Presumed consent and priority allocation systems for organ donation legislation in the United States: Making the moral case

Abstract

ere human life was cheap and test subjects plentiful were used as laboratories. In 2010 the US government apologized to Guatemala for allowing U.S. doctors to infect Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis 65 years earlier, while acknowledging dozens of similar experiments were performed in the United States. Among these included studies that often involved making healthy people sick or keeping sick patients ill, such as in the Tuskegee syphilis study. These experiments were often life threatening and took place with the direct approval and/or supervision of some of the country's most prestigious research institutions and some of the country's leading medical researchers.