Ethical Dilemmas In Medical Research

The horrific experiments of Dr. Mengele demonstrate the cruelty of the Nazi’s during the holocaust. Most of the world today knows of Dr. Mengele of having been the doctor of death for being responsible for killing more than 6 million Jews.

Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor stationed at Auschwitz, was called the “Angel of Death”. Many times he would be the one who was in charge of “selection”. He had the power to decide the fate of the prisoner; he had the power of life and death over them. He was in charge of the many experiments conducted at Auschwitz. The experiments he is most known for are genetic experiments, and the experimentations on twins. (Josef Mengele)

During the holocaust prisoners of concentration camps were faced with evil, torture and death every day. Some of the prisoners in these camps were selected for Nazi medical experiments. Nazi doctors performed several different human experiments on prisoners throughout the Holocaust. A specifically horrific experiment was the twin experiments. This experiment was performed by Dr. Joseph Mengele and several of his assistants in Auschwitz. He is known for performing some of the most inhumane experiments during the holocaust.

The art of medicine and curing diseases was not always approached in a scientific way. In fact, many advances occurred between 1919 to 1939, after technological advances allowed scientists to apply the scientific method to medical research. At this time, the ethics of using patients as test subjects either for new medicines or as samples for further testing were not considered. An extreme example of this was the Nazi’s using concentration camp inmates – including children – to run painful and invasive experiments. More modern examples are not so easy to identify as unethical, however. While amputating a leg to develop methods to deal with fractures and war wounds is obviously unethical, harvesting cells to develop a vaccine is not so clear cut, as the disadvantage to the patient is hard to identify. Coming from the various Nazi testing and especially the Nuremberg testing and trials, another code of ethics was developed, called the Nuremberg Code.

“I will remember that there is an art to medicine as well as a science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife and the chemist’s drug.” (Louis Lasagna). However, the doctors of the holocaust didn’t care, and used the victims as guinea pigs for the results. The medical experiments performed during the Holocaust had horrific outcomes for those experimented upon.

A 35-year-old man named Paul, who has a supportive wife and two adventurous kids, has been diagnosed with a very severe case of bone cancer for 1 year now. Since this type of cancer is so severe, chemotherapy is starting to not work as well. Paul’s oncologist unfortunately had to suggest a final option for Paul to try which was a clinical research trial. Clinical research trials are experimental studies that deem whether or not a medical drug, treatment, surgery, or device is safe and beneficial for humans to use ("National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute"). As explained in Marcia Angell’s Article, “The Ethics of Clinical Research in the Third World”, the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Health Organization (WHO) provides a guideline

Mengele. Dr. Mengele was a German officer at Auschwitz and was often referred to as the “Angel of Death” (Gutman, 2). He is known for his horribly unethical experiments performed on prisoners and immense number of bodies killed in Auschwitz. Mengele treated the majority of his patients ruthlessly, with no remorse, and as objects for his destruction. He was also known for his bad temper and was seen beating prisoners with metal poles, burning them alive, and shooting them. The only patients he treated less horrifically were twins, which he found to be enticing. Mengele would provide them with clean clothes and regular meals in order to strengthen them, and once they were healthy he would perform horrific surgeries on them (Schmittroth, 315). How Dr. Mengele treated the prisoners in Auschwitz would have an extensive influence on the difficulties they had

Many claim that doctors were only advancing science, and others claim the horrid acts that were committed were done because of the hatred towards the Jewish people. Regardless of which fact is inevitably true, both situations caused cruel and inhuman treatment to the Jews, and ultimately led to their deaths at the camps. A civilian doctor named Carl Clauberg was famous for his sterilization experiments. The procedure involved injections to the cervix to destroy the fallopian tubes, and then often the victims were gassed and left for dead (Winik 9). When the Jews arrived on transports, Nazi doctors immediately determined who would be gassed and who would go to a work camp (Winik 8). In Auschwitz, Nazi doctors presided over the murder of most of the one million victims of that camp. “Doctors consulted actively on how best to keep selections running smoothly, on how many people to permit to remain alive to fill the slave labor requirements” … “and on how to burn the enormous numbers of bodies that strained the facilities of the crematoria (Gutman 303). In the book, “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,” Yisrael Gutman offers a summary of the events that took place at Auschwitz:

"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." This is a quote by the Angel of Death himself, a man who brought medical advancements and discoveries to the Nazi society. Throughout the Holocaust there have been many experiments for the better of medicine and the disregard of its patients. These experiments had no regard to the patient's' well being and partly due to the hate of the victims but mainly due to the medical breakthroughs that brought forth. The holocaust in retrospect was very beneficial to the medical and experimental society as a whole.

Josef Mengele a German SS officer and physician during World War II, is infamous for performing malicious medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp, in contemplation of creating the perfect Aryan race. Mengele is a prominent member of the doctors responsible for the selections of innocent people who were killed within the camp’s gas chambers. Mengele aided prodigiously in the attempt to fulfill the Nazi’s “Final Solution”; their plan to exterminate the Jewish race. By looking at Dr. Josef Mengele, one can see that he was patently deranged by his malicious ways, which is important because it gives reasoning for why he aided in the deaths of many Jews during the Holocaust with no remorse or mercy.

The Nuremberg Doctor’s trial of 1946 involves human experimentation performed by the Nazi doctors. These physicians were accused of conducting torturous “experiments” with concentration camp inmates. During these studies, physicians conducted treatments that were not permitted and caused severe injuries to the participants, and in some cases, participants died as a result of this. Prisoners were left to freeze to study more on hypothermia. Later, during December 9th, 1946 to August 20th, 1947 representatives establish a Nuremberg trial to prosecuted these doctors for the atrocities that they committed and 23 out 15 were found guilty. As a result, the Nuremberg code was created to

Thousands of Jews died unethically due to experiments that they were put under by the Nazis. These experiments were extremely unethical and the information found should not be used in the medical field today. Some may argue that it should be used because although it was basically torture, the information was already found. Others could also argue that they experiments were so extreme that it is useful information to be put into the medical field. Many people believe that we should use the information found during these experiments.

The Nuremberg Doctors Trial of 1946 is the preeminent case recognizing the importance of medical ethics and human rights specifically about human research subjects. The defendants in the trials include Nazi leadership, physicians, and investigators prosecuted for conducting unethical and inhumane medical experiments on civilians and prisoners of war resulting in extreme pain, suffering, permanent injury and often death. The Nuremberg Code, borne of these trials, establishes ethical guidelines for human experimentation to ensure the rights of subjects in medical research. Herein, this writer will first identify and discuss ethical dilemmas presented in the Nuremberg case followed by three

One type of experiment that the Nazis performed on the prisoners of the concentration camps could fall into the classification of twin experiments. These experiments dealt with twins going through examination and observation. Taken for examination, the twins entered the concentration camps for “three days of what must have been psychological examination and three days of laboratory experiments” (“The Holocaust: Nazi Medical Experiments”, 1998). During these three days when the experiments took place, the doctors photographed the twins to compare features between the twins. After the twins went through examination and the process of photographing, “Mengele and his collaborators dispatched them with a single injection of chloroform to the heart,” (Tyson, 2000). Mengele conducted most of the twin experiments at the Auschwitz camp because he found twins very intriguing, so he dedicated his time to their experiments. During and after the injection, “care was taken to ensure the twins died at the same time. The

Main ethical violations in clinical research that contribute to the abuse of subjects include paternalism, informed consent, lack of ethical supervision and the avoidance of legislation in relation to the ethics of health care and research. Human rights has been widely violated throughout history as seen in multiple events. As early as the 1930’s, researchers involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, withheld information and treatment from a large group of African American men with syphilis. Following this tragic event, Nazi concentration camps were established. German scientists conducted research with the involvement of the prisoners. Disfigurement, disabilities and death were often the results of the Nazi human experimentation. During the creation of the atomic bomb, the United States government sponsored the research of the involvement of subjects being exposed to radiation without their informed consent. In addition, James Watson and Francis Crick obtained their data of x-ray