Introduction

My issue is exploitation on human experimentation for medical research. I choose my Fire Project issue because during Biology Ms. Nelson told us about a case where there was a women who had cancer and after she passed away medical researchers kept using her cancer cells to do experiments on. I felt that this issue was a form of exploitation because the women who had cancer and not even her family received any compensation for using her cells. Another reason why I choose my project was because during Chemistry class Mr. MD gave us an article that explained how Puerto Rican women were exploited in order to test birth control pills. I am passionate about this issue because there are many people to this day who don’t see exploitation as a form of injustice. It’s a very sad issue because many people are exploited due to the fact that they’re people of color, children, elderly, mentally ill, low-income, etc. This issue matters because these people are our people. The people who are taken advantage of are the people who usually suffer from this injustice just because they don’t fit the perfect picture to society.

Through this project I hope to make people aware of what exactly is exploitation. I plan to help people become more self-aware of all the forms of unethical research that is going on in the world. I want people to become more concerned about the people around them and not only the people that look like them. This issue is important to me because people like me are the people who fall into that category of the ones who would most likely be exploited. I am blessed enough to have not faced a form of direct exploitation but blindly every single person is being exploited because of their skin color. I have had the experience of living in a community were the medical attention has been treated very poorly. This issue is important to those who don’t necessarily look like me because once people start to treat each other like human beings then the world would be a less cruel place to live in. I want people to see the many struggles that other people face so they can then base their actions on what other more unfortunate people face in order to help those around them.   

In our science classes, we are taught the core material with the incorporation of social injustices. We learn about the exploitation of people and the fight for social change. Exploitation in science is an issue that at first seems like the things we need to change are obvious: give credit where it is due--not just to white males, do not experiment on people without consent, share honest results from clinical trials, to name a few. However, in my environmental science class, where I learned about various cases of unethical science experiments, I got the impression that sometimes the approaches are more complex because people are not always honest, and more recently, it is not just scientists who are taking part in developing pharmaceutical drugs and other forms of treatment--corporations are increasingly becoming involved which complicates approaches and accountability. 


I am passionate about the issue because I have grown up around a community that is constantly approached with incentives. Incentives are used in order to get consent from people when, if the circumstances were different, those same people would not be giving their consent. This is a scenario that many low-income communities experience as well as developing countries who are targeted by pharmaceutical companies. 


Aside from raising awareness about this issue so that people are conscious of what is happening with the medicine they are buying, I hope that this project makes people ask more questions to their physicians or people trying to get their participation in clinical trials. It is also important to me to reach out with this project to my classmates who are future physicians and scientists so that our generation puts an end to the violation of human rights.

Thesis: Although experimentation is needed in this developing nation there should be a line drawn on unethical testing on humans.