Experimental Altruism: Guess Who Gets to Be the Guinea Pig?
Apparently, some lessons are simply too inconvenient to learn. The notion that vulnerable populations, particularly those in former colonies with nascent healthcare infrastructure, make ideal subjects for medical trials has a storied, if ignominious, past. FIRST INSTANCE: The Legacy of Exploitation Perhaps one of the most egregious examples, though far from the first, is the Tuskegee Syphilis
Study (1932-1972) in the United States. For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service deliberately withheld treatment from hundreds of African American men diagnosed with syphilis, merely to observe the natural progression of the disease. The subjects were impoverished, illiterate sharecroppers, essentially operating under duress and misinformation – a chilling precedent for what constitutes
'informed consent' in resource-poor settings. REPETITIONS: A Global Pattern Emerges The playbook, it seems, travels well. In 1996, Pfizer conducted a clinical trial of an experimental anti-meningitis drug, Trovan , on children in Kano, Nigeria, during an epidemic. Critics, and later a Nigerian government commission, alleged that the drug was administered without proper informed consent from
parents, leading to deaths and disabilities. Pfizer was eventually sued, settling out of court for millions. Curiously, the ethical standards applied in a US lab rarely seem to make the transatlantic journey unscathed. Then there's the Guatemala syphilis experiments (1946-1948), revealed in 2010. U.S. government doctors intentionally infected hundreds of Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, psychiatric