Justin Goodman,
Primate
Freedom
March 2011
A century later, one government researcher defended his involvement in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments by stating that because the people being deprived of medical treatment were poor black sharecroppers, "The men's status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical materials, not sick people." Back then, using black men and women against their will in experiments was as much a "fact of science" as slavery and racial segregation were a "fact of life." Both then and now this abhorrent cruelty and racism was indefensible.
An experimenter at the University of California-Los Angeles who addicts
monkeys to methamphetamines, kills them and dissects their brains recently
defended the practice of tormenting animals in laboratories by saying that
it was a "fact of science."
Animal experimentation is indeed a "fact" in the sense that it takes place,
but its mere existence is not a sound ethical defense, with all its
accompanying violence and death. This sort of argument implies that the way
we conduct science - and the way we treat animals - is constant,
unchangeable and not up for debate. Fortunately, this is not how science (or
society) actually works.
Other "facts of science" that history ultimately deemed atrocities include
experiments on unconsenting humans - among them, the poor, prisoners, the
developmentally disabled, Jews and blacks. J. Marion Sims, the so-called
"father of gynecology," developed life-saving treatments for difficult
pregnancies that are still in use today by conducting surgeries on the
genitalia of unanesthetized female slaves he "rented" from local owners.
A century later, one government researcher defended his involvement in the
infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments by stating that because the people
being deprived of medical treatment were poor black sharecroppers, "The
men's status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not
patients; clinical materials, not sick people." Back then, using black men
and women against their will in experiments was as much a "fact of science"
as slavery and racial segregation were a "fact of life." Both then and now
this abhorrent cruelty and racism was indefensible.
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