Human Testing Persuasive Essay

In the aftermath of World War II, countless cases of Nazi war crimes were exposed and confronted by the Allied powers. In particular, the astounding death toll as a result of human experimentation was put under special scrutiny. During the famed Nuremberg trials in 1946, the American judges conducted a separate proceeding, referred to as the “Doctor’s Trial,” in which 23 German physicians and administrators were tried under accusations of the murder and torture of multitudinous concentration camp inmates. These proceedings invoked many questions in regards to rightly handling human experimentation, and they were answered with the resulting Nuremberg code, which provided several guidelines for acceptable and ethical human experimentation. However,

For instance, this was how the smallpox vaccine came to be. Had this method backfired, the doctor who performed this experiment could have very well been responsible for the death of his patient (who was, in fact, an eight-year-old child). By today’s standards, this would unquestionably be an unethical, and maybe even morbid, approach. However, you could also consider how effective that tactic actually turned out to be. If this man never did this unthinkable test, smallpox might have been terrorizing families for much longer than it did. That being the case, what if doctors performed this method of experimentation, but just replaced a couple of its facets? Instead of searching for a smallpox cure, doctors could be continuing their search for a cancer cure. Instead of intentionally infecting innocent children, doctors could do so on a more likely and logical test subject choice. A subject choice like prisoners serving life sentences without parole would be ideal. Without anywhere to go, and with many seeking a redemption of some kind, convicts would be enlightened of what good they would be doing by furthering research and bringing about a cure much