied Medical and Healthcare Ethics
Instructor Rick Hall
Arizona State University
August 3, 2015
Ethics in Research
From bench to bedside
Developing new treatments or studying physiological/pathophysiological processes require different methods of research. Some tests require humans and others require animals. How do we know when each one is necessary? Well, it really depends on the type of research that is being conducted. Animals are studied so that researchers can learn more about how living organisms work and how diseases affect their bodies. There are many laws in place in the U.S. to protect research animals and human subjects. At the moment there are no alternatives to conducting…show more content… In other words, they want animals to be tested with drugs and experimented on before they move on to test the human participants to protect the welfare of the humans. In order to protect the welfare of animals, they are not the initial test for medicines. Computers and test tubes are the initial screenings and tests in research studies to protect the human subjects and the animals. So I think that there are a lot of steps in the process before we get to animals and humans.
Clinical Research Ethics
Our history has plenty of examples of ethical violations in clinical research. It wasn’t until 1906 that the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed and started the road to protecting human participants in research. Before then, there were no regulations regarding the ethical usage of humans in research. There are several cases of what you could call unethical medical research studies in our history. From 1932-1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (which was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health), studied the effects of untreated syphilis in 400 African American men by withholding treatment. The subjects were not even told that they were in an experiment and most of the subjects believed that they were getting treated for “bad blood”. During World War 2, concentration camp prisoners were conducted upon by the German scientists for research. On December 9, 1946, 23 scientists and administrators were put on trial for allowing these crimes against humanity and war crimes. The