Medical Experiments on Skid Row Alcoholics Condemned
I continue to be saddened by the sheer number of medical experiments doctors performed on powerless people who did not give informed consent. Gina Kolata’s article in the New York Times October 17th about Skid Row alcoholics who agreed to biopsies of their prostates in return for free meals, a bed and cancer treatment, sickened me. But they did not surprise me.
Before federal laws and regulations were enacted in the 1970s, hundreds of medical experiments were routinely performed on people without a voice to say no, including orphans, the mentally ill, prison inmates, women and African Americans. In fact, one of the most difficult issues I faced in writing For the Good of Mankind? was trying to limit and choose which experiments to include.
In the Skid Row case, Kolata writes that many of the men who later were treated for cancer suffered serious complications such as rectal bleeding, impotence and incontinence. Doctors surgically removed testicles and gave the men large doses of estrogen, a highly risky therapy that was not the standard care.
Journalist’s like Kolata must continue to uncover these horrifying medical experiments. Let these experiments be a reminder of what should never be allowed to occur again, particularly as we navigate through the ethical issues in clinical trials, genetic therapies, the sequencing of the genome and stem cell research.
