Questioning Privacy Protections in Research; New York Times, 10/23/11

Patricia Cohen, New York Times; Questioning Privacy Protections in Research:

"Hoping to protect privacy in an age when a fingernail clipping can reveal a person’s identity, federal officials are planning to overhaul the rules that regulate research involving human subjects. But critics outside the biomedical arena warn that the proposed revisions may unintentionally create a more serious problem: sealing off vast collections of publicly available information from inspection, including census data, market research, oral histories and labor statistics."

U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Tests in Guatemala; New York Times, 10/2/10

Donald G. McNeil, Jr., New York Times; U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Tests in Guatemala:

"From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin...

In a twist to the revelation, the public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades. Late in his own life, Dr. Cutler continued to defend the Tuskegee work.

His unpublished Guatemala work was unearthed recently in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh by Professor Reverby, a medical historian who has written two books about Tuskegee."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=facebook%20ethics&st=cse