Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments This book had its origins in conversations, both in person and in cyberspace, among its three editors. We agreed on the urgency of raising the questions asked in these chapters—and decided to assemble world authorities on both the historical cases and the contemporary issues investigated here. Unwilling to imply that unethical medical research is a problem only of the past, we sought to explore how the rationalization mechanism operates today as well. The persons we pinpointed for this project gathered for a conference at the University of Pennsylvania April 28 to May 1, 2004. We convened in Philadelphia under the rubric “Going Too Far: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research in Japan, Germany, and the United States.” We enjoyed strong support from two research units at Penn—the Center for East Asian Studies, under the direction of G. Cameron Hurst III, and the Center for Bioethics, directed by Arthur F. Caplan. Financial support was provided by a grant to the CEAS from the U.S. Department of Education. Generous additional support was received from the US–Japan Friendship Commission through its director, Eric Gangloff; Penn’s School of Medicine and its dean, Arthur H. Rubinstein; the special fund of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences; the Penn Humanities Forum; the Penn Lauder CIBER; the E. Dale Saunders Council; individual departments at Penn; and the discretionary fund of the Director-General of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Sadly, one of our colleague-contributors, Rolf Winau of Berlin, died very suddenly while this volume was in preparation. In addition to being a physician, he had been a leading authority on the history of the research use of human subjects. We are very grateful to his colleague, Volker Hess of Berlin’s Center for Humanities and Health Sciences, Charité, for checking the ¤nal proofs of Winau’s essay here. Paula Roberts, the Assistant Director of Penn’s Center for East Asian Studies, skillfully and un®appably coordinated our funding, travel, and conference logistics . Max Dionisio was an absolutely reliable coordinator of all on-theground details; he made the conference ®ow with ease. Since we decided early on to reach out for quality of expertise not necessarily complemented by a scholar’s ability to write and lecture in English, translators and interpreters would, we knew, be required. During what were often lively conference interchanges , Alexander Bennett and Frank Chance adroitly sent comments in Japanese into English and vice versa. The team of persons who, in advance and often within terribly compressed time-frames, had skillfully translated most of the papers was composed of Nona Carter, Adrian Daub, Denis Gainty, Jeffrey Graves, William Hammell, Sari Kawana, Stephen Miller, Robin Orlansky, Rika Saito, and Jonathan Siegel. Also assisting with logistics were Jennifer McCaskie and Kenji Saito. Cheri Love designed a stunning poster for the conference and Nicole Riley assisted later in handling manuscripts and proofs. The collaboration of Penn colleagues was invaluable. Those who contributed greatly by giving prepared responses to the conference papers were Ronald Granieri, Nien-hê Hsieh, Rahul Kumar, Luigi Mastroiani, and Paul Root Wolpe. Linda Chance, Jennifer Conway, Ruth Cowan, Sherrill Davis, Margaret Guinan, Richard Herring, Lynn Lees, Irene Lukoff, Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Wendy Steiner, and Liliane Weisberg helped us greatly. Ongoing discussions with colleagues in Penn’s Faculty Seminar on Ethics in the Professions were also a stimulus for completing this work. Ann Mongoven, on the faculty of Indiana University, not only attended but also contributed a comment on one of the papers. Attendees came not only from within the United States but from Japan as well. During the summer and fall of 2003, Kyoto’s International Research Center for Japanese Studies provided funds and a venue for William LaFleur to explore the possibility and shape of this project. Its director at the time, Tetsuo Yamaori, was supportive from the outset. Persons at Indiana University Press deserving mention in gratitude are Robert Sloan and Jane Quinet. Carol Kennedy was a careful and always helpful copyeditor . Thanks for helpful comments go also to anonymous readers of the original manuscript. xii Acknowledgments Dark Medicine ...