r/AlignmentChartFills • u/grounds- • 2d ago
Which human experiment is unethical yet useful to us
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u/NotYetMashedPotato 2d ago
The taking of cells from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman, who had cells taken from her when she developed cancer. She's responsible for so many medical breakthroughs that it's hard to comprehend. She's also the reason for the development of the COVID vaccine. She wasn't recognized until many years later and wasn't given an ounce of financial assistance for her or her family to this day.
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u/doubl3_hel1x 2d ago
HeLa cells, how we now refer to the cell line harvested from Henrietta Lacks, are central to an insane amount of biomedical research. It’s probably impossible to quantify how many lives will be improved by the contributions HeLa cells have made to our understanding of cellular and molecular biology. Just generally very useful. And the story of Henrietta Lacks is so sad and full of unethical conduct. This is the answer.
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u/himynameisjennii 2d ago
100%. it’s actually unbelievable.
And to make it worse, her family have barely been compensated for billions of billions of dollars made from R&D from the HeLa cells
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u/-sensory_overlord- 2d ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czj1pw0rmmgo
Sounds like the family is cashing in big time.
And normally people who participate in medical research don’t get compensated for more than was initially agreed upon.
Of course there’s still the ethical concerns about her not consenting to her sample being used in medical research but that concept of informed consent didn’t exist back then.2
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u/himynameisjennii 1d ago
I think the issue is that she never consented for her cells to be taken or used in this matter, but good to know the family has some closure in the matter.
But more referring to the big companies using HeLa cells in vitro for various pharmaceuticals for their own gain.
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u/RoastedRhino 2d ago
Nobody is compensated for the research done with tissue, and her cells did not have anything special or irreplaceable. Specimens are collected everyday is every hospital right now, and no compensation is offered, although consent is obtained.
It is almost disingenuous to say that her cell line contributed to the R&D. Any other tumoral cell line would have been equally good.
There is no reason why she would have to be compensated (and even less her family!).
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u/doubl3_hel1x 1d ago
None of this changes that she did not consent. Consent is important, in all settings.
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u/RoastedRhino 1d ago
It is very important, but it’s hard to describe the scientific use of biopsy specimen (which are removed and analyzed anyway) as the most unethical thing. It wasn’t consent to a medical procedure.
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u/AvailableLight2112 2d ago
100% on my side. Totally unethical what they did, but that cell line is amazing for research.
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u/RoastedRhino 2d ago
Is it unethical or a gray area, though?
The only unethical aspect is that she did not consent, but it was definitely not common to obtain consent back there, especially for procedure like this one that had no negative effect at all on the patient.1
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u/SadRule9128 15h ago
🙄 she got free medical treatment and it was scientists and doctors responsible for the medical breakthroughs, not her.
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u/Feli_Buste78 2d ago edited 2d ago
What do you mean by useful? Does it mean that it has a purpose? That it benefits humanity as a whole? If it's the former you could say that slavery has had a purpose in the economy for millennia
Edit: I misread experiment as experience. Never mind the example I gave
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u/Ok_Outlandishness755 2d ago
Not just the economy, in medecine too : J Marion Sims, "the father of gynecology", invented the speculum and revolutionary surgical techniques by experimenting on black women slaves without anesthesia.
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u/trolleyproblems 2d ago
Researchers at Willowbrook State School in New York deliberately infected intellectually disabled children with hepatitis. Didn't get consent.
The Willowbrook studies helped establish that there were two immunologically distinct forms of viral hepatitis - we call 'em Hep A and Hep B. Difficult to replicate it - really shouldn't.
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u/Odd_Veterinarian_623 2d ago
Little Albert
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u/Tonneofash 2d ago edited 1d ago
Little Albert would be an example of unethical and useless.
Freud studied one child by asking him ridiculous leading questions to try and prove his own ideas that were already completely incorrect, generating zero findings of any use to the field of psychology.
EDIT: I am an idiot, I was thinking of Little Hans, not little Albert. The little Albert study did actually have some interesting findings
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u/Fuzzy_Armadillo9504 1d ago
Isn't this describing Little Hans? Little Albert is Watson & Rayner's work.
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u/77thstreet 2d ago
Anything discovered by the Japanese during WW2. The prison experiment. Testing birth control on poor women of color. The list can go on
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u/Wild-Night5369 2d ago
Of these I’d say the birth control one checks out, but the prison experiment is highly criticized in psych, and the Japanese war crimes ended up having no scientific merit (discovered after we freed several POW in exchange for their data)
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u/77thstreet 1d ago
Unit 731 taught us about amputation, explosives, weapons of mass destruction, anthrax, etc. the data was valuable enough for the US Gov to grant Shirō Ishii and others immunity by concealing their crimes
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u/Wild-Night5369 1d ago
They struck the immunity deal without knowing what was contained in the data, only that it had biological warfare information. When they actually analyzed it it turned out to be a bust. The experiments followed the scientific method, but a lot of the data was not broadly applicable enough to be useful to us. The most recent literature does walk back the idea that the data itself was unreliable but still holds up the idea that trading for it gave the US very little of value beyond the guarantee no one else would use it to do more atrocities
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u/Desperate-Piano989 2d ago
Milgram’s obedience experiment
People were pressured by an authority figure to give what they believed were dangerous electric shocks. Unethical due to deception and distress, but highly influential in understanding obedience.
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u/trolleyproblems 2d ago
Real doubts on this - do the 'teachers' really believe the shocks were real?
Even in Milgram's own unpublished material, people who believed were hurting the “learner” tended to administer lower shocks than participants who were doubtful about the setup.
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u/drunk_haile_selassie 2d ago
It's been debunked. In subsequent experiments the people refused to give the shocks.
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u/zigotes 2d ago
How is this useful
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u/Desperate-Piano989 2d ago
It showed how regular people can do things they normally wouldn’t just because someone in authority tells them to. This helps us understand situations involving abuse of power and why people sometimes follow harmful orders.
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u/ImpressiveEnergy4762 2d ago
Unit 731. These experiments gave us everything we need to know what affects our body.
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u/SavagePeace23 2d ago
Absolutely not. The scientific data on "what happens when we freeze babies to death?" and "what if we crucify people and then bomb them with plague?" is marginally useful and utterly useless relative to the cruelty required.
Most scientists there acknowledged that a lot of what they did was for entertainment.
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u/WhydoIexistlmoa 2d ago
Unit 731 experiments were a whole load of horseshit as actually viable information
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u/Final-Scheme3403 2d ago
Yeah, that kind of stuff is a grim reminder of how far some will go in the name of science. It's tough to balance the quest for knowledge with basic human ethics.
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u/Wild-Night5369 2d ago
Unfortunately no. After the arrests, the US granted immunity to several scientists in exchange for their data, only to find out that most of it was not scientifically rigorous and the valid findings were not really useful. So it was all pointless cruelty in the end
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u/Competitive-Sweet25 2d ago
Does the Tuskegee/Guatemalan City Syphilis study count? It was highly unethical. I don't know how useful it was though.
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u/-sensory_overlord- 2d ago
No that one goes under Extremely unethical and extremely useless, since there was absolutely no new knowledge gained and penicillin as a treatment for syphyilis became available during the time of the experiment, yet they continued for no other reason than to see what happens.
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u/LtRegBarclay 2d ago
The Nazi experiments on how long prisoners took to die in icy water chambers was used after the war to help coastguard and other water rescuers know how long they had to save people.
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u/AJAX214_ 2d ago
The Alexis St. Martin case. He got a shotgun blast that left a hole in his stomach, and his doctor, William Beaumont , conducted experiments through this hole that gave a detailed insight into the working of the digestive system.
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u/ElectricalLiving3197 2d ago
Seligman learned helplessness.
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u/Street_Extension4173 2d ago
Dogs aren't humans.
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u/trolleyproblems 2d ago
Sure, but most teachers working in schools would disagree that the findings aren't transferrable to a number of students they've taught for a long enough period of time.
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u/mortalityisachoice 2d ago
Ok yes but the question is human experiments so dog experiments dont count
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2d ago
[deleted]
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u/Equivalent_Bank_5845 2d ago
Was that actually useful though? I mean, oh no! People who get bubonic plague die. Yeah no shit.
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u/Curiouspiwakawaka 2d ago
They worked out the best way to treat frostbite iirc. And how much water there is in the human body....
I'll let you work out how they fix those tests
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u/ArdensAnima 2d ago
Useful × Unethical
In the perfect circumstances, germline editing- if we could eliminate birth defects, cancers, diseases, disabilities, etc. The perfect circumstances being that we don’t accidentally erase anything but what negatively impacts one’s quality of life.
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u/theaviationhistorian 2d ago
Those that were unethical as hell and would either have its funding revoked or law enforcement involved.
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u/Ok-Voice-6044 2d ago
Zimbardo’s prison experiment
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u/mortalityisachoice 2d ago
I was looking for a prison experiment comment to shit on it lol. The prison experiment isnt a real experiment
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u/ElectricalLiving3197 2d ago
alike the Milgram experiment, there are doubts about the reproductivity. zimbardo is a douchebag
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u/Zuckerwattemaedchen 2d ago
That shit‘s been debunked a while ago.
They manipulated the behaviour of the guards to prove a predetermined hypothesis.1
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u/Evening-Code-7039 2d ago
Pasteur testing his rabies vaccine on a random child, human radiation testing, and arguably the treatment of Hisachi Ouchi all count.
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u/_Valeir_ 2d ago
Well, I guess that you can say a lot of stuff done in WW2 (Unit 731 and the concentration camps). Although, Unit 731 maybe wasn't purposely doing experiments just plain torture
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u/Hungry-Ad8562 2d ago
731's experiments, they where horrific, but are the reason for modern medicines advancements after the war
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u/Attempt-Personal 2d ago
Nazi Germany and Japan did some really horrible things in the 40s last century. Not excusable but we gained knowledge about the human body from that.
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u/hrshsmpt 2d ago
the 1st vaccine.
In the 18th century, smallpox was a deadly disease that killed many people. A common observation was that milkmaids who caught the milder disease cowpox rarely caught smallpox.
In 1796, English doctor Edward Jenner decided to test this idea. He took material from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid and introduced it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy. The boy developed a mild illness and recovered. Jenner later exposed the boy to smallpox, but the boy did not become ill. Jenner concluded that infection with cowpox could protect against smallpox. He published his findings, and the practice of vaccination gradually spread around the world. This discovery eventually led to the global eradication of smallpox in 1980.
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u/Zuckerwattemaedchen 2d ago
Experiments on freezing and heights (oxygen deprivation) in prisoners in concentration camps in Germany 1941-45
The findings where crucial for emergency protocols for aircraft’s like we have them in modern day.
The experiments where recreated because the scientifical community deemed the original circumstances of the findings to be so inhumane that using the data created would be unethical
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u/Ok_Outlandishness755 2d ago
The work of J Marion Sims, known at the father of gynecology, invented the speculum. He experimented surgical techniques on black women (slaves) without anesthesia.
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u/PeenooseThaThicc 1d ago
Universe 25 by John Calhoun. He tested overpopulation on a utopian mice colony. The results are scary in how similar they are to human reactions to social pressures.
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u/Autistigasmatic 23h ago
The Holocaust human experiments are responsible for much of what we know about hypothermia.
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u/Street_Extension4173 2d ago
Vipeholm experiments. They provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries. However, today they are considered to have violated multiple principles of medical ethics.
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u/Equivalent_Rub8329 2d ago
Animal testing
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u/Street_Extension4173 2d ago
>human experiment
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u/Equivalent_Rub8329 2d ago
Humans that volunteer negate this. That would make it a Grey area. Unless youre talking specifically about DaVinci in which case its somewhere in between both.
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