Ethics is defined as a system of moral principles. It has played a vital role in human research and the healthcare system for many decades, helping to guide moral decisions and ensuring that no harm or suffering results from human research. Informed consent falls within the field of bioethics and is an important part of medicine today. However, many cases of research on human and biological samples in the past have posed major ethical and consensus issues that have impacted the medical community. In this review, the focus is on Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells, World War II experiments, and the Tuskegee syphilis study. This review will examine the websites that addressed issues of consent and ethics in each case and outline the expected paths each should have taken to make the experiments ethical. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayHenrietta Lacks was a 30-year-old African-American woman who was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer after having her 5th child at Johns Hopkins in 1951. Tissue samples were taken and given to a researcher who used her cells to try to grow human cells outside the human body. This was common practice at the time and was not unethical as Henrietta had signed a form stating that she consented to whatever would be done to her and her cells. However, this was not informed consent. The cells then created an immortal lineage of what are now called HeLa cells and helped create vaccines and better understand diseases and viruses. Informed consent is a process that allows patients to make a voluntary “informed” decision to participate in human research, by understanding the purpose, procedure, risks, benefits, and alternatives to the research they may participate in. be involved. This type of consent is based on ethical principles. In the United States, federal regulations state that a human subject is a living individual who has provided data to an investigator during an interaction with the individual or in the form of identifiable private information. Therefore, when an investigator interacts with an individual and collects biological samples specifically for research, informed consent is required as this would be research involving human beings. However, if a researcher uses biological samples that have already been collected for other purposes and the sample comes from an anonymous person, it is no longer human research, which means that no informed consent is required. Therefore, in order not to violate consent laws, the HeLa cells would have had to be labeled with an unidentifiable code by a scientific researcher, so that the study would be classified as not human research. The mistake was that the researcher knew who the cells belonged to and named them HeLa cells, derived from the patient's full name. Henrietta Lacks was also not asked for her consent and her family did not know what happened to her cells. This was still a common practice in the 1950s and it is still a practice today. However, there are now more standards in place for obtaining consent. In Rebecca Skloot's book, she writes that lack of understanding can be more important than outright consent. “If you speak another language and youneed to see a doctor, a translator will be provided for you – but if it's the science you don't understand, there's no one to translate for you, so you simply leave without knowing. what was said. I think there should be scientific translators, trained to communicate complex medical topics in a simple and easy to digest way. This would have made a huge difference to Henrietta's family. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” – Rebecca Skloot 2010. Privacy was also a major issue. Dr. Gey (the researcher) used parts of Lack's name to name the samples, without his permission. There should be some anonymity and protection for Henrietta Lacks and other patients like her. As Henrietta's story becomes more widely known, information about her and her family's medical history becomes more and more publicly known. There is also no known owner of HeLa cells and John Hopkins never patented the cells. Due to the questionable ethics of the use of her cells, she is not called the "Mother of Modern Medicine", but is considered a powerful symbol of informed consent. The ethical misconduct that occurred in Nazi concentration camps during World War II is a great example of ethical and consensual issues. Nazi Germany believed that the dominant race was the Aryan race and introduced ethnic cleansing practices to somewhat "purify" the population. They often sterilized non-Aryan individuals to prevent the spread of "impure" races through x-ray radiation of the testicles and ovaries. This method later proved ineffective. Dr. Mengele was one of approximately 200 Nazi doctors who experimented on all types of non-Aryan races in extremely harmful and crippling ways. The experiments were conducted for many reasons, the three main ones being military research (finding ways to advance the Nazi army through medical means, such as high altitude and cold experiments), miscellaneous experiments ( experiments that did not involve any scientific research, such as poison and injury experiments). ) and experiences of a racist nature. It is estimated that approximately 70 medical research programs in Nazi concentration camps linked to the German medical establishment used human subjects in the camps to test pharmaceutical drugs intended to combat infectious diseases and gas poisoning. Although it was a horrific event that violated many ethical morals, one of the most important codes that arose from it to promote ethical and informed consent, the Nuremberg Code. The American Medical Association's code of ethics did not address research on humans until 1946 and 1947 (the Nuremberg Code). Before World War II, there were no explicit written codes on human research ethics, but there were standards for what could be done in the context of human research. Under unwritten, but real, ethical standards, before World War II, research on humans was only done after animal experimentation and it was acceptable for a researcher to experiment on themselves or their family before to move on to other researchers. Regarding standards regarding consent, if the research were related to the possibility of harm, it would require consent, but would not otherwise be required for non-invasive research. Some people are also not considered capable of consent, for example young children and patients in mental asylums. Paid topics.