Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Informed Consent And Medical Experimentation, George H. Martin Jr.

IUSTITIA

Certain biomedical technologies already or almost already with us "threaten to reduce the meaning of man and to degrade the human spirit in the very process of becoming technologically feasible, long before the final stage of deployment and widespread use has been reached." It is this threat that has prompted me to consider certain medical and legal problems associated broadly with the human experimentation process. I shall be examining the concept of "informed consent" to both experimental medical therapy and nontherapeutic scientific experimentation as a means of protecting man from the potential ravages of a zealous application of scientific advances …