Medical Experiments on Human Beings and Human Rights

No achievement in any field is possible without an element of risk to the human life and the worst kind of threat to human life is from the medical experiments on human body itself. These experiments on human beings are often beneficial for mankind in general and individuals in particular. Improvements in medicine and surgery during the last two centuries have greatly extended the average lifetime of people and reduced the pain and disability following various injuries and diseases. Because medicine and surgery have a strong basis in scientific knowledge, it is absolutely necessary for medical progress that there be experiments on humans. Some people believe that human experimentation is necessary and desirable for the well being of human race. Therefore, society owes a great debt to the many creative physicians and surgeons who have performed ethical experiments and advanced medical technology. There is also a dark side to human experimentation: a long history of dangerous and harmful experiments performed on nonconsenting patients. Not only was informed consent not obtained, but the physician often fraudulently described the experimental procedure as either a diagnostic procedure or a treatment for the patient's condition, when the physician had no reason to believe that the patient might benefit from the experiment. History has shown that nonconsensual experiments are often performed on captive people in an institution, particularly people to whom society has regarded as "less worthy[1]." Such experiments may also present a threat to the right of personal integrity. Existing provisions of the International Law on human rights as well as of humanitarian law are instruments to protect this right against certain forms of experimentation. They leave, therefore, many questions open. This article seeks to examine the desirability and feasibility of medical experiments on human body. Keywords : Human Rights, Medical Experimentation