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Bioethics
Violation of the Four Pillars

(This the section that Justin & Rebecca worked on).

Controversy

Southam’s violation of medical ethics as well as the decision in the Hyman v. Jewish Chronic Disease case was highly criticized and ridiculed in the media at the time, being referred to as the "hottest public debate on medical ethics since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi physicians" by Science in 1964. The scandal quickly placed further attention on unethical human experimentation, however, the publicity was short-lived and did little more than raise awareness on bioethical issues.

After the public discovery of Southam’s actions, one immediate action was Southam being censured by the Regents of the University of the State of New York. Today, Southam’s work is recognized of one of several controversial instances of human experimentation during the Cold War era that prompted reform initiatives in the field of bioethics. As time progressed and such unethical experiments became more known to the public, many procedures were developed in order to prevent ethical violations from occurring, such as post-experimentation review, screening entries of experiments submitted to medical journals,and the investigator-monitor system. For example, the United States Public Health Service started to review experiments with human subjects, authorize the procedures, and secure informed consent before issuing grants to the establishment conducting the experiment in order to prevent experiments that violate bioethics to occur.