| Here is a link to the more detailed reporting on this same incident by the Sacramento Bee: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/22/4648415/2-uc-davis-neurosur... http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/22/4648465/banned-ucd-doctor-i... At Universities in New Zealand, any type of experiment involving human participants (even just talking to them) requires passing through an exceptional amount of ethics-committee red tape. The same is true in the United States. At the state university in this state, which has a very extensive medical research program, the human subjects review committee has to approve any new experimental protocol to be used on human patients. What J. Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph J. Schrot, both neurosurgeons at the University of California, Davis, reportedly did (as related in the article submitted here on HN) is completely unethical, and not at all to be tolerated. Their being barred from further medical research on human subjects, as reported in the article, is an appropriate response. (And that is basically a severe restriction on the faculty member's ability to raise grant funding.) I write this as someone who has an immediate relative whose fiancee died of the dreaded disease mentioned in the article. Finding a patient with a disease with a grave prognosis is no excuse for doing something that is dangerous on its face and unproven to be therapeutic. The rule "first do no harm" is still a basic principle of medical practice. |
It's a sad story, but experimentation is necessary to find effective treatments. If you're like many people on HN, you'll agree that terminally ill people should be able to commit suicide. If you grant that, why not let them consent to experimental treatments?