5 ms·

It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagn

It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

zero-sharp 2y ago
There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos (radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)
greenavocado 2y ago
It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf
surfingdino 2y ago
Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.
- mangamadaiyan 2y ago
  Governments are happy to exploit their citizens for any -- or no -- reason whatsoever.
  - hkpack 2y ago
    People with power are happy to exploit other people for their own benefits if they can get away with it. We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too. And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.
hobobaggins 2y ago
Wow, and it was actually heart disease that took him and not the radiation directly. This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy) https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano
krisoft 2y ago
I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process. And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals. Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      True. When is the time to remove from checklists, and when is the time to add to them. If the feedback-loop isn't properly closed, you get imbalance.
      - nickpp 2y ago
        Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives". The system is unbalanced by default.
jorvi 2y ago
And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s. To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Incidents like these decrease confidence in the medical establishment, which only has a net-negative effect. Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments. Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole. There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it. [0] - https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elderly-chinese-are-unvaccinated https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder... [1] - https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-case-study-understanding-the-impact-of-polio-vaccine-disinformation-in-pakistan/ https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    > While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  I think when you forgo high scrutiny you end up with a lot of sloppy research. You literally have problems with a sloppy study showing something and then needing ten increasingly rigorous studies to show it's bunk. So ethics review probably puts the kabosh on a lot of bad or unnecessary studies. Which is a positive.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Modern polite correct cancel culture snowflakes discover science. This is hilarious. Everything we have nowadays was researched or discovered using "crazy", "unethical", unrestrained science.
- arresin 2y ago
  Whatever we get out of injecting someone with plutonium isn’t worth it.

zero-sharp 2y ago

There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos (radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)

greenavocado 2y ago

It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf

surfingdino 2y ago

Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.

mangamadaiyan 2y ago
Governments are happy to exploit their citizens for any -- or no -- reason whatsoever.
- hkpack 2y ago
  People with power are happy to exploit other people for their own benefits if they can get away with it. We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too. And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.

hobobaggins 2y ago

Wow, and it was actually heart disease that took him and not the radiation directly. This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy) https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano

krisoft 2y ago

I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process. And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.

actionfromafar 2y ago
The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals. Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    True. When is the time to remove from checklists, and when is the time to add to them. If the feedback-loop isn't properly closed, you get imbalance.
    - nickpp 2y ago
      Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives". The system is unbalanced by default.

jorvi 2y ago

And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s. To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.

alephnerd 2y ago
Incidents like these decrease confidence in the medical establishment, which only has a net-negative effect. Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments. Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole. There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it. [0] - https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elderly-chinese-are-unvaccinated https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder... [1] - https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-case-study-understanding-the-impact-of-polio-vaccine-disinformation-in-pakistan/ https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.
Gibbon1 2y ago
I think when you forgo high scrutiny you end up with a lot of sloppy research. You literally have problems with a sloppy study showing something and then needing ten increasingly rigorous studies to show it's bunk. So ethics review probably puts the kabosh on a lot of bad or unnecessary studies. Which is a positive.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

Modern polite correct cancel culture snowflakes discover science. This is hilarious. Everything we have nowadays was researched or discovered using "crazy", "unethical", unrestrained science.

arresin 2y ago
Whatever we get out of injecting someone with plutonium isn’t worth it.