SACR 2900 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Life Insurance, Syphilis, Informed Consent
17 Feb 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
Researching social life
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Lecture 7
First Principle of Research Ethics: do no harm
• Appeal to the common good of humanity
o Nazi doctors experiments
▪ Tried to justify what they did as a means of justifying science
Kinds of harm
• Psychological harm
o Stress or anxiety of the experiment or afterwards
o People in the experiments were having mental breakdowns
• Physical harm
o Medical procedures
• Social
o Loss of status, loss of professional reputation, loss of job
• Stigma of individual or population
o Warrior genes?
Voluntary participation
• Participation must be voluntary
• Informed consent
o Conflicts of interest; need 2 or more interests in a particular research
o Purpose of study must be clear
o Can be done in technical language
1932 to 1972 Tuskegee syphilis study video
− 50 dollar life insurance offered
− Incentives being given in exchange for participation in the study
− Autopsy revealed severe damage to the organs
− Culture of complicity
o Reports of the project
o No questions were arranged on the study
o First article was released in 1946
o By 1937, conditions had become even more worse
