Assignment 4: Trials of new drug therapies
2. A number of medical centers around the United States now
offer “finders’ fees” to physicians for referring patients to
researchers who are conducting trials of new drug therapies, the
side effects of which are not yet known.
one researcher, for example, was offering physicians a $350
payment for each referred patient who enrolled in the research
project. Many physicians accept the fees and make the referrals,
apparently without suffering pangs of conscience. Are their
actions ethical?
3. From 1940 to 1970, more than 4,000 radiation experiments were
performed on tens of thousands of Americans, many of them poor
and uneducated, without their informed consent. Examples of
alleged incidents: children in a Massachusetts orphanage were
fed radioisotopes; 829 pregnant Tennessee women were fed
radioactive iron; patients in Rochester, New York were injected
with plutonium; cancer patients in Cincinnati received heavy
doses of gamma rays. Not all of these experiments can be
attributed to researchers’ ignorance of the harmful effects of
radiation; the main purpose of the experiments was to identify
those effects rather than to cure the patients. Even so, the
researchers do not seem to have thought they were committing a
moral offense. Were they?
Assignment 4: Trials of new drug
therapies
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