Informed Consent Of The Study Of 1963

731 Words3 Pages

In the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital study of 1963, a vulnerable group of subjects, such as the chronically ill and debilitated noncancerous patients in New York were injected with live human cancer cells without their consent to understand whether the body's inability to reject cancer cells was due to cancer or debilitation. Physicians did not inform the participating patients that they would be injected with live cancer cells so as not to scare them, since it was believed that the cells would be promptly rejected anyway, by the healthy people and the cancer cells would also be rejected by the debilitated patients but at a substantially slower rate (Emanuel et al, 2008). An informed consent of the study was never taken in writing for the …show more content…

Foremost, the respect for persons that each individual should be treated with autonomy was ignored. There was a lack of respect for autonomy since there was no documented informed consent and the study used a vulnerable group of subjects. Patients were also deceived in that they were getting a skin test. The study “withhold information necessary to make a considered judgment” (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1979, p. 4). No one should consent to be a research participant without being informed of the risks and benefits of that involvement, and in this case, the risks and the benefits of the procedure were explained to the patients. “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body” (Vernon, 2020, p. …show more content…

There should have been fair procedures and outcomes in the selection of the research subjects, but here it was violated because the study used a vulnerable group of subjects. The study failed to use subjects that were appropriate to the research according to their needs and efforts but instead used chronically ill and debilitated