WEBVTT
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My business is your business.
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It's all within my lady business with me.
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All right.
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Hello, everybody.
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I got a very exciting guest today.
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At least exciting for me.
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It's my friend Emily Anderson.
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Doctor Emily Anderson.
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That's right.
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And she is my smartest friend.
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Sorry, all my other friends.
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Thanks, Mary.
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And she is a doctor.
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I mean, doing better than anybody else's.
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I'm a PhD.
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Which stands for phony doctor.
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Oh, it does?
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Do people when people find it?
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That's a joke someone told me like 30 years ago.
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And I say it once a week.
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Do you do you know what PhD actually stands for?
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I don't.
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I'm gonna be using the Socratic method a lot during this podcast.
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I need to be reminded of the Socratic method.
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It it means when I ask you questions.
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Like I'm Socrates.
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Oh, okay.
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Do you know what the Ph stands for in PhD?
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Is it like balanced, like a woman secret?
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Like Ph balanced for her for your I don't even remember what that stands for.
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I don't remember what that stands for.
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It stands for philosophy.
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So PhD means doctor of philosophy.
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So no matter what you have a doctorate in, you are a doctor of philosophy in that subject.
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Oh I'm a doctor of philosophy in healthcare ethics.
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Um and thank you for bringing that up because I didn't get further further into your uh your C V.
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So Emily.
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Please introduce me.
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So this is Dr.
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Emily Anderson, and she is has her PhD in medical history?
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Medical Healthcare ethics.
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Healthcare ethics.
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That's what your PhD is in, is healthcare ethic ethics.
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Healthcare ethics, yeah, technically.
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Does it say that on the on the diploma?
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Yep.
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So Emily, how did you get there?
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Like, why did you decide to be a medical ethicist or a healthcare ethicist?
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That is the that is a great question.
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I'm trying to imagine where to start.
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Um What was your undergrad in?
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My my undergrad was actually in English and anthropology uh and gender studies.
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And I was always well, I'll I guess I'll start here.
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When I went to college, I was an accounting major because I wanted to be in I wanted to be in the FBI.
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Oh.
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Because of Twin Peaks.
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Oh, yeah.
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Yeah.
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I was about to say Dana Scully, but that's that's that's a little too late.
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Yeah, I wanted to be in the I wanted to be in the FBI, I wanted to like solve mysteries.
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And accounting you thought was your path?
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Well, yeah, because like that is actually a someone had told me that actually was a path, and I was really good at math.
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And so I was like, I'll be an accounting major.
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And I don't know if you remember the 90s.
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Uh but if you do you weren't there.
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We don't really get a lot of counseling and direction about college and careers and all of that.
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And so I went to college to be a FBI agent like Agent Cooper, Dale Cooper, or Dana Scully.
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And I did really bad in my microeconomics class, but I did really well.
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I actually didn't even do that well, but I really enjoyed my composition class that I had to take, where we read, we focused on monsters the whole semester, and I had to write a paper on Frankenstein, which was which is very timely.
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Um and Frankenstein is very influential in bioethics, which is the field that I ended up in millions of years later.
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Yeah.
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Because it's like the story of, you know, men playing God with science and you know, things like that.
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So, anyways, and I haven't seen the new Frankenstein movie.
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So it's good.
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I actually I did watch it.
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We have that on our list.
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So, anyways, I got I've always all of that is to say, like, I love writing, and I uh I I fell in love with writing, which is not something that I enjoyed much in high school.
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But in college, I really fell in love with writing and I fell in love with anthropology and like studying humans.
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And I always was very interested in health, but I knew very early on that I didn't want to do anything clinical.
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I didn't want to be a doctor, I didn't want to be a nurse, I didn't want to touch people or deal with individual deal with individual people.
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It's not really about bodies, it's more about I am a very I I learned very early that I am a very empathic person and I'm very sensitive.
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And so I could never be in a job where like every day I was absorbing other people's like pain or trauma or or difficulties.
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So I knew but but again, because it was the 90s and I didn't really get a lot of good guidance, I didn't really understand what other careers were like available to me.
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So I moved to Washington, DC after I graduated college.
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I was looking for jobs in some sort of women's advocacy something.
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So I had interviewed at places like League of Women Voters, I was looking at like NARAL.
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I had been offered a job at a place that's now called Catholics for Choice, which is like a Catholic pro-choice organization.
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And those jobs were very, very low paying.
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I needed to make money because my boyfriend was a graduate student.
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I ended up taking this random job.
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Why why does you why is your boyfriend being a grad student mean you had to make money?
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Well, he was only making like$10,000 a year.
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So I had to be the bread I had to be the breadwinner.
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Yeah and make and make$15,000 a year because you could live off of that in 1998.
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Exactly.
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And so I took a job at the American Psychiatric Association in the Office of Research, and I ended up as when I was there, I was learning about a lot about mental health and how mental and how psych psychiatric services are funded at the time were funded differently than health services.
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You know, most people's insurance wouldn't cover, wouldn't cover mental health services.
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Mental health parity advocacy was a big thing.
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I was also learning a lot about research and things that were happening um in psychiatric research at the time.
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And I got a lot of a lot of opportunities to be exposed to a lot of different issues in in mental health and research and a little bit in ethics.
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But everyone that I worked with who was sort of like a step above me professionally had a master's degree either in psychology or public health.
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So then when that boyfriend, who is not the man that I'm currently married to, as Mary knows, when that guy finished his master's, then it was time for me to get my master's, and I decided to go for a master's of public health.
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I focused on health education.
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I worked for a professor that did a lot of research, and I got very interested in research and issues related to ethics both in research and public health, because a bunch of a bunch of things that were going on at the time that I won't bore you with.
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And so then I decided, um, I didn't necessarily think I was gonna get a PhD when I got my master's.
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But then I realized that if I didn't get a PhD, I was always gonna be working for people with with PhDs.
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And that was a little bit frustrating because in academia and academic research, you're always very limited if you don't have the PhD.
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Um so then I decided to go get a PhD and I was trying to decide, you know, do I wanna, do I wanna get a PhD where I'm very much focused on crunching numbers and doing statistics and doing that kind of research, which would be more the public health route.
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But I was very be I was very much becoming interested in ethics and like normative questions, which means like what should we do?
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And so I decided to take a little bit of a chance and go into this very like niche field and focus on research ethics and get an interdisciplinary PhD, which is that that's the risky part of it.
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Because, you know, if you get a PhD in psychology, then you get a job at a psychology department and you teach psychology.
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Not every university has a big bioethics center.
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Some universities invest more and usually these are in medical schools.
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Sometimes people with bioethics degrees get jobs in philosophy.
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So it's just you're sort of like a weird match.
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It's not as much of like a one-to-one match as if you're like an English professor or a psychology professor or history.
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When did the concept in history?
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When did the concept of like bio I mean, obviously going back as far as Frankenstein?
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Yes.
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But like the when did bioethics become a were like like were they always like is bioethics gone hand in hand with like medical education or is Yeah, that's something that's such a good question, Mary.
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I I said it sounded fishes when I well the way I said it, but it's not.
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Because it is a very new field, and there's a lot of, you know, as a new field, there's a lot of like navel gazing and a lot of like histories of bioethics.
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And it was sort of a it was a convergence of a bunch of different things.
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So a lot of times when people tell the history of bioethics, they start with another movie that's out right now, Nuremberg.
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Um, because of Mengele?
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Well, because of Mengele, but also because of the way that, you know, what drove World War II, what drove Hitler, right?
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Oh, yeah.
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The the quest for a pure race.
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So it was very like eugenics driven.
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And there's, you know, I'm trying to kind of shortcut it here, but this idea that medicine was like pervert the the the knowledge medical knowledge was like perverted for this political agenda was kind of at the center of of um what was happening in World War II.
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And then there was also the experiments that happened in Nazi concentration camps that were both to advance the agenda of the Nazi Party and also to generate knowledge that would help the German army or the Naz the Nazi army.
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So um, how do we care for wounds?
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How like if somebody, I mean, this sounds really crass, but some of the questions they were looking at it were things like if someone falls off a boat into if a soldier falls off a boat into freezing water, how long before they die so that we know if it's worth trying to save them or not?
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Mm-hmm.
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So a lot of that that does seem like a like a good thing to know.
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I mean, it's like hard because you have to test on some he's like throw somebody in.
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Yeah, but that's really that's like really at the center.
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So my the focus of a lot of my work is ethics in research with humans.
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And that's really at the center of ethics with of research with humans is like if you could abuse people and do anything to them without their consent and treat people as less than human, cut open their brains, you know, test a variety of different things, we could actually gain a lot of knowledge.
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And there is debates about, you know, is it ethical to use some of the knowledge that was discovered, you know, through those experiments?
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A lot of those experiments were garbage because they were totally driven by racist agenda.
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But some of the stuff that was kind of trying to look at how do we keep soldiers healthy, fun tidbit, like everything we know about how to prevent and cure sexually transmitted infections comes from World War II.
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Because what's the number one reason that soldiers weren't fit for battle?
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They had syphilis and gonorrhea and things like that.
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Really?
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So yeah.
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So there's, you know, a lot of a lot of like the whole fact that we have all this investment in medical research in the US really came out of World War II and money that we were investing in our country to try to keep sold soldiers healthy as well.
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And then Germany was doing research and Japan was was doing research and yada yada yada yada yada yada.
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Didn't we like import like after after well, and I would like to know the Nuremberg part of it too, but like with like Project Zeus or something, didn't we like bring a lot of Nazis over after the war, like kind of secretly to work in like engineering, like in the Rand Corporation and stuff?
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Like I feel like I I'm sort of probably butchering the I do not know.
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But I do know yeah, yeah, that I do not that I do not know.
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I have not read that history.
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Um, and I do need to read more.
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One of the things I on my long list of things I need to read more about is sort of the history of military research in the US, because it's not something I know a ton about.
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I know a little bit about like MKUltra and like the psychedelic research.
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But I need to learn, I need to learn more about that.
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But so then sort of like this well, okay, so what happened at the Nuremberg trials was that in order for the Nazi doctors who were conducting research in the death camps to be tried against a standard, some American doctors had to put put together what's called the Nuremberg Code, which is sort of the first international code of research ethics, which is basically a list of principles of how people should be treated when we use them in research.
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And the first thing is we shouldn't do research on people without their consent.
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And then there's other things like there has to be social and scientific value.
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People who are doing the research have to be qualified to do it.
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And it's a pretty, it's a very thin document and it's a it's a static document because it was just a one-time thing.
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And then since then, there's been evolutions of like international codes of ethics, but it started with Nuremberg so that those Nazi doctors could be tried against, you know, what was considered to be a global st a global standard at the time.
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So they put it forth like this is what this is what we've decided is what you should have been doing.
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Yeah.
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And so you're like better, like retroactively holding them accountable to something that didn't exist a little bit.
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Not to defend the Nazis, but Right.
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But it was sort of based on it was based on sort of what is common practice at the time because that hadn't really been delineated or coded or put in writing.
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The interesting thing is that there was one country, this is a Jeopardy question.
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I know you love Jeopardy.
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There was one country in the whole world that actually had a code of ethics for research with humans prior to the Nuremberg Code.
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Would you like to guess what country that was?
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Okay.
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It's so it'd be a country like was is it an old country?
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It has to be an old country.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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So like in Egypt.
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But don't overthink it.
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Don't overthink it.
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It was a I said.
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Is it Egypt?
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No, it's Germany.
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Oh.
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So they did have a code of ethics.
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They did have a code of ethics that they weren't following, yeah.
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And it didn't even went by the wayside.
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Like that was from, I don't know, again, I now I feel like I'm out of my depth, but it was like that was from like the pre like the previous administration before Hil Hitler came in and take over and took over.
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But they that version of the German government had some sort of code of for doctors for when they were conducting medical, medical research.
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But then the other part of the story is that because the US had made such an investment in scientific research and medicine in World War II, medicine actually started to be able to come up with things that kept people alive longer.
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So, you know, if it was 1899 and you had tuberculosis, the doctor came and kept you to your house and kept you comfortable while you were dying.
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Now all of a sudden we had like things that could cure people and keeping them live longer.
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And then we had to think about making decisions and who gets what and rationing and you know, all of that sort of thing.
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And so when when were we making those what were we making those decisions around?
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Like like what kinds of things?
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Well, like dialysis.
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During wartime?
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Well, this is maybe like the 50s.
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This was like the 50s and 60s.
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We started to have things like dialysis.
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And dialysis was like a really big issue where kind of bioethics started to bloom or blossom because doctors were saying, like, we can do dialysis.
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Dialysis saves people's lives, it extends people's lives, but we don't have enough resources.
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Who's gonna pay for dialysis?
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And so dialysis is one of the few things, right?
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That like if you need dialysis, the government will pay for pay for your dialysis.
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And that's is that all but is that di when I think of dialysis, I think of like like um like kidney?
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Diabetes, like it's so it's all so is dialysis only for that, or is there like other things that dialysis helps with?
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Well, anytime you go into kidney failure, one of the main reasons is diabetes, but there's other things that that could send you into into kidney failure.
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But so when doctors started to have to make these difficult decisions about what to do and patients, there were more choices for patients.
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That was when bioethics really grew as a profession because physicians started to invite, this is sort of the language of some of these of these histories.
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Doctors started to invite philosophers, theologians, and others like to the bedside or into the clinic to help them make decisions about what to do.
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And policy started to have to think you know, policy start had to start to integrate ethics.
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And part of it was because again, I think it's really I think it's really important for ri for people to realize like how short of a time it's been since medicine was actually able to do anything helpful.
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I mean, yeah, like when you think about like, you know, the Civil War was when they like began to figure out that you washing your hands can keep you from not dying.
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I also think, you know, just between you and me, like once you turn 50, you realize like how short modern history has has been.
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And you think like, oh, all this stuff was like very um like very recent.
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And so the other thing I'll mention, you know, talking about the history of bioethics is that, you know, the uh the US Public Health Service study of syphilis in Negro in the Negro Mail, which is the official name of the Tuskegee, what a lot of people call this Tuskegee syphilis study, and a lot of people have heard about that.
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I call it the U.S.
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Public Health Service study of syphilis in the Negro Mail because number one, I want to remind people that this was a study that was funded and conducted by the U.S.
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Public Health Service.
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And number two, the people of Tuskegee would like everyone to stop calling it the Tuskegee syphilis study because they didn't ask for it and they didn't have anything to do with it.
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They were just the people that were used in the in the study.
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Oh, like they and then weren't they giving it to them?
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Like weren't they giving to them?
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So that is a major that is a major misconception, and I will come I will come back to that because there's another story of what happened in Guatemala.
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But what happened in um the syphilis study that took place in Macon County, Alabama was that there had been some observational studies of syphilis that had took place in Scandinavia where men that had syphilis were just observed to figure out what happened to their bodies.
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And that's when they figured out, you know, there if un untreated syphilis will have will affect your heart, it will affect your brain, it will affect your your other organs.
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And at that time in the 20s, when the syphilis study started in the US, there weren't a lot of great treatments for syphilis, and they were pretty like gnarly.
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Like it involved like putting ointments on your shankers and all of that sort of stuff.
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And it wasn't like it didn't work very well.
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It was kind of gnarly, had a lot of risks.
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So were they like making up what it could potentially be because they didn't like like how do you like when you have a when it when you've got like bad solutions to a problem like that, like is that because they're just they weren't studying or they were just like throwing shit at the wall to see what they're doing.
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It just was a scary.
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You know, so like in the 20s, like there were there were not yet very many antibiotics.
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So this is so this is like part of the story.
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So at the time, there wasn't much known about how to treat syphilis, but there was very much known about what happened if you didn't treat syphilis.
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So in the 20s, when the study started, what the public health service was looking for was an area where there was a lot of untreated syphilis and a place where people wouldn't really have access to syphilis treatments.
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So they started this observational study, and what they did was they tested everybody in the county for syphilis or men, black men in the county for syphilis, and they followed them, some people that had syphilis and some people that didn't have syphilis, and they didn't tell them that they had syphilis.
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So men were followed for decades and they were never told that they had syphilis.
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And when they would come in for research data collection, like and they would get things like spinal taps and blood draws and you know all sorts of things.