Human Rights at Home and Abroad: Past, Present, and Future

Although the government has power over many things in this country, this should not give them
the right to violate human rights and put their own people in poor health. Anyone for that matter should
not be able to harm humans in or outside of human testing. So why not take out human testing altogether?
If human testing was stopped, people would not be in these types of unfortunate situations. Most people
do not think of the opportunity scientists have to experiment on real human subjects. Human testing
should be something to be looked at as a way to promote interest in learning more about the human body,
not destroy it. Keeping things a secret to avoid human rights trouble is not the best way to promote this
kind of opportunity. If the Nuremberg Code and a new experimenter oath were created, this would
prevent these maladaptive ways to experiment, promote safer human testing, and also make the public
aware of the experiments that are being conducted. Human experimentation should lead to success stories,
not tragic, secretive ones.
The enforcement of a new oath and the Nuremberg Code seem reassuring, but others have created
an oath to prevent human testing as a whole. Jacob Sullivan (2008) reports in his article:
the Declaration of Helsinki, first adopted in 1964 and amended five times since, prohibits
experimentation on humans. The declaration draws clear lines for acceptable medical research
involving human subjects, such as vaccines. The document was created in order to outlaw the
kind of brutal, inhumane experimentation performed on human subjects by Nazi doctors. (Should
doctors change the Hippocratic Oath?)
Attempts in the past have been made, such as those efforts from Helsinki, and had little to no effect. The
only reason this ‗document‘ exists is from research done over the internet. It is not reliable in current
times because this declaration is unknown to the public. If this ‗document‘ were to be in effect, it would
affect today‘s human testing experiments. The ‗Declaration of Helsinki‘ states prohibiting human
experimentation. This would stop so many discoveries that were founded during the late sixties and
beyond that society would not have the modern technologies and medicines to save lives today. This
would include modern day cancer technologies such as chemotherapies, as well as other methods to make
chemotherapy less harsh on patients through human testing.
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