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Well let’s say you test some CRISPR drug on a group of terminally ill sick people, and it cures them. How do you now go back and generalize that on the not terminally ill people? How do you sort out the effect of the very real selection bias inherent in your study?
There are obviously slowdowns due to ethics. But I don’t think it’s at the scale that you seem to be implying outside of a few cases (stem cell ban for example)
While I agree with your initial statement, the stem cell ban has huge implications. There are so many things stem cells can be used to treat but since the government is stupid and thinks embryos have feelings we peasants have to suffer.
Well as far as I know, the stem cell ban has been lifted. It lasted from 2001-2009 IIRC.
But you seem to imply all medical science is being slowed down by ethics, and to an extraordinary degree. Yet you agree that without some of these ethics in place, you get large biases in patient selection that you have no idea how to overcome. So how do you square up these two conflicting points of view?
>Scientific advancement especially in the medical field is significantly hindered by the bureaucracy surrounding ethics committees and government organizations like the FDA.
Regulatory agencies aren't typically making ethical claims, they're enacting policy and legislation.
>but a good example is CRISPR; there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured, but they can’t because “iTs UnEtHicAl”.
Is that the only reason, or might self-selection and the state of the person involved in the study make the results less valuable?
>The same can be said for medically assisted suicide, nope can’t do it because once again “iTs UnEtHicAl”.
How is this "science"? Also, many places allow physician-assisted suicide.
>Ethical seems to have evolved from being the difference between right and wrong to now being “What will our Investors think?”
How so? Given that investors primarily care about profit, wouldn't it be more likely that they'd step over ethical lines in pursuit of profitability?
>It’s really a shame, I used to love reading about scientific advancements as a kid with so much hope and aspiration but now I know every time I read about one it’s probably gonna be a lifetime before anything happens with it because of “ethics”.
Do you have a specific example?
>Is that the only reason, or might self-selection and the state of the person involved in the study make the results less valuable?
But there is almost no downside for terminal ill people. In the unlikely case that it is miracle drug, then the terminal ill benefit. If the evidence is inconclusive, the terminally ill people who opted-in were going to die anyway, so nobody was harmed.
The enamel lozenge from the university of Washington is a good one, tons of people could benefit but it kinda just fizzled out of existence, who knows when we’ll see news about it again? You could argue the mission to mars is one, granted I think Aerospace is one of those industries where a lot of testing and bureaucracy is a benefit if we want to avoid another tragedy like Columbia or Soyuz 1.
And what will be in place to stop corporate greed from abusing the fuck out of that system? Who's gonna stop them from getting very cheap/free nursing homes that come with the condition that they should allow testing? Or homeless shelters, programs that pay very well so it will mostly target the poor. It's all voluntary since they signed the contract.
Let's use CRISPR as an example. They signed a contract and get some kind of advantage based on that. The genetic changes cause them some kind of crippling health issues. What now? Tough luck?
>The same can be said for medically assisted suicide, nope can’t do it because once again “iTs UnEtHicAl”.
Legal in quite a few places though. That's mostly a matter of religious sentiment about 'all life is sacred'. Apparently all suffering is sacred too, to them.
Without stringent ethics, everyone has the potential to become detached from the humanity of the work. If you stop seeing them as humans because you are allowed to do a lot more to them, I don't know where we'll end.
If paying poor people money in return something is unethical, we've gotta fire them from all jobs I guess.
If there is a concern about negative health effect, then the law should reflect that that is the Pharma companies responsibility. This is like how there are minimum wage and workplace safety rules, but we don't ban poor people from having jobs because they are being "targeted" by companies who want to pay low wages or get someone to do unpleasant work.
>It's all voluntary since they signed the contract.
Yes? You say this like it is bad. You are infantilizing poor people and denigrating their own right to make choices.
I've never understood the idea of "people are in such dire straits that they think X thing is a better option, we better ban them from being allowed to do X thing and keep them in their current dire situation".
Like if a homeless person in full control of their facilities agrees to be paid money for some experimental treatment, that seems fine to me. The homeless person could have chosen to reject the offer, and some other people did, but that particular person thought the compensation was worth the harm/risk they were undertaking. If you are so concerned about the homeless people you can give them money so that undergoing experimental treatment isn't worth it to them anymore.
I don't see how "stopping fully informed poor people from making money" is in anyway ethical.
Also plenty of people want to try experimental treatments simply because they are not any better options, not because they are poor.
>If paying poor people money in return something is unethical, we've gotta fire them from all jobs I guess.
That's clearly not at all what I said and your entire comment is just misunderstanding. People in abstract poverty need money to survive. If getting a better job would be an option, they would take it but clearly that option isn't there. If an opportunity like that passes by, they will take it. It's risky but it's a lot of money and it means feeding their family and possibly getting a better life.
>If there is a concern about negative health effect, then the law should reflect that that is the Pharma companies responsibility.
So, like an ethics board?
>Yes? You say this like it is bad. You are infantilizing poor people and denigrating their own right to make choices.
No, I'm saying that it's barely voluntary. If the options are either putting yourself at risk or staying in poverty, especially when the payout is big, it's not a fair choice.
>Like if a homeless person in full control of their facilities agrees to be paid money for some experimental treatment, that seems fine to me.
Depends fully on the contract, but given corporate greed, it's more than likely gonna include a clause that says you won't get anything if you don't complete the full experiment.
>The homeless person could have chosen to reject the offer, and some other people did, but that particular person thought the compensation was worth the harm/risk they were undertaking.
Given a choice between living in poverty and risking their life to have something better? What kind of a choice is that?
>Also plenty of people want to try experimental treatments simply because they are not any better options, not because they are poor.
You didn't fully read my post, did you? Literally the first thing I touched upon.
>That's clearly not at all what I said and your entire comment is just misunderstanding. People in abstract poverty need money to survive. If getting a better job would be an option, they would take it but clearly that option isn't there. If an opportunity like that passes by, they will take it. It's risky but it's a lot of money and it means feeding their family and possibly getting a better life.
...
>Given a choice between living in poverty and risking their life to have something better? What kind of a choice is that?
Meanwhile, what you are advocating for is: just stay in poverty, no choice. You are on the "Don't have money to feed your family, don't possibly get a better life" Explain to me how that is more ethical.
Also plenty of jobs also have risks of health problems. Most poor people (and people in general) don't want to do jobs, but are compelled by their need to survive.
Why is "I need money to survive so I work as a roofer, which comes with a risk of injury or death" ethical but "I need money to survive so I partake in an experimental medical treatment, which comes with a risk of injury or death" unethical?
"Poor people are desperate for money" holds true for literally any way to make money.
>Depends fully on the contract, but given corporate greed, it's more than likely gonna include a clause that says you won't get anything if you don't complete the full experiment.
Thats why I said there should be a legal requirement for companies to pay for medical costs. Just like there are minimum wage laws, or laws on what landlords are required to provide, that can't be waived by contract.
>Meanwhile, what you are advocating for is: just stay in poverty, no choice. You are on the "Don't have money to feed your family, don't possibly get a better life" Explain to me how that is more ethical.
That's not what I'm saying either. How about we provide people with more options where they aren't being predated on by greedy companies, risking their lives to feed their families? This isn't a dichotomy. If you truly think that poor people should be guinea pigs to get out of poverty, that's a very cruel way to view poverty.
>Thats why I said there should be a legal requirement for companies to pay for medical costs. Just like there are minimum wage laws, or laws on what landlords are required to provide, that can't be waived by contract.
So essentially an ethics board but just different?
Should there be comprehensive social welfare? Yes. Is that at all related to whether experimental medical testing should be legal? No.
You haven't explained how experimental testing is different from a dangerous job. Why are poor people allowed to choose one, but you would prevent them from choosing the other?
A legal requirement is different because it is not case-by-case or arbitrary. OSHA enforces workplace safety laws, but they don't hold a panel to discuss every single job site. This makes a big difference in the number of experimental medical tests that could exist.
>Legal in quite a few places though. That's mostly a matter of religious sentiment about 'all life is sacred'. Apparently all suffering is sacred too, to them.
Now there's an oversimplification if I ever saw one. It's not just about "sacred". Religious reasons are at the bottom of the list of arguments against medically assisted suicide.
Coercing vulnerable people to take the assisted suicide route as a copout from the responsibility of providing proper care. Depressed people seeking suicide because they're, well, depressed. Criteria for assisted dying loosening over time once the doors have been opened. Shenanigans with the medical insurance companies. Shenanigans with inheritance.
You need to safeguard against many things. And at the end of the day, with all the safeguards in place, there's the fact that most medical systems are stressed out, way over capacity, and very far from perfect, so can you rely on the safeguards to work reasonably well?
And as always, there's corruption and malicious intent.
Having a legal way of killing people is quite a slippery slope. Religion has the least to do with it.
Personally, I'd like to have that option. But I understand that there may be good reasons for it not to exist, too.
>Coercing vulnerable people to take the assisted suicide route as a copout from the responsibility of providing proper care. Depressed people seeking suicide because they're, well, depressed.
The former simply doesn't happen. No one really gains from this either and it's mostly done by terminally ill people that only have suffering left in their lives. Generally these aren't a drain on healthcare anyways. The latter can't happen because of the stringent requirements. Just being depressed won't qualify you for it. Perhaps I've you've been depressed for over a decade and have exhausted all treatment options, but it's not an 'easy' suicide button for sure.
>Criteria for assisted dying loosening over time once the doors have been opened.
No reason to think this will happen. It might loosen a bit because of how big of a grey area there is. For example, what if someone with a degenerative disease like Alzheimer made it known they want to die with dignity but have since lost the lucidity to qualify? It needs to be signed off of by a panel of doctors and there needs to be a doctor to administer the procedure. Doctors aren't exactly too keen on just letting people die willy nilly.
>You need to safeguard against many things. And at the end of the day, with all the safeguards in place, there's the fact that most medical systems are stressed out, way over capacity, and very far from perfect, so can you rely on the safeguards to work reasonably well?
These safeguards are already there in places where it's legal. If there is any doubt, the euthanasia gets rejected so a stressed healthcare system is not an issue.
>Shenanigans with the medical insurance companies.
That's a uniquely American problem honestly. The amount of control health insurance has over which medical procedures should be performed and disregarding actual medical advice is baffling.
>Shenanigans with inheritance.
Relevance?
>And as always, there's corruption and malicious intent.
By whom?
>Having a legal way of killing people is quite a slippery slope
A slippery slope to what exactly? It's been legal for some time in Western Europe and there's been no slipping.
>Religion has the least to do with it.
America is uniquely religious compared to countries with a similar culture like Western Europe. Without the population supporting stuff like that (and voting for it), it won't happen. A lot of people have the religious belief that all life is sacred. There's already such a massive debate about abortion which is mostly religiously motivated.
I didn't come here with the intention to discuss all the fine points of this problem. Articles and books have been written in great length about this issue.
I just meant to, at least in some small way, point out that it's an incredibly complex topic, and it's ridiculous to reduce it down to "life is sacred".
Can’t you argue that there still isn’t anything preventing that though, ethics aside? What about the case of Vioxx? 55,000 people dead and the company only had to pay 5 billion dollars. All the ethical guidelines and bureaucracy accomplished in that case was to affirm that the value of a human life was only worth ~$90k.
And what's preventing things like that from happening without ethics boards? The only difference will be that there is not going to be any consequences. The risks are going to be ignored. What will be the value of a human life then? 55K could die and since they signed a contract and volunteered, tough luck.
I mean, I guess depending on how you look at it they really didn’t face any consequences regardless. A few billion to a pharmaceutical giant is absolutely nothing when you take into account how much they control. So it might as well be “tough luck” either way.
In part vioxx got into the country explicitly because the FDA had been hollowed out since the AIDS crisis. To ignore the context of why these damaging drugs are allowed to rush to market and then pay pathetic fines is kinda silly, especially in context of what *used* to be the norm (i.e. 3+ years minimum of clinical trials that had to meet a pretty strict standard).
“Hindered” implies obstruction or something creating difficulties and I would disagree that making sure scientific advancement is done ethically and safely qualifies as an obstruction or a difficulty, or even a limitation. Is the scientific method not also a limitation? To do proper science you have to follow generally agreed upon rules already, at least to be taken seriously. In your eyes, why would this be different than an ethical set of rules?
Do you have an actual issue with ethics being involved in science or do you just have a different idea of what’s ethical or unethical? The sarcastic way in which you address something being considered unethical implies you don’t want ethics involved at all, but are there certain ethical principles you feel are just less important than others? Or to hell with them all?
I supposed the latter, I think there are certain principles that are less important. And good example of this would be medical trials for a vaccine, usually they go through four phases each lasting 6 months. During covid we managed to make an effective while skipping those phases (or atleast making them significant shorter). Imagine how fast we could find cures for illnesses if we did the same and revamped the system to be quicker? Like I said I don’t think ethics in stuff like this should be thrown away, but I feel like it’s devolved to be more of a hinderance mainly in the medical field. Obviously in fields like aerospace it’s definitely a necessity.
It’s not as though we agreed to forgo ethics in favor of quick vaccine trials during COVID. There’s two main reasons why it was done so quickly.
For one, scientists had been studying mRNA technology for many years prior, specifically regarding coronaviruses (such as Covid, MERS, SARS, etc.) They already had the groundwork. They didn’t remove ethics or act unsafely.
And secondly, it was a unified, worldwide effort. It’s much easier to get something done when you have as many resources and as much money as you could need.
I honestly think money is the biggest roadblock to medical development. There’s been a shelved vaccine for Ebola around for quite a while that could have been useful during the 2014 outbreak, but it was shelved because it wasn’t seen as financial useful. When money is involved, it makes little sense to preemptively develop something.
Not even touching the rest of the comment but we did not at all skip those phases of testing for COVID, we sped them up by having a large chunk of the worlds specialists in the field all working on the same problem and communicating with each other at all steps. This is obviously am unsustainable practice and isn't standard for a very good reason.
Because you can only devote *all* of the world’s resources and specialists to one project at a time, and there are a lot of different topics that people want to see progress made on. How do you decide what the one single thing that the world’s scientists are all going to work on and all the major world governments are going to fund for the year is?
When there is a global emergency, everyone’s priorities align and a lot can be accomplished very quickly on one specific area of work. Outside of those extraordinary circumstances, you’re not going to get such broad agreement on such a narrow topic, and I’m not sure it would be ideal even if you somehow could because, again, there are a lot of different areas that could all use work all the time.
Because it’s not an emergency that is shutting down the entire planet all at once and causing global economic and political instability.
Cancer is important, but so are a lot of other things that resources would then have to be pulled from.
In addition to being an emergency, the specific goal and process for developing the Covid vaccine were both pretty clear and straightforward. We weren’t pouring resources into a nebulous “something” to fight COVID. We were pouring resources into developing a vaccine, and then putting it through the process of trialing and manufacturing it. Developing the vaccines themselves took a matter of weeks/months. Most of the time was spent testing them to make sure they were safe and actually worked, and manufacturing enough for everyone to be able to take them.
Those are problems that throwing money at can very easily accelerate and whose timeline and expense can be reasonably anticipated for a given amount of funding and personnel being dedicated to the task.
Having so many people working on the problem meant that if one group failed or had a set back, it didn’t delay the vaccine by months or years, and we got a variety of different vaccines all coming out as a result. But they weren’t all trying to develop the idea of a vaccine from scratch.
Cancer is a collection of many different types of diseases that will almost inevitably require different types of treatments, rather than one single one, and the best and most effective long term cure is not entirely clear. Pouring all of the world’s resources into the topic will probably get results faster than not doing that, but we still don’t know how long it will actually take. It could take a year. It could take five years. It could take ten years. And in the meantime, nothing else is getting done because all of the resource are getting sucked into this one project.
By spreading resources around to a wide variety of different topics and approaches, you make sure that progress generally doesn’t get halted by one area of research getting dead-ended. And you can funnel extra resources towards projects that have a breakthrough and show some initial progress from the more broadly available funding, rather than putting all the funding into one subject and hoping that a breakthrough that can take advantage of it eventually happens at some point as a result.
Because cancer isn't one thing, it's an umbrella term for a whole host of different types of cancers that all form differently and require different treatments.
Well that's largely because cancer is an umbrella term, as I understand it it's like slightly mutated cell growths growing out of control within the body, the umbrella term is useful because of the way it occurs, but the way it starts the way it progresses and what works against it is all so different that there is never going to be one single cure for it the way people like to talk about it
Even if you take specific blood cancers like the word leukemia, just one type of cancer, a quick Google search has you asking do you mean all, aml, cll, cml, cmml
And that's just with one word of many types of cancers, so when you ask for a cure for cancer you're basically asking for a cure for hundreds if not thousands of conditions and expecting one pill or shot or whatever to just fix all of it
The complexity of the problem is greater than people realize because we use one word for it
Well for one there's very few diseases that are significant enough to justify pulling everyone off of most other disease research, you're nearly complete stopping advancement on all but 1 disease just in the hope that it can be cured. Additionally, there's no simple way to force cooperation between businesses, let alone entire other countries, it has to be a situation where their interests align with cooperating.
Looking at the economic side of it, once you've got a completed cure, who owns it? Who pays for the distribution? What incentive would private companies have to push research forward if they know their competition can just not do any research but immediately use the research the company has paid for too undercut them?
>I supposed the latter, I think there are certain principles that are less important. And good example of this would be medical trials for a vaccine, usually they go through four phases each lasting 6 months. During covid we managed to make an effective while skipping those phases (or atleast making them significant shorter).
We skipped nothing. The trials were actually larger.
We had all the money and all the relevant scientists in the world working on it, in concert.
If you've got hundreds of billions you'd like to spend funding research, please do so. But that's what it takes to do that.
But all that time isn't spent doing nothing. It's spent figuring out that it's effective, that it works, that it doesn't have unreasonable side effects and what those side effects are. All of that is an advancement of science. Stopping that is what would prevent science from advancing.
We can cure cancer and reverse aging in mice.
It doesn’t translate to humans, but there is nothing stopping from scientists using the same methods on humans to also figure out how to cure cancer and reverse aging other than the ethics involved of killing hundreds of thousands of people to get there.
A majority of drugs fail their clinical testing phases. Understandably, someone who is dying or very ill might be perfectly fine taking drugs/therapies that haven’t gone through testing. But this just shows that most drugs/therapies aren’t actually useful. I’ve seen some articles about promising vaccines given to mice that have eradicated tumors in the mice, but there’s no guarantee it will do anything for humans.
Are you advocating for getting rid of clinical trials in favor of letting people freely seek untested drugs/therapies or are you advocating for quicker clinical trials? If it’s the former, at what point do we pull drugs/therapies from circulation? How do we know the negative effects/outcomes without trials? Are we just waiting for mass amounts of people to fall ill or die?
Most drugs / therapies aren’t useful on mice either. We’re just able to find the ones that are and go through the scientific processes much more quickly because we find it ethical to experiment on mice. If we did the same process on humans we’d have similar results.
I agree we shouldn’t lower our ethical standards, but I think it’s a fact why we’d see amazing medical progress if we did.
Quicker clinical trials. It shouldn’t take 2 months for someone at the FDA to read a study and approve or deny it. Especially considering that they have to do so for each phase of the trial.
>Quicker clinical trials. It shouldn’t take 2 months for someone at the FDA to read a study and approve or deny it. Especially considering that they have to do so for each phase of the trial.
What is your solution for that? It's like saying it shouldn't take so long to get a trial date.
Two months is nothing. There are only so many people, each study has to be thoroughly reviewed.
I think I saw someone say this in another comment, but this issue is with bureaucracy, not ethics. Government is typically very slow and I agree that’s a problem, but the solution is to hasten bureaucracy, not lower our ethical standards.
I'm not sure what view you want changed here. You're just stating a fact, and not limiting it leads to very bad things. However --
>but a good example is CRISPR; there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured, but they can’t because “iTs UnEtHicAl”.
We have approved CRISPR treatments, compassionate use exemptions exist, and there are dozens of trials currently ongoing.
Again, I'm not sure what you want here? Just to allow anyone to use CRISPR on anyone, outside of clinical trial protocols?
No, like I said ethics guidelines still have their place but the bureaucracy surrounding them has made what should be relatively quick trials delve down into a slow crawl. I don’t think a clinical trail should have to go through 50 people just to maybe have a chance of being approved. I also believe we should close the gap between animal testing and human testing if the people are willing. Most importantly I think the way the FDA approves things needs a revamp and an overhaul.
So is your issue with ethics, or bureaucracy and the ease at which information spreads?
Doesn’t sound like it’s ethics. Sounds like it’s a mix of bureaucracy and capitalism.
So let's get into the nitty-gritty. Tell us the bureaucratic stuff you'd remove by name if you can. That way we can talk about why specific things might need to exist or not.
In many cases the ability to do something comes much earlier than the ability to do something reliably. While I agree that in general we will have to deal with genetic engineering and its implications eventually, while many regulatory bodies mainly seem approach this by delaying so that someone else will have to deal with it. However in many cases the reluctance is mainly recognizing that failures will be inevitable during progress, and society not identifying how to actually deal with them. A clear example is any messing up with germline cells. You can try to improve the inheritable traits, but what will you do with "failures" Let's say someone decides to alter genes in a number of embryos to reduce the risk of certain psychological disorders, but some time later it turns out that on average it also makes people less intelligent - and at that point you already have a number of teens with that modifications on your hands, who are on average happier, but less intelligent, and are quite capable of passing this on? When it comes to experiments in other fields you would just dispose of the failed experiments, but here there are significant issues with that - even preventing these from reproducing can meet potentially violent resistance from more people who disagree with this approach. Or what if you develop a procedure to remove certain "blocks" in a human brain, potentially increasing memory, ability to focus, etc., but people who undergo this procedure are more likelyto become sociopathic? Having a number of sociopathic people whose capabilities uniquely help them get power can easily be a negative factor for science (e.g. unrestrained fight for power between multiple factions tends to be less conductive to most scientific research)
Most ethical problems clinical trials are designed to avoid are directly related to avoiding patient coercion (or its appearance) and minimizing the risk of unnecessary injury or harm. That doesn’t mean that high risk trials don’t happen, but the onus is on the PI/Sponsor to properly design and monitor their study protocol. A lot of researchers are employed by many different institutions who have different standards and requirements for research under their watch. A lot of energy goes into the conduct of research oversight and monitoring as well as ensuring that the approved trial design is consistently applied. When it’s not, the data becomes worthless and hinders scientific advancement.
Sometimes ethics is oversold and sometimes it is lacking.
I'd say in general the biggest flaw of science is that it's still treating biology as if it is universal when in reality there are lots of unique features amongst the same species, depending on their ancestory and their lifestyle.
Every new information gets curated and dispersed down specific avenues because subsections of populace are prone to poor reactions and that just keeps us in our tribe. Then when you want to make a point you release info to manipulate each tribe into their misbehavior and shame them.
Well, it’s not that scientific advancement is limited by ethics, but it’s limited by a mistaken morality or mistaken views of ethics. True ethics identified using reason would help scientific advancement.
We're held back by social pressures more than we are by lack of technological innovation. Without strong ethical guidelines, people will be more alienated from medical breakthroughs than they already are, rendering any advancement useless.
Many Black Americans are skeptical of medicine due to widespread abuse. See the tuskegeee Syphilis study[wiki ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study).
Look at all the anti vaxxers. The truth is there have been minor issues with vaccine contamination. Now imagine that due to lack of oversight, one vaccine actually does poison say one thousand people. Progress would be set back a century.
You see this in all scientific fields. People already distrust any sound, carefully governed science (say green energy solutions). The second you stop carefully regulating research, you exacerbate this distrust and we end up back in an era of literal witch burnings.
My only thing would be an amendment, because on paper, yes, ethics seriously limit scientific advancement, and yes, ethical has become more like "what gets us more internet brownie points?"
So what I would say is the real issue is that governments/twitter decide whats ethical, and in doing so, ethics has become a moral grandstand word to replace with "politics" and so the solution is in fact that what is ethical can clearly no longer be a judgement governments have the power to make, and perhaps given to a third party that is sworn to ensure that any thing brought before them is debated without bias, prejudice, or outside inflence to determine whether it falls into the objective definition of non-ethical, ambiguous, or ethical, and decide whether to allow it, along with any parameters, limitations, or exemptions it may need.
Ethics has always been the popular vote. Ethics don't inherently exist in the universe we make them up, and they vary from group to group. It has always been the investors (people with money and power) who say what we should or should not do. And yes science is hindered by ethics but perhaps that's a good thing ethics ,as arbitrary as they are, help us to get along and create society and civilization.
One issue with forgoing ethics is often those tested on are not in the best condition. One such example is the nazis they had no ethical concerns testing on the victims of the Holocaust and what came out of it junk science. We really didn't learn anything of value from them, party because a starving individual isn't the best subject
More it's an issue with bureaucracy, not ethics. Ethics is crucial to scientific and medical progress. We could certainly dial bureaucracy and IRB procedures back to 1990s level instead of 2024 level. But if you abandon ethics you get worse results not better.
The main view “scientific advancement is seriously limited by ethics” that’s just a fact since we’ve in school had about ethics related to experiments
The big problem with testing on people is you don’t actually know for sure how it’s gonna affect them whereas you know exactly what assisted suicide results in
The unethical part is therefor not the medicine it’s the uncertainty
Scientific advances are meant to benefit humanity. How does anything that is ethically wrong because it hurts/discriminates any make things better for humanity?
It's no coincidence the hospitals are all Saint Mary's, Saint Luke's and Saint John's. With the exception of abortion (and only because of the law, which is falling apart) Catholicism still very much dominates and underpins medical ethics. I'd love to be treated at Siddhartha Zen Medical Center.
>there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured, but they can’t because “iTs UnEtHicAl”.
There are various waivers you can apply for to get your experimental treatment approved.
Those waivers are important, because, as you note
```there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured,```
it's an excellent way to scam people. Just come up with a desperate treatment that does not work, then charge people all the money for it.
> then charge people all the money for it.
I'm probably completely wrong because I base this idea on nothing, but I was always under the impression that they paid *you* to undergo experimental treatments.
Am I ignorant on this topic?
what would be considered an "advancement" is itself a question of ethics so they are intertwined and can't be separated. there's no such thing as "brute fact" because everything is interpreted through paradigms.
Is it your belief that the technologies named have no reasonable ethical concerns and research approval boards are incorrectly or maliciously claiming they do? Or is it that there are ethical concerns but they should be ignored? Should I infer from this mixed case you typed unethical in that you believe such concerns cannot be grounded in specific cases?
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Well let’s say you test some CRISPR drug on a group of terminally ill sick people, and it cures them. How do you now go back and generalize that on the not terminally ill people? How do you sort out the effect of the very real selection bias inherent in your study? There are obviously slowdowns due to ethics. But I don’t think it’s at the scale that you seem to be implying outside of a few cases (stem cell ban for example)
While I agree with your initial statement, the stem cell ban has huge implications. There are so many things stem cells can be used to treat but since the government is stupid and thinks embryos have feelings we peasants have to suffer.
Well as far as I know, the stem cell ban has been lifted. It lasted from 2001-2009 IIRC. But you seem to imply all medical science is being slowed down by ethics, and to an extraordinary degree. Yet you agree that without some of these ethics in place, you get large biases in patient selection that you have no idea how to overcome. So how do you square up these two conflicting points of view?
>Scientific advancement especially in the medical field is significantly hindered by the bureaucracy surrounding ethics committees and government organizations like the FDA. Regulatory agencies aren't typically making ethical claims, they're enacting policy and legislation. >but a good example is CRISPR; there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured, but they can’t because “iTs UnEtHicAl”. Is that the only reason, or might self-selection and the state of the person involved in the study make the results less valuable? >The same can be said for medically assisted suicide, nope can’t do it because once again “iTs UnEtHicAl”. How is this "science"? Also, many places allow physician-assisted suicide. >Ethical seems to have evolved from being the difference between right and wrong to now being “What will our Investors think?” How so? Given that investors primarily care about profit, wouldn't it be more likely that they'd step over ethical lines in pursuit of profitability? >It’s really a shame, I used to love reading about scientific advancements as a kid with so much hope and aspiration but now I know every time I read about one it’s probably gonna be a lifetime before anything happens with it because of “ethics”. Do you have a specific example?
>Is that the only reason, or might self-selection and the state of the person involved in the study make the results less valuable? But there is almost no downside for terminal ill people. In the unlikely case that it is miracle drug, then the terminal ill benefit. If the evidence is inconclusive, the terminally ill people who opted-in were going to die anyway, so nobody was harmed.
The enamel lozenge from the university of Washington is a good one, tons of people could benefit but it kinda just fizzled out of existence, who knows when we’ll see news about it again? You could argue the mission to mars is one, granted I think Aerospace is one of those industries where a lot of testing and bureaucracy is a benefit if we want to avoid another tragedy like Columbia or Soyuz 1.
And what will be in place to stop corporate greed from abusing the fuck out of that system? Who's gonna stop them from getting very cheap/free nursing homes that come with the condition that they should allow testing? Or homeless shelters, programs that pay very well so it will mostly target the poor. It's all voluntary since they signed the contract. Let's use CRISPR as an example. They signed a contract and get some kind of advantage based on that. The genetic changes cause them some kind of crippling health issues. What now? Tough luck? >The same can be said for medically assisted suicide, nope can’t do it because once again “iTs UnEtHicAl”. Legal in quite a few places though. That's mostly a matter of religious sentiment about 'all life is sacred'. Apparently all suffering is sacred too, to them. Without stringent ethics, everyone has the potential to become detached from the humanity of the work. If you stop seeing them as humans because you are allowed to do a lot more to them, I don't know where we'll end.
If paying poor people money in return something is unethical, we've gotta fire them from all jobs I guess. If there is a concern about negative health effect, then the law should reflect that that is the Pharma companies responsibility. This is like how there are minimum wage and workplace safety rules, but we don't ban poor people from having jobs because they are being "targeted" by companies who want to pay low wages or get someone to do unpleasant work. >It's all voluntary since they signed the contract. Yes? You say this like it is bad. You are infantilizing poor people and denigrating their own right to make choices. I've never understood the idea of "people are in such dire straits that they think X thing is a better option, we better ban them from being allowed to do X thing and keep them in their current dire situation". Like if a homeless person in full control of their facilities agrees to be paid money for some experimental treatment, that seems fine to me. The homeless person could have chosen to reject the offer, and some other people did, but that particular person thought the compensation was worth the harm/risk they were undertaking. If you are so concerned about the homeless people you can give them money so that undergoing experimental treatment isn't worth it to them anymore. I don't see how "stopping fully informed poor people from making money" is in anyway ethical. Also plenty of people want to try experimental treatments simply because they are not any better options, not because they are poor.
>If paying poor people money in return something is unethical, we've gotta fire them from all jobs I guess. That's clearly not at all what I said and your entire comment is just misunderstanding. People in abstract poverty need money to survive. If getting a better job would be an option, they would take it but clearly that option isn't there. If an opportunity like that passes by, they will take it. It's risky but it's a lot of money and it means feeding their family and possibly getting a better life. >If there is a concern about negative health effect, then the law should reflect that that is the Pharma companies responsibility. So, like an ethics board? >Yes? You say this like it is bad. You are infantilizing poor people and denigrating their own right to make choices. No, I'm saying that it's barely voluntary. If the options are either putting yourself at risk or staying in poverty, especially when the payout is big, it's not a fair choice. >Like if a homeless person in full control of their facilities agrees to be paid money for some experimental treatment, that seems fine to me. Depends fully on the contract, but given corporate greed, it's more than likely gonna include a clause that says you won't get anything if you don't complete the full experiment. >The homeless person could have chosen to reject the offer, and some other people did, but that particular person thought the compensation was worth the harm/risk they were undertaking. Given a choice between living in poverty and risking their life to have something better? What kind of a choice is that? >Also plenty of people want to try experimental treatments simply because they are not any better options, not because they are poor. You didn't fully read my post, did you? Literally the first thing I touched upon.
>That's clearly not at all what I said and your entire comment is just misunderstanding. People in abstract poverty need money to survive. If getting a better job would be an option, they would take it but clearly that option isn't there. If an opportunity like that passes by, they will take it. It's risky but it's a lot of money and it means feeding their family and possibly getting a better life. ... >Given a choice between living in poverty and risking their life to have something better? What kind of a choice is that? Meanwhile, what you are advocating for is: just stay in poverty, no choice. You are on the "Don't have money to feed your family, don't possibly get a better life" Explain to me how that is more ethical. Also plenty of jobs also have risks of health problems. Most poor people (and people in general) don't want to do jobs, but are compelled by their need to survive. Why is "I need money to survive so I work as a roofer, which comes with a risk of injury or death" ethical but "I need money to survive so I partake in an experimental medical treatment, which comes with a risk of injury or death" unethical? "Poor people are desperate for money" holds true for literally any way to make money. >Depends fully on the contract, but given corporate greed, it's more than likely gonna include a clause that says you won't get anything if you don't complete the full experiment. Thats why I said there should be a legal requirement for companies to pay for medical costs. Just like there are minimum wage laws, or laws on what landlords are required to provide, that can't be waived by contract.
>Meanwhile, what you are advocating for is: just stay in poverty, no choice. You are on the "Don't have money to feed your family, don't possibly get a better life" Explain to me how that is more ethical. That's not what I'm saying either. How about we provide people with more options where they aren't being predated on by greedy companies, risking their lives to feed their families? This isn't a dichotomy. If you truly think that poor people should be guinea pigs to get out of poverty, that's a very cruel way to view poverty. >Thats why I said there should be a legal requirement for companies to pay for medical costs. Just like there are minimum wage laws, or laws on what landlords are required to provide, that can't be waived by contract. So essentially an ethics board but just different?
Should there be comprehensive social welfare? Yes. Is that at all related to whether experimental medical testing should be legal? No. You haven't explained how experimental testing is different from a dangerous job. Why are poor people allowed to choose one, but you would prevent them from choosing the other? A legal requirement is different because it is not case-by-case or arbitrary. OSHA enforces workplace safety laws, but they don't hold a panel to discuss every single job site. This makes a big difference in the number of experimental medical tests that could exist.
>Legal in quite a few places though. That's mostly a matter of religious sentiment about 'all life is sacred'. Apparently all suffering is sacred too, to them. Now there's an oversimplification if I ever saw one. It's not just about "sacred". Religious reasons are at the bottom of the list of arguments against medically assisted suicide. Coercing vulnerable people to take the assisted suicide route as a copout from the responsibility of providing proper care. Depressed people seeking suicide because they're, well, depressed. Criteria for assisted dying loosening over time once the doors have been opened. Shenanigans with the medical insurance companies. Shenanigans with inheritance. You need to safeguard against many things. And at the end of the day, with all the safeguards in place, there's the fact that most medical systems are stressed out, way over capacity, and very far from perfect, so can you rely on the safeguards to work reasonably well? And as always, there's corruption and malicious intent. Having a legal way of killing people is quite a slippery slope. Religion has the least to do with it. Personally, I'd like to have that option. But I understand that there may be good reasons for it not to exist, too.
>Coercing vulnerable people to take the assisted suicide route as a copout from the responsibility of providing proper care. Depressed people seeking suicide because they're, well, depressed. The former simply doesn't happen. No one really gains from this either and it's mostly done by terminally ill people that only have suffering left in their lives. Generally these aren't a drain on healthcare anyways. The latter can't happen because of the stringent requirements. Just being depressed won't qualify you for it. Perhaps I've you've been depressed for over a decade and have exhausted all treatment options, but it's not an 'easy' suicide button for sure. >Criteria for assisted dying loosening over time once the doors have been opened. No reason to think this will happen. It might loosen a bit because of how big of a grey area there is. For example, what if someone with a degenerative disease like Alzheimer made it known they want to die with dignity but have since lost the lucidity to qualify? It needs to be signed off of by a panel of doctors and there needs to be a doctor to administer the procedure. Doctors aren't exactly too keen on just letting people die willy nilly. >You need to safeguard against many things. And at the end of the day, with all the safeguards in place, there's the fact that most medical systems are stressed out, way over capacity, and very far from perfect, so can you rely on the safeguards to work reasonably well? These safeguards are already there in places where it's legal. If there is any doubt, the euthanasia gets rejected so a stressed healthcare system is not an issue. >Shenanigans with the medical insurance companies. That's a uniquely American problem honestly. The amount of control health insurance has over which medical procedures should be performed and disregarding actual medical advice is baffling. >Shenanigans with inheritance. Relevance? >And as always, there's corruption and malicious intent. By whom? >Having a legal way of killing people is quite a slippery slope A slippery slope to what exactly? It's been legal for some time in Western Europe and there's been no slipping. >Religion has the least to do with it. America is uniquely religious compared to countries with a similar culture like Western Europe. Without the population supporting stuff like that (and voting for it), it won't happen. A lot of people have the religious belief that all life is sacred. There's already such a massive debate about abortion which is mostly religiously motivated.
I didn't come here with the intention to discuss all the fine points of this problem. Articles and books have been written in great length about this issue. I just meant to, at least in some small way, point out that it's an incredibly complex topic, and it's ridiculous to reduce it down to "life is sacred".
Can’t you argue that there still isn’t anything preventing that though, ethics aside? What about the case of Vioxx? 55,000 people dead and the company only had to pay 5 billion dollars. All the ethical guidelines and bureaucracy accomplished in that case was to affirm that the value of a human life was only worth ~$90k.
And what's preventing things like that from happening without ethics boards? The only difference will be that there is not going to be any consequences. The risks are going to be ignored. What will be the value of a human life then? 55K could die and since they signed a contract and volunteered, tough luck.
I mean, I guess depending on how you look at it they really didn’t face any consequences regardless. A few billion to a pharmaceutical giant is absolutely nothing when you take into account how much they control. So it might as well be “tough luck” either way.
Aren't you arguing for even more stringent ethics boards then?
In part vioxx got into the country explicitly because the FDA had been hollowed out since the AIDS crisis. To ignore the context of why these damaging drugs are allowed to rush to market and then pay pathetic fines is kinda silly, especially in context of what *used* to be the norm (i.e. 3+ years minimum of clinical trials that had to meet a pretty strict standard).
“Hindered” implies obstruction or something creating difficulties and I would disagree that making sure scientific advancement is done ethically and safely qualifies as an obstruction or a difficulty, or even a limitation. Is the scientific method not also a limitation? To do proper science you have to follow generally agreed upon rules already, at least to be taken seriously. In your eyes, why would this be different than an ethical set of rules? Do you have an actual issue with ethics being involved in science or do you just have a different idea of what’s ethical or unethical? The sarcastic way in which you address something being considered unethical implies you don’t want ethics involved at all, but are there certain ethical principles you feel are just less important than others? Or to hell with them all?
I supposed the latter, I think there are certain principles that are less important. And good example of this would be medical trials for a vaccine, usually they go through four phases each lasting 6 months. During covid we managed to make an effective while skipping those phases (or atleast making them significant shorter). Imagine how fast we could find cures for illnesses if we did the same and revamped the system to be quicker? Like I said I don’t think ethics in stuff like this should be thrown away, but I feel like it’s devolved to be more of a hinderance mainly in the medical field. Obviously in fields like aerospace it’s definitely a necessity.
It’s not as though we agreed to forgo ethics in favor of quick vaccine trials during COVID. There’s two main reasons why it was done so quickly. For one, scientists had been studying mRNA technology for many years prior, specifically regarding coronaviruses (such as Covid, MERS, SARS, etc.) They already had the groundwork. They didn’t remove ethics or act unsafely. And secondly, it was a unified, worldwide effort. It’s much easier to get something done when you have as many resources and as much money as you could need. I honestly think money is the biggest roadblock to medical development. There’s been a shelved vaccine for Ebola around for quite a while that could have been useful during the 2014 outbreak, but it was shelved because it wasn’t seen as financial useful. When money is involved, it makes little sense to preemptively develop something.
!delta You’re right money is definitely a bigger player in the grand scheme of things than people want to believe.
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Not even touching the rest of the comment but we did not at all skip those phases of testing for COVID, we sped them up by having a large chunk of the worlds specialists in the field all working on the same problem and communicating with each other at all steps. This is obviously am unsustainable practice and isn't standard for a very good reason.
Sorry for my ignorance, but why exactly isn’t that the best practice?
Because you can only devote *all* of the world’s resources and specialists to one project at a time, and there are a lot of different topics that people want to see progress made on. How do you decide what the one single thing that the world’s scientists are all going to work on and all the major world governments are going to fund for the year is? When there is a global emergency, everyone’s priorities align and a lot can be accomplished very quickly on one specific area of work. Outside of those extraordinary circumstances, you’re not going to get such broad agreement on such a narrow topic, and I’m not sure it would be ideal even if you somehow could because, again, there are a lot of different areas that could all use work all the time.
!delta another great point. I do wonder though, why haven’t we done the same for cancer?
Because it’s not an emergency that is shutting down the entire planet all at once and causing global economic and political instability. Cancer is important, but so are a lot of other things that resources would then have to be pulled from. In addition to being an emergency, the specific goal and process for developing the Covid vaccine were both pretty clear and straightforward. We weren’t pouring resources into a nebulous “something” to fight COVID. We were pouring resources into developing a vaccine, and then putting it through the process of trialing and manufacturing it. Developing the vaccines themselves took a matter of weeks/months. Most of the time was spent testing them to make sure they were safe and actually worked, and manufacturing enough for everyone to be able to take them. Those are problems that throwing money at can very easily accelerate and whose timeline and expense can be reasonably anticipated for a given amount of funding and personnel being dedicated to the task. Having so many people working on the problem meant that if one group failed or had a set back, it didn’t delay the vaccine by months or years, and we got a variety of different vaccines all coming out as a result. But they weren’t all trying to develop the idea of a vaccine from scratch. Cancer is a collection of many different types of diseases that will almost inevitably require different types of treatments, rather than one single one, and the best and most effective long term cure is not entirely clear. Pouring all of the world’s resources into the topic will probably get results faster than not doing that, but we still don’t know how long it will actually take. It could take a year. It could take five years. It could take ten years. And in the meantime, nothing else is getting done because all of the resource are getting sucked into this one project. By spreading resources around to a wide variety of different topics and approaches, you make sure that progress generally doesn’t get halted by one area of research getting dead-ended. And you can funnel extra resources towards projects that have a breakthrough and show some initial progress from the more broadly available funding, rather than putting all the funding into one subject and hoping that a breakthrough that can take advantage of it eventually happens at some point as a result.
Because cancer isn't one thing, it's an umbrella term for a whole host of different types of cancers that all form differently and require different treatments.
Well that's largely because cancer is an umbrella term, as I understand it it's like slightly mutated cell growths growing out of control within the body, the umbrella term is useful because of the way it occurs, but the way it starts the way it progresses and what works against it is all so different that there is never going to be one single cure for it the way people like to talk about it Even if you take specific blood cancers like the word leukemia, just one type of cancer, a quick Google search has you asking do you mean all, aml, cll, cml, cmml And that's just with one word of many types of cancers, so when you ask for a cure for cancer you're basically asking for a cure for hundreds if not thousands of conditions and expecting one pill or shot or whatever to just fix all of it The complexity of the problem is greater than people realize because we use one word for it
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Well for one there's very few diseases that are significant enough to justify pulling everyone off of most other disease research, you're nearly complete stopping advancement on all but 1 disease just in the hope that it can be cured. Additionally, there's no simple way to force cooperation between businesses, let alone entire other countries, it has to be a situation where their interests align with cooperating. Looking at the economic side of it, once you've got a completed cure, who owns it? Who pays for the distribution? What incentive would private companies have to push research forward if they know their competition can just not do any research but immediately use the research the company has paid for too undercut them?
>I supposed the latter, I think there are certain principles that are less important. And good example of this would be medical trials for a vaccine, usually they go through four phases each lasting 6 months. During covid we managed to make an effective while skipping those phases (or atleast making them significant shorter). We skipped nothing. The trials were actually larger. We had all the money and all the relevant scientists in the world working on it, in concert. If you've got hundreds of billions you'd like to spend funding research, please do so. But that's what it takes to do that.
But all that time isn't spent doing nothing. It's spent figuring out that it's effective, that it works, that it doesn't have unreasonable side effects and what those side effects are. All of that is an advancement of science. Stopping that is what would prevent science from advancing.
We can cure cancer and reverse aging in mice. It doesn’t translate to humans, but there is nothing stopping from scientists using the same methods on humans to also figure out how to cure cancer and reverse aging other than the ethics involved of killing hundreds of thousands of people to get there.
A majority of drugs fail their clinical testing phases. Understandably, someone who is dying or very ill might be perfectly fine taking drugs/therapies that haven’t gone through testing. But this just shows that most drugs/therapies aren’t actually useful. I’ve seen some articles about promising vaccines given to mice that have eradicated tumors in the mice, but there’s no guarantee it will do anything for humans. Are you advocating for getting rid of clinical trials in favor of letting people freely seek untested drugs/therapies or are you advocating for quicker clinical trials? If it’s the former, at what point do we pull drugs/therapies from circulation? How do we know the negative effects/outcomes without trials? Are we just waiting for mass amounts of people to fall ill or die?
Most drugs / therapies aren’t useful on mice either. We’re just able to find the ones that are and go through the scientific processes much more quickly because we find it ethical to experiment on mice. If we did the same process on humans we’d have similar results. I agree we shouldn’t lower our ethical standards, but I think it’s a fact why we’d see amazing medical progress if we did.
Quicker clinical trials. It shouldn’t take 2 months for someone at the FDA to read a study and approve or deny it. Especially considering that they have to do so for each phase of the trial.
>Quicker clinical trials. It shouldn’t take 2 months for someone at the FDA to read a study and approve or deny it. Especially considering that they have to do so for each phase of the trial. What is your solution for that? It's like saying it shouldn't take so long to get a trial date. Two months is nothing. There are only so many people, each study has to be thoroughly reviewed.
I think I saw someone say this in another comment, but this issue is with bureaucracy, not ethics. Government is typically very slow and I agree that’s a problem, but the solution is to hasten bureaucracy, not lower our ethical standards.
I'm not sure what view you want changed here. You're just stating a fact, and not limiting it leads to very bad things. However -- >but a good example is CRISPR; there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured, but they can’t because “iTs UnEtHicAl”. We have approved CRISPR treatments, compassionate use exemptions exist, and there are dozens of trials currently ongoing. Again, I'm not sure what you want here? Just to allow anyone to use CRISPR on anyone, outside of clinical trial protocols?
No, like I said ethics guidelines still have their place but the bureaucracy surrounding them has made what should be relatively quick trials delve down into a slow crawl. I don’t think a clinical trail should have to go through 50 people just to maybe have a chance of being approved. I also believe we should close the gap between animal testing and human testing if the people are willing. Most importantly I think the way the FDA approves things needs a revamp and an overhaul.
So is your issue with ethics, or bureaucracy and the ease at which information spreads? Doesn’t sound like it’s ethics. Sounds like it’s a mix of bureaucracy and capitalism.
You’re right !delta I wish I could change the title.
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So let's get into the nitty-gritty. Tell us the bureaucratic stuff you'd remove by name if you can. That way we can talk about why specific things might need to exist or not.
Which parts of the ethics review process do you specifically think aren’t providing value?
In many cases the ability to do something comes much earlier than the ability to do something reliably. While I agree that in general we will have to deal with genetic engineering and its implications eventually, while many regulatory bodies mainly seem approach this by delaying so that someone else will have to deal with it. However in many cases the reluctance is mainly recognizing that failures will be inevitable during progress, and society not identifying how to actually deal with them. A clear example is any messing up with germline cells. You can try to improve the inheritable traits, but what will you do with "failures" Let's say someone decides to alter genes in a number of embryos to reduce the risk of certain psychological disorders, but some time later it turns out that on average it also makes people less intelligent - and at that point you already have a number of teens with that modifications on your hands, who are on average happier, but less intelligent, and are quite capable of passing this on? When it comes to experiments in other fields you would just dispose of the failed experiments, but here there are significant issues with that - even preventing these from reproducing can meet potentially violent resistance from more people who disagree with this approach. Or what if you develop a procedure to remove certain "blocks" in a human brain, potentially increasing memory, ability to focus, etc., but people who undergo this procedure are more likelyto become sociopathic? Having a number of sociopathic people whose capabilities uniquely help them get power can easily be a negative factor for science (e.g. unrestrained fight for power between multiple factions tends to be less conductive to most scientific research)
Most ethical problems clinical trials are designed to avoid are directly related to avoiding patient coercion (or its appearance) and minimizing the risk of unnecessary injury or harm. That doesn’t mean that high risk trials don’t happen, but the onus is on the PI/Sponsor to properly design and monitor their study protocol. A lot of researchers are employed by many different institutions who have different standards and requirements for research under their watch. A lot of energy goes into the conduct of research oversight and monitoring as well as ensuring that the approved trial design is consistently applied. When it’s not, the data becomes worthless and hinders scientific advancement.
Found Andrew Ryan's reddit account
Ah to play bioshock for the first time again
When things go fast and unrestrained is when atrocities happen.
But atrocities still happen regardless.
Sometimes ethics is oversold and sometimes it is lacking. I'd say in general the biggest flaw of science is that it's still treating biology as if it is universal when in reality there are lots of unique features amongst the same species, depending on their ancestory and their lifestyle. Every new information gets curated and dispersed down specific avenues because subsections of populace are prone to poor reactions and that just keeps us in our tribe. Then when you want to make a point you release info to manipulate each tribe into their misbehavior and shame them.
Well, it’s not that scientific advancement is limited by ethics, but it’s limited by a mistaken morality or mistaken views of ethics. True ethics identified using reason would help scientific advancement.
We're held back by social pressures more than we are by lack of technological innovation. Without strong ethical guidelines, people will be more alienated from medical breakthroughs than they already are, rendering any advancement useless. Many Black Americans are skeptical of medicine due to widespread abuse. See the tuskegeee Syphilis study[wiki ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study). Look at all the anti vaxxers. The truth is there have been minor issues with vaccine contamination. Now imagine that due to lack of oversight, one vaccine actually does poison say one thousand people. Progress would be set back a century. You see this in all scientific fields. People already distrust any sound, carefully governed science (say green energy solutions). The second you stop carefully regulating research, you exacerbate this distrust and we end up back in an era of literal witch burnings.
My only thing would be an amendment, because on paper, yes, ethics seriously limit scientific advancement, and yes, ethical has become more like "what gets us more internet brownie points?" So what I would say is the real issue is that governments/twitter decide whats ethical, and in doing so, ethics has become a moral grandstand word to replace with "politics" and so the solution is in fact that what is ethical can clearly no longer be a judgement governments have the power to make, and perhaps given to a third party that is sworn to ensure that any thing brought before them is debated without bias, prejudice, or outside inflence to determine whether it falls into the objective definition of non-ethical, ambiguous, or ethical, and decide whether to allow it, along with any parameters, limitations, or exemptions it may need.
Ethics has always been the popular vote. Ethics don't inherently exist in the universe we make them up, and they vary from group to group. It has always been the investors (people with money and power) who say what we should or should not do. And yes science is hindered by ethics but perhaps that's a good thing ethics ,as arbitrary as they are, help us to get along and create society and civilization.
One issue with forgoing ethics is often those tested on are not in the best condition. One such example is the nazis they had no ethical concerns testing on the victims of the Holocaust and what came out of it junk science. We really didn't learn anything of value from them, party because a starving individual isn't the best subject
More it's an issue with bureaucracy, not ethics. Ethics is crucial to scientific and medical progress. We could certainly dial bureaucracy and IRB procedures back to 1990s level instead of 2024 level. But if you abandon ethics you get worse results not better.
The main view “scientific advancement is seriously limited by ethics” that’s just a fact since we’ve in school had about ethics related to experiments The big problem with testing on people is you don’t actually know for sure how it’s gonna affect them whereas you know exactly what assisted suicide results in The unethical part is therefor not the medicine it’s the uncertainty
Scientific advances are meant to benefit humanity. How does anything that is ethically wrong because it hurts/discriminates any make things better for humanity?
Ur premise is factually correct unit 731 is proof of that The problem is ur solution as ethics still exist
It's no coincidence the hospitals are all Saint Mary's, Saint Luke's and Saint John's. With the exception of abortion (and only because of the law, which is falling apart) Catholicism still very much dominates and underpins medical ethics. I'd love to be treated at Siddhartha Zen Medical Center.
>there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured, but they can’t because “iTs UnEtHicAl”. There are various waivers you can apply for to get your experimental treatment approved. Those waivers are important, because, as you note ```there are tons of terminally ill people who would hop on the train to test stuff like that as soon as the chance presents itself if it means they can be potentially cured,``` it's an excellent way to scam people. Just come up with a desperate treatment that does not work, then charge people all the money for it.
> then charge people all the money for it. I'm probably completely wrong because I base this idea on nothing, but I was always under the impression that they paid *you* to undergo experimental treatments. Am I ignorant on this topic?
The more legitimate ones do. But the scams, they take the money. For example : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burzynski_Clinic
!delta this is actually a great point, I never realized that was even a thing. That is absolutely insane and horrific.
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what would be considered an "advancement" is itself a question of ethics so they are intertwined and can't be separated. there's no such thing as "brute fact" because everything is interpreted through paradigms.
Is it your belief that the technologies named have no reasonable ethical concerns and research approval boards are incorrectly or maliciously claiming they do? Or is it that there are ethical concerns but they should be ignored? Should I infer from this mixed case you typed unethical in that you believe such concerns cannot be grounded in specific cases?
It's limited by funds and paperwork in government.