Withholding information is thematic in the recent articles; the fact that the men of the Tuskegee experiments were DYING just tears me apart, knowing that these men were very sick and were denied help, especially when penicillin became the method of treatment, it really destroys my faith in the American government knowing it allowed things like this to occur. Sure, try to amend it by providing health care to the survivors, to their wives, children, grandchildren... you can't fix deliberately taking a man's life for the sake of charting a disease's progress. There is no undoing for that. And when Clinton formally apologized in 1997, for something that was occurring when he was a child, on behalf of the nation, as respectable as his actions were, the action was years too late. The people involved in the study were probably already dead, and they should have been the ones to apologize to the men of Alabama for not only prolonging their illness, but destroying their standing in their community. [On a side note, Clinton apologizing for the nation reminded me of people apologizing to Sharpton/Jackson when trying to address the black community.]
"Natural Laboratories" reminded me of the Sims article in which people were equated to animals rather than fellow humans, and to think that the native people of America were equated to "plants and animals" is upsetting PERIOD. The fact that hepB "vaccines" were given to children upset me as well, I thought children would be left out because they are so young, but apparently if you can't fully understand what's going on, you're a prime subject for experimentation. I question where ideas of morals and ethics went during these experiments; honestly, over 30 years of denying men infected with syphilis their rightful treatment and not once in 30 years did someone say, "Hey, this can't be right, what if I were one of these men," is so shocking. And to be doing experiments on black men, and then bring in black medical students to oversee the study? Distasteful. These studies we're covering are completely distasteful.
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I completely agree with you on the thought that the doctors and medical students did not once think or act out on the idea that those poor men were being treated like complete animals, devoid of sentient feeling. It seems like the objectivity so valued in science became the loss of morals and ethics in regard to fellow human beings. There was no empathy in dealing with these people--they were simply "plants and animals," as Smith put it.
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