IS HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION MORALLY RIGHT? WHAT IS THE POSITION OF THE CHURCH?

BRIEFLY DEFINED: 

Human Experimentation is an experiment or research involving human subjects that are designed either to enhance the professional capabilities of individual physicians or to contribute to the font of knowledge in those sciences that are traditionally considered basic in the medical context e.g biochemistry, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, epidemiology and cognate behavioural science.

TYPES OF HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION: There are two types of  Human Experimentation namely Therapeutic and Non-Therapeutic

Therapeutic experimentation is concerned with the acquisition of generalizable knowledge. Here the subjects are themselves expected to benefit medically from the new drug, vaccine, treatment, or diagnostic procedure being tried. For example, the first patients on a kidney dialysis machine and coronary bypass surgery were therapeutic. These procedures were used on the subjects for their benefit because it promises to be more effective than other available therapy.

Non-therapeutic experimentation is said to be experimentation whose sole aim is to provide the information sought by the researchers. It is not concerned with providing therapy for the research subjects. For example, in the 1940s, 18 human subjects were injected with plutonium at several American universities to observe where it would go in their bodies. This experiment was to determine the risk to workers exposed to plutonium.

THE CHURCH'S POSITION ON HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

The Church recognizes that scientific, medical or psychological experiments on human individuals contribute to the healing of the sick and the advancement of public health. Consequently, she affirms that human experimentations cannot be legitimate acts that are in themselves contrary to the dignity of persons and the moral law.

The church also recognizes that improvements in the medical treatment of disease primarily depend on progress in research. In this way, medicine has been able to make a decisive contribution in wiping out lethal epidemics; treating serious illnesses successfully, and notably the duration and quality of life in most of the developed world.

For the Church, experimentation on a human being is not morally legitimate if it exposes the subject’s life or physical and psychological integrity to disproportionate or avoidable risks. 

For the Church, experimentation on human persons without their informed consent or those who legitimately speak for them, does not conform to the dignity of the human person.

The Church respects and supports scientific research when it has a genuinely humanist orientation, avoiding any form of instrumentalization or destruction of the human being and keeping itself free from the slavery of political and economic interests. For the Church, the aims, methods and means of research must always respect the dignity of every human being, at every stage of his or her development and in every phase of experimentation. 

For the Church, experimentation Human subjects especially those “vulnerable” such as the human embryos are ethically unacceptable. This is because of the high risk of irreversible damage to them and even death. Therefore, any experimentation on the human embryo that does not have the goal of obtaining direct benefits for his/her health, cannot be considered morally licit. The church sternly warns against the production of living human embryos for the preparation of embryonic stem cells as well as its supply to those who wish to use them for experiments because it is illicit and sinful. 

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