Dark Angel. Fringe. The X-Files. Soul Survivor by Dean Koonz. Maximum Ride and Where The Wind Blows series by James Patterson. The God Project by John Saul. Disturbing Behavior. The Unborn. Push…
Unethical medical experimentation on children is a popular theme in fiction, usually conducted by the military, scientists, or business who are trying to create elite soldiers. It happened in real life during WWII, too.
Putting aside Nazi doctors and the occasional psychopath working on his/her own, has any group actually been accused of medical (but not psychological) experimentation on children?
Yes. It is a topic covered in The Plutonium Files. The U.S. gov’t dosed 73 disabled children with radioactive material in their oatmeal (ya, rly). They also dosed 800+ pregnant women with radioactive iron, telling them they were “prenatal vitamins.”
Also, The Monster Study, which was an experiment on 22 orphaned children in Davenport, Iowa in 1939. The study had the effect of inducing stuttering in some of the children.
Edited to add, sorry if that’s considered psychological experimentation.
I’ve read the internal reports of the initial studies done for Robitussen in children. None of them are horrific like those mentioned above, but until the eighties, not a single one mentions any sort of consent for parents; one was done in a home for ‘Negro Orphans.’ They’re terrible studies in other ways, too, like no control groups.
Has anybody done medical tests on children?
Yes, probably hundreds of thousands. Human trials are a necessary part of the FDA process for new medications.
Have any groups been accused of unethical practices during medical trials on children?
I think many groups are accused of being unethical but I don’t think it’s criminal unless people die.
But, what I think you’re really trying to ask is “have there been any ethical problems with groups who have done experiments similar to the marshmallow experiment?”
However, a law in circa 1975 killed the fun (can’t find the citation at the moment) where full disclosure had to be made to participants about the purposes and procedures of psychological experiments. Since then, all really cool experiments have been stopped.
When I was in college in the late 90s, I took a psychology class and volunteered for a few experiments. In no case were we told what the experiment was testing beforehand.
Probably the most contentious recent example concerns cochlear transplants. And not just medical experiments, but also medical practice.
Here’s the story. Some children are born deaf. Frequently to deaf parents. A cochlear transplant can, in many cases, restore normal or nearly normal hearing. If you don’t hear speech by age 1 (and preferably earlier), your auditory speech apparatus and spoken language will not develop normally. Therefore this not only had to be tested on infants (with parents’s consent) but are now routinely carried out on infants. The contention comes not only from testing on infants, but also because deaf parents often don’t want their children to have hearing. They want them to join the signing community and not participate in regular society from which they are barred.
Fetal surgery obviously had to be tested on fetuses. Again the parents gave consent and they had been tried first on animals, but it is still testing without consent. For that matter, the first in vitro fertilizations were carried out without consent.
When I did psychology at A level there were a couple. There seems to a be at least some basis for a “Little [child’s name]” pattern for the names of studies carried out on individual children. The ones I looked at were “Little Albert” (using loud noise to condition a phobia; it worked) and “Little Hans” (working out why a child had a phobia of horses, which wasn’t really unethical, although you could make arguments for the psychological effects of being exposed to Sigmond himself ;)).
A recent scandal (still being played out) involves research done by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in Britain in the '90s, in which children were recruited into a study on an alleged connection between the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine and autism, without the necessary ethics committee approval, and subjected to invasive medical procedures to “prove” a link.
It turned out that Wakefield got a huge sum of money from trial lawyers hoping to sue the MMR vaccine manufacturers, and didn’t reveal this conflict of interest to the journal Lancet which published his article (and which led to many British parents avoiding the vaccine and an upsurge in measles cases and deaths in the country). It’s also come out that Wakefield had an additional conflict of interest in that he was trying to patent another vaccine he claimed would be safer, and that he used faulty scientific techniques and may even have falsified data to reach his conclusions.
The original children in the study were victims; far greater numbers of children became ill or died of preventable infectious disease following Wakefield’s actions.
In psychological studies at least, certain rights of the subject can be ignored (they are ethical guidelines, not rules or laws) if the ethics committee approves.
As for the case of a foetus, it isn’t considered a person until a certain point, and in any case a parent or legal guardian typically has right of attorney over their charge.
Ummm correction…It’s a cochlear implant,NOT a cochlear transplant. It also does not "restore normal or nearly normal hearing, in pediatric cases, except in cases where the child is postlingal.
Rather in the best case scenerio the child has “hard of hearing” level hearing. It’s also not the way hearing people hear by a mile.
And the Deaf attitude towards CIs is changing slowly but surely…More and more Deafies are realizing that their kids will get the best of both worlds.
When I was in college in the late 90s, I took a psychology class and volunteered for a few experiments. In no case were we told what the experiment was testing beforehand.[/QUOTE.
Sometimes it is essential for the study to deceive/misinform people at first, then the debriefing is done afterwards. Deceiving people in order to get them to participate in research is always unethical.
Has anybody done medical tests on children?
Yes, probably hundreds of thousands. Human trials are a necessary part of the FDA process for new medications.
It’s called ‘reckless endangerment’ and ‘depraved indifference to human life’. Both crimes.
But, what I think you’re really trying to ask is “have there been any ethical problems with groups who have done experiments similar to the marshmallow experiment?”
However, a law in circa 1975 killed the fun (can’t find the citation at the moment) where full disclosure had to be made to participants about the purposes and procedures of psychological experiments. Since then, all really cool experiments have been stopped.
Wow, 1920?? In a 1968 psych text book I had the Little Albert case was mentioned in a side bar. It said that he never got deconditioned then ended with a joking comment that he should be about undergraduate age now, so “If you have a classmate named Al who’s afraid of girls in angora sweaters, have him get in touch with Johns Hopkins. They’d like to talk to him.”
