Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and Respect for Persons | 35
Notes
1
Ruth Macklin, “Dignity Is A Useless Concept,” BMJ 327 (2003): 1419-1420.
2
Ibid., p. 1420.
3
See chapter 12, “Genetics, freedom and human dignity,” of the Nuffield Council
report, available online at www.nuffieldbioethics.org/go/ourwork/behaviouralgenetics/publication_311.html.
4
Macklin, loc. cit.
5
Ibid.
6
Rapid responses to Macklin’s editorial are published online at www.bmj.com/
cgi/eletters/327/7429/1419.
7
See James H. Jones’s Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: The
Free Press, 1981).
8
Resources on the history and sequelae of the Tuskegee study are numerous. A
portal to internet-based resources is available online at www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/assignments/experiment/tuskegee.html.
9
Henry K. Beecher, “Ethics and Clinical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine
274 (1966): 1354-1360.
10
Ibid. p. 1360.
11
Most of the reports of the National Commission are available online from the
website of the President’s Council on Bioethics at www.bioethics.gov/reports/past_
commissions/index.html.
12
The Belmont Report was approved by the National Commission at its 42nd meeting
on June 10, 1978, and published in the Federal Register on April 18, 1979.
Citations in this essay are to a reprint of the report included as an appendix (pp.
253-265) to Belmont Revisited: Ethical Principles for Research with Human Subjects,
ed. James F. Childress, Eric M. Meslin, and Harold T. Shapiro (Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 2005).
13
For discussion, see Evelyne Shuster, “Fifty years later: the significance of the
Nuremberg Code,” New England Journal of Medicine 337 (1999): 1436-1440. The
Nuremberg Code is available online at: http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/nuremberg.html.
14
Belmont Report, p. 255.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., p. 256.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid., p. 257.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., p. 260.
22
Albert Jonsen, “On the Origins and Future of the Belmont Report,” in Belmont
Revisited, p. 8.
23
Tom L. Beauchamp, “The Origins and Evolution of the Belmont Report,” in
Belmont Revisited, p. 19.