The last few days have been rich in scientific scandals. In the United States, a group of researchers announced the development of a genetic test to detect low intelligence in embryos. In China, a geneticist from the Southern University of Science and Technology (Shenzhen) said that before a successful artificial insemination attempt, he changed the DNA of human embryos. As a result, healthy children were born. Most of the academic community condemned these experiments. However, this has already happened in the history of science. We are investigating why scientists are conducting such experiments and whether something can stop them.
The first vaccinations were tested on children
In 1796, the English physician Edward Jenner decided to test his assumption that patients with vaccinia never become infected with human. The most suitable test subject, in the opinion of the researcher, were children. Jenner injected a healthy eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with the contents of pustules (abscesses) from the hand of a peasant woman infected with cowpox. The child fell ill for several days, recovered and became immune to the variola virus - all attempts to infect him with this infection did not lead to anything.
Almost a hundred years later, a similar approach was used by the French scientist Louis Pasteur. But he, unlike Jenner, inoculated an already infected boy with the rabies vaccine he had developed. As a result, the child recovered, and victims of rabid animals from all over Europe were drawn to Pasteur's laboratory.
Today it is pointless to argue that the invention of vaccination radically changed human history. But many contemporaries of Jenner and Pasteur were very negative about the experiments of scientists. The Royal Society of London refused to publish Jenner's work so as "not to risk their reputation," and demonstrations took place outside Pasteur's laboratory demanding an end to experiments - even on animals.
Illustration by RIA Novosti. Source: Vaccine Specialists (www.yaprivit.ru) - site of the National Association of Infection Control Specialists (with the support of the RF Ministry of Health).
In the two centuries since the first vaccination, more than a hundred vaccinations have been developed.
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Test slaves
In April of this year, a monument to one of the founders of modern surgical gynecology, Marion Sims, was removed in New York. A century and a half after the death of the scientist, American society thus condemned his research approach: he tested innovative methods of treatment on black slaves.
Sims dreamed of ridding women of vesicovaginal fistulas - the channels between the bladder and the vagina that appear after a traumatic birth and lead to urinary incontinence. He developed his own method of treating these formations and tested its effectiveness on his slaves, some of whom he specially acquired for experiments.
In addition to the method of treating fistulas, Sims invented the postcoital test for diagnosing infertility, sigmoidoscopy (visual examination of the rectal mucosa) and was the first to remove stones from the patient's gallbladder. These were all real scientific breakthroughs for their time, but Sims' research approaches are today recognized as unethical.
However, as the deputy head of the Center for Shared Use of the Institute of Gene Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, biologist Alexei Deikin, noted in a conversation with a RIA Novosti correspondent, when discussing past experiments, it is important to understand that earlier ethics were different and scientific results were obtained within the framework of ethical research at that time.
Killing transplant
Today, the academic community will definitely condemn a morally questionable experiment, and no scientist will dare to speak out in support of it. The rules for conducting scientific experiments are literally written in blood - the Nuremberg Code of Ethics, which formed the basis of ethical guidelines in all universities in the world, was developed immediately after the end of World War II, when it became known about the inhuman experiments on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
According to this document, all participants in the experiment must give their voluntary consent to its conduct and be able to stop the experiments at any time. Human trials should only be conducted after successful animal tests, and the risk involved in the experiment should not exceed the importance of the problem the trial is intended to address.
However, this does not stop some researchers. So, in 2011, the Swedish transplant doctor Paolo Macchiarini conducted a series of successful, according to him, artificial trachea transplant operations. Later, however, six out of nine operated (including a patient from Russia) died. The rest had time to transplant donor organs.
The investigation showed that the technology developed by the scientist (it was believed that the patient's stem cells, which covered the plastic trachea, would eventually turn into trachea cells) was not tested on animals, and Macchiarini himself tried to hide the facts of the death of patients until the last moment. The doctors were fired from the Karolinska Institute (Sweden), the Kuban State Medical University and the Kazan Federal University. In Sweden, he was charged with manslaughter.
“Speaking about the current state of research ethics, you need to understand that it is determined by legislation, which clearly outlines the boundaries of what is permissible. There are principles of informed consent of patients, humane treatment of animals involved in the experiment, and the rationale for the need to conduct it. In science, the end does not justify the means. But, imposing ethical restrictions on a researcher, one must understand that science is aimed primarily at ensuring human well-being,”explained Alexey Deikin.
Alfiya Enikeeva