Over the past 50 years scientific experiments have gone through a drastic change in ethical procedures. It wasn't too long ago when the U.S. government was conducting secret tests on more than 400 hundred unaware African-American men, and resulted in hundreds of unnecessary deaths and infections. I asked many people if they have heard about the Tuskegee experiments, and surprisingly most of them answered no. I find it interesting that this huge government mishap is not more widely known, so I decided to investigate further into other unethical cases. I ran into an interesting case that was a psychology experiment that Stanley Milgram put together. He tested what extremes individuals would go to when under pressure by a higher authority. Check out this video of the controversial experiment that was replicated in 2009.
I believe ethical issues in research involve each and every one of us in some way or another, and we all need to be informed in past experiences in this subject so we can make the right choices in the future. One question i have is, would more people have known about the Tuskegee experiments if they would have been white men instead of poor African-Americans?
Very cool video! Can't say I'm surprised that humans will do basically whatever in order to obey an authority figure, though it is an interesting phenomena.