"The Hot Zone"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Richard Preston's book, "The Hot Zone," in which he recounts a story about a laboratory accident and its aftermath. The paper discusses the ethical issues that surround the laboratory incident, such as the need to inform the public. It goes on to describe possible connections that can be made to current events and the ethical dilemmas that may surround them.

From the Paper:

"Concern about ethical treatment in medical matters had been increasing for some time after the revelation of the Tuskegee experiment in which the medical establishment and the government in the 1930s had treated a group of black men in the South for syphilis, giving some a placebo rather than actual treatment and never telling the subjects what they were doing. When details of this experiment surfaced in the 1970s, many first accepted the argument that the cure was as bad as the disease. It soon became clear that this experiment actually took advantage of people who were poor, black, uneducated, and trusting. Analysts have noted how genocide is evoked by the Tuskegee experiment, and some made reference to the Nazi experiments on human subjects during World War II, which had been condemned by the civilized world at the Nuremberg Trials. Other explanations have also been cited, notably with regard to racial differences, to explain how medical personnel could be part of such a breach of ethics."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bower, R.T. & de Gasparis, P. (1978). Ethics in social research: Protecting the interests of human subjects. New York: Praeger.
• Chadwick, B.A., Bahr, H.M., & Albrecht, S.L. (1984). Social science research methods. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall.
• Preston, R. The hot zone. New York: Random House.

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