Those involved with administering research funding acknowledged the public disapproval generated by the exposure of gross abuses in medical research. Examples of abuses in medical research included the uncontrolled promotional distribution of thalidomide throughout the United States, labeled as an experimental drug; the administration of cancer cells to senile and debilitated patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital; and the uncontrolled distribution of LSD to children at Harvard Medical Center through Professors Alpert and Leary. One of the most famous cases of gross ethical neglect and abuse by medical researchers is the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment which spanned from 1932 to 1972 which studied the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African American men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. …show more content…
The regulations that followed from their work were designed to protect experimental subjects’ autonomy by mandating voluntary, informed consent, to protect subject and public welfare, to protect privacy and maintain confidentiality of data, and to ensure equability in the selection of subjects. The National Commission accomplished this by transferring a great deal of authority from central bureaucracy that funded research to the newly-created Institutional Review Boards (IRB). The National Commission set up the following guidelines for the IRBs principles of decision making: decisions should be made in an informed manner, decisions should be made with enough time for deliberation and reflection, decisions should be made under calm circumstances, decision makers should be willing to make public their conclusions and reasons, collective decision making can help reduce bias and error and increase the chance of rational decision making, and allow time for circumstances and opinions to change. After creating the IRBs, the National Commission was no longer needed and was disbanded. When the IRBs were created, they encountered two major problems: being able to determine the difference between experimentation and treatment and recognizing the proper way to obtain informed