To: The United States House of Representatives and The United States Senate
Don't roll back human protections in medical research
Maintain and strengthen the protections for human subjects of medical research against harm and abuses; prosecute those who conduct or authorize medical experiments without the fully informed consent of the humans subjected to those experiments.
Why is this important?
The National Institutes of Health and some medical researchers currently defend the recent SUPPORT experiment of restricting oxygen breathing help for premature babies that killed 23 "extra" babies in the low-oxygen group. The researchers had said they were concerned about the safety of those babies but went ahead with their knowingly fatal project anyway, without informing the parents about the risks. Now the NIH and many medical researchers want to do away with the "research-hindering" obligation to tell research subjects about the risks and to relapse to the abusing of people as disposable guinea pigs that led to the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics and similar solemn declarations. For details, see
http://retinopathyofprematurity.org/RelapseToPreNurembergCodeBioethics.htm
http://retinopathyofprematurity.org/RelapseToPreNurembergCodeBioethics.htm