16 I History
Scientific research's unsavory past BY BINH DANG, ENGLISH, 2022 DESIGN BY LILLIE HOFFART, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 2022
Content Warning: This article discusses but condemns racism, ableism, and eugenics
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efore seeing a single patient, every doctor learns the ultimate maxim of healthcare: primum non nocere — first, do no harm. The principle of nonmaleficence is essential to medicine, and this ethical tenet grants the field a strong level of trust among the public. Despite this oath and reputation, the fields of medical and research ethics have had a history of moral wrongdoing — even though most, if not all, research organizations codify their ethical guidelines today. To understand the emphasis on bioethics today, we must look back to the most sinister parts of medical and scientific research.
Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924, barring Jewish, Arabic, East Asian, and Eastern European people from entering the country. Even more startling, state legislatures enacted forced sterilization laws, and these policies led to the sterilization of as many as 70,000 people deemed “feebleminded” by eugenicists, with that figure being composed primarily of people of color and people with mental illnesses or impairments.
One of the most infamous experiments on people of color is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that took place from 1932 to 1972. The U.S. Public Health Service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in tandem with Tuskegee University, enrolled 399 men with syphilis and 201 healthy In the 1830s and 1840s, phrenology, the study of men in the study, promising them free medical exams and skull shapes and their correlation to mental ability, treatment for “bad blood” (a general phrase that included was a popular science in the United States and syphilis, anemia, and fatigue). The subjects agreed to the was used to justify violence and supremacy over experiment; however, they had not been informed of the true Indigenous Peoples and African Americans. nature of the study: to observe the untreated progression Today, we can confidently scoff at this field as of the disease. The participants were never treated for their pseudoscience, but its very syphilis, even when penicillin became real consequences were a common treatment in 1947. As the Unfortunately, there championed in the patients went on untreated (or treated name of science with placebos), the advisory panel for are many more and physiology. the study stopped the experiment in examples of unethical 1972, and it became a reckoning for Physicians used experiments, both phrenology to informed consent in research studies conclude that Black after it was exposed to the public. in the United States people were mentally and abroad, that have inferior to white people These dark moments in scientific and therefore a separate perpetuated dangerous research are important to highlight species that didn’t deserve to and learn from, but their caveats conclusions.” be treated as human. These racist hardly make them real science. They scientists used the same justification were all done unethically, used poor to remove Native Americans from their homelands, methodologies, and had little to no scientific grounding. claiming that they were a barrier to societal progress. Phrenology is a pseudoscience, eugenics was founded on a rudimentary understanding of genetics and co-opted by Fortunately, society did progress enough in the right racists (including Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany), and way to abandon that maliciously false practice, but the Tuskegee Experiment was futile and ethically unsound. another more sinister one would take its place. One Unfortunately, there are many more examples of unethical of the most renowned medical research laboratories experiments, both in the United States and abroad, that in the world, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have perpetuated dangerous conclusions under the guise of in New York, was home to the Eugenics Records impartial science. Office from 1910 to 1939. Their scientists sought to improve the genetic quality of the United States, It’s important to realize that science can be weaponized by and they advocated for removing unfit genes people with malintent. It’s lauded as an objective practice — from society through exclusion or forced indisputable fact. However, we must recognize when some sterilization. They targeted people with practitioners don’t affirm the essential maxim of primum non physical disabilities, people with nocere and try to take advantage of the ethos of the field. As mental illness, people of color, and physicians, researchers, and people intent on making the immigrants. The researchers in world better and more knowledgeable, we must look at the these labs weren’t fringe past to be cognizant of the innately intertwined relationship ideologues either — between science and its politicization. In doing so, we can they successfully build a better, more ethical future for everyone. testified before the United States PHOTO BY SHUTTERSTOCK
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