Write a persuasive essay in which you argue that such use of patients and medical subjects is inappropriate despite the benefits it has brought about. Make use of the text as evidence to support your argument.

Chris Bonhomme                                                                                                                 Bonhomme Pg. 1

Professor McInnis

English 101.011

9/25/2017

Human Experimentation

A) Thesis:

I. Introduction: A.

B. However benefit and risk are the two faces of the same coin.

C.

Thesis: The use of human subjects as medical experiments despite the benefits is wrong because it has unfairly targeted people of color, it goes against human morals, and it has made the public uneasy about medical doctors.

II. Main Point #1:    it has unfairly targeted people of color

A. Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. (30)

B. In fact, Dr. Sager has shown that 45% of hospitals open in 1970 had closed by 2010, and of these hospitals 60% were in neighborhoods that were predominately African American…….This reduction of hospital beds in African American communities, which generally have the greatest need for care, further compromises African Americans’ health by decreasing their access to health care…..(Yearby)

C.  researchers at Johns Hopkins University hospital unduly influenced economically disadvantaged Baltimore parents into enrolling their children into a research study to prove criminality by lying about the purpose of the study and promising them access to free health care otherwise denied by Hopkins.(Yearby)

III. Main Point # 2:  it goes against human morals

A.   He repeated this process with about a dozen other cancer patients. He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else's malignant cells. (128)

B. "You know other countries be buying her for twenty-five dollars, sometimes fifty?  Her family didn't get no money out of it." (81)

C.  “Some researchers, however, ignored the code and continued to exploit the faith of the patients. In Willowbrook Hepatitis Study (1956), children were deliberately infected with mild form of hepatitis, and consent was obtained from parents without informing about the hazards and giving the opportunity of school .”

IV. Main Point #3:  it has made the public uneasy about medical doctors

A.  They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them (50).

B.Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies. (97)

C.  Research on inmates would come under scrutiny and start being heavily regulated about fifteen years later, because they'd be considered a vulnerable population unable to give informed consent. But at the time, prisoners nationwide were being used for research of all kinds—from testing chemical warfare agents to determining how X-raying testicles affect sperm count. (129)

D.I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics [...]. " Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. (275-276)

V. Conclusion: