Question

The morality of clinical research by Tannsjo, deals with human experimentation. Tannsjo relays the story of him evaluating the morality of a clinical trial being run for HIV patients. Throughout the reading he touches upon many of the founding principles of human experimentation that played a role in the conclusion he made about the clinical trial at hand.

Please post a reflection on whatever aspects of the reading your found interesting.

Answer 1

In this case, the research is debatable because of its results. Something that come to my attention was that one patient out of 500 patients was killed by a drug that it is supposed to be directed to postpone the HIV development. What is wrong with this? If we thing about it objectively, to find the cure of a disease or to make a drug that improve the chances of life needs to be studied and of course, some patients could die in this research. But is it ethic to make such research? Is it moral to defend your results establishing that someone died in your research? Should you “hide” that ”detail”? Well, we can ask a lot of question about this but the main point of this is that we as a researchers, we can not make such type of research before test the toxicity or secondary effects of the drug in an animal model. Besides, imagine that the drug did not showed any side effects on animals, you proceed to test it on humans and you found that some died because of it. It is debatable in this scenario what it moral and what is immoral but something that we have to take in consideration is that before a drug trial using humans beings, we need to be very sure that the drug wont affect the health of the patient.