A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION FROM THE CHRISTIAN AND ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVES

Research involving humans as subjects have been in existence throughout the years. Such research conducted with human beings as subjects has brought about advancements in the knowledge of medicine (treatment of deadly diseases and all manner of psychological ailment as well as an overall understanding of the human anatomy). However, due to the nature of some horrifying experimentation such as those conducted by German Nazi, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and the Guatemala Syphilis experiments, ethicists are of the view that these experiments abuse the utilitarian motive of satisfying the greatest good. All these opinions have shaped people’s views on the ethics of research resulting in ethical guidelines such as the Declaration of Helsinki and the Nuremberg Code to serve as a guide when researches are conducted on human beings. This paper is purposed to highlight the views of both the Christian and Islamic religions on the subject of human experimentation so as to enable individuals to understand the bioethical views shared on this biological technology.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study of 1932–1973 and the Rise of Bioethics as Shown Through Government Documents and Actions

One government source regarding clinical trials is Clinicaltrials.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov), which is available to health information seekers as a resource to find information about past, current, and recruiting clinical trials. Currently, if you participate in a clinical trial you are required to provide your “informed consent.” This means you have been informed of the risks, benefits, purpose of the study, and your rights. This information is provided to you so that you, as the potential participant, can make an informed decision before deciding whether or not to participate. If you work with or in research, you will become very familiar with the term IRB, which stands for “Institutional Review Board.” An IRB is a panel intended to oversee the entire scope of one or more medical research studies including protecting the rights and welfare of human research subjects. Although it may seem like common sense that these two things are necessary, there was a time when they did not exist. A new approach to bioethics and the regulation of clinical trials and medical studies using living human subjects came about from public and governmental outrage over one study, known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. By looking specifically at this case, which led to the rise of bioethics at the federal-government level in the 1970s, the origin of IRBs and informed consent as they relate to medical studies and human subjects will be illuminated. The issues of IRBs, informed consent, and bioethics are important in the library and information science community because we often interact with a public that is impacted by the policies and regulations related to these issues. In addition, we are the very researchers, or hold relationships with researchers, that are held to the strict standards set in place by IRBs and bioethics in general.

Justice and the Living Human Web

This chapter focuses on justice. Part one begins with a discussion of how justice is articulated in Principles of Biomedical Ethics. This is followed by two classic cases concerning justice: the Seattle Dialysis Committee and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The former deals primarily with clinical ethics, and the latter with research ethics. Together they illustrate how justice is often understood in bioethics. Part two focuses on Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s pastoral image of the living human web. The essential features of this image include the following claims: (i) human suffering needs to be understood in context; (ii) psychology, while valuable and necessary, cannot by itself make sense of the whole of individual human experience; and (iii) other perspectives and disciplines, therefore, are needed, such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and more. Part three correlates justice and the living human web.

Patient Preferences

This chapter describes the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of race and gender preferences among middle-class Black women. First, the author presents a case study of Tammy, a focus group respondent whose great-grandfather was involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Although her case illustrates underlying assumptions of the race concordance hypothesis (that Black patients want Black providers), her story also points to the persistence of structural discrimination and limits of using race concordance as a strategy to overcome it. Second, Tammy’s case is contrasted with women who complicated the underlying assumptions of the race concordance hypothesis by emphasizing the intersection of race, gender, and other identities (e.g., disability, age, sexual orientation) on the formulation of preferences and the futility of race concordance as a strategy to mitigate the effects of a rushed, impersonal, and neo-liberal healthcare environment.