Speaking of consent issues

[james_davis_nicoll]

'Scientists' used residential school children for ESP research

Comments

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Better than the starvation trials done in Nova Scotia for the sake of "nutrition research".

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

When did patient consent actually become required? Not until the 80s from some things I've read.

[(Anonymous)]

Nuremburg Code was 1947, but that seems to have been non-enforceable.

According to NIH, the first US law was 1962. Lots of regulations etc over the years, with different standards in difference departments, until they were unified in the 1980s. Tinkering seems ongoing, and I suspect that patent protection has a lot to do with some of the rules.

Brief summary here:

http://history.nih.gov/about/timelines_laws_human.html

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Recent dodgyness involves commercial drug testing being outsourced to developing countries with less strict (or nonexistent) oversight of clinical trials.

The stuff you hear from the alt-med crowd is nonsense as always, but it is nonetheless true that the people running the big pharma companies are utter bastards.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think the zero-consent angle was pretty par for the course back then, especially when dealing with marginalized populations. At least this one sounds like it was pretty harmless, which I'd bet was not always the case.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

And even when it was solicited, "consent" used to mean you were consenting for anything the experimenters felt was required to do to you. (Relative) transparency came later.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Meh. It appears that the "responsible adults" agreed to this ("children's consent" is questionable -- cf. "oh, I liked to have sex with uncle Homer") and that this incident was not worth worrying about. Not that some/many aren't, but this one... there seems to have been no harm done to the children playing these games, so WTF.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

*nervous twitch*

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Seems like the sort of thing Scully and Mulder would investigate, if Canada had X-Files.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Possibly with a still-smoldering crater and inbred townsfolk refusing to admit ever having a school.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

And children with glowing eyes, of course.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

Funny, my first thought is this will end up in Margaret Atwood's next novel.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

Mine was, "wasn't this a major plot point in Fringe?"

[andrew barton (from livejournal.com)]

I'm disappointed but unsurprised that our government would have done this, and I'm ESPECIALLY not surprised that it was specifically Mackenzie King's government that did this.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

Given our track record with the First Nations population, I wouldn't be particularly surprised by something like that happening under Mulroney. Or Trudeau, for that matter.

The contempt towards that population's still around in spades. (There are reasons most comment-allowing Canadian news sites tend to make an exception for First Nations topics..)