Human Experimentation

The Tuskegee study and the experiments done on Native American communities were appalling, and I found that I was pretty much horrified that such things had even occurred. It was surprising to see how casually these experiments were done on minority, underpriveledged and forgotten communities as though they were animals. I think the Smith article about the Native communities summarized the issue when it said that the Natives were seen as "rapable, deserving of destruction and mutilation." Using these people as experiments and objects, a means to an end seems to take away their humanity and devalue them at the same time. The black men were not informed of their diagonoses and the Natives were tested through deception. Undercurrents of racism and greed also ran through what I determined to be the intent behind these experimentations in that, again, a blind eye was turned toward the senselessness of these acts. It's ironic to see that people are being hurt in order to heal others. As a pre-med student, I can't imagine that a doctor would even consider taking such routes, no matter what the "benefits" are.