Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and Respect for Persons | 21
persons, has a history that begins long before the establishment of the
President’s Council? What, if anything, comes to light when the differing
historical contexts in which the two national forums were created
are compared? To address these questions, I turn first to the context
in which the National Commission was conceived and established.
Respect for Persons, the Belmont Report, and the
National Commission
On July 12, 1974, then President Richard M. Nixon signed into law
Public Law 93-348, the National Research Act, which created the
National Commission and charged its members with several tasks.
One task was to identify the ethical principles that should govern
the conduct of biomedical and behavioral research with human subjects.
Another was to develop guidelines to ensure that specific investigations
would be designed and conducted in accordance with
these principles. The events that led to Congressional passage of the
National Research Act of 1974 are well known but merit explicit
remembrance here. Two years before, in the midst of the civil rights
movement, the now-notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study was brought
to light in a series of newspaper investigations. Funded and conducted
by the U.S. Public Health Service, the Study began in 1932 in
Macon County, Alabama, and enrolled 399 poor African-American
men suffering from syphilis. While its purpose was to track the natural
history of the disease, researchers from the Public Health Service
told the participants that they were subjects in an investigation of
“bad blood,” an umbrella term encompassing several conditions including
syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. 7 In 1947, fifteen years into
the study, penicillin was established as an effective cure for syphilis,
but the Tuskegee researchers withheld the antibiotic from the subjects,
whose participation was enticed and sustained with offers of
free meals, physical examinations, and burial insurance. In the course
of the 40-year study, 28 of the men died of the disease, 100 died of
related complications, and at least 40 wives and 19 children became
infected. 8
The public outrage sparked by the Tuskegee revelations was unprecedented,
though similar abuses in human subjects research had