THESE PHOTOGRAPHS REMINDS US THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICS IN CLINICAL TRIALS

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Some of the children born with the flipper-like limbs. Remarkably, many of the children involved have gone on to lead successful and fulfilling lives.Thalidomide was marketed as a morning sickness medication for pregnant women. The women eventually gave birth to babies without arms and legs. More than 20,000 babies were born with deformities because of the drug.

Louise Medus is one of over 400 victims of the thalidomide tragedy. Louise’s mother took the prescribed drug after just 21 days of pregnancy and gave birth to Louise with no arms or legs. Thalidomide was originally used as a sleeping pill but was then it was made legal for doctors to prescribe it to pregnant women as a drug for morning sickness.

The "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" was designed to investigate the long-term side effects of untreated syphilis. It followed a group of 600 poor African-American men in Alabama, 399 who had syphilis and the rest who did not, for over 40 years. In the course of the study, scientists actively denied treatment to these men, which had devastating effects on the health of not only the men but their families.

For almost 30 years after penicillin became the accepted treatment for syphilis in 1945, the men in the Tuskegee study were actively denied treatment by not only the study doctors, but by physicians in their own communities who had been requested to withhold treatment from the study participants so that scientists could continue to follow the course of the disease.

One of the results of the Tuskegee incident is that many African Americans are now understandably reluctant to participate in research studies, and there is still a great deal of lingering mistrust of the scientific and medical communities.