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Has AIDS Changed the Ethics of Human Subjects Research?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Carol Levine
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Extract

Jay Katz has been a pioneer in exploring the ethics of human subjects research. We are all the more grateful because he has given us a map of the landmarks along the path of what he has called his personal odyssey. That intellectual journey, from the horrors of Auschwitz to the callous disregard of human rights in the Tuskegee syphilis study, can serve as a guide to us today as we attempt to measure and direct the impact of AIDS on the ethics and regulation of research.

Professor Katz's account of his odyssey begins with the sources of his concern. At Yale Law School in 1966, with his colleague Richard Donnelly, he began teaching what was probably the first semester-long seminar on human experimentation. In preparation he read for the first time the trial transcripts of the Nuremberg proccedings against the Nazi physicians. I had lost most of my cousins, aunts, and uncles in the Holocaust, he writes. How many of them, I wondered, had been condemned to participation in these experiments?

Type
Autonomy and Risk-Taking
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 16 , Issue 3-4 , Winter 1988 , pp. 167 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1988

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References

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