Five ears ago, he found that a signal pathway is exclusively used by the cancer cell. If you can efficiently block this signal pathway then you can kill the cancer cells without hurting other normal cells. However, the problem is how to find the way to block this pathway without affecting other vital pathways. Change submitted his plan to the managers of Pfizer and they are quite excited about it. They discovered that this plan may cost a lot but the revenue is huge if the plans succeed. The managers decided to support Change with one million dollar.
Change designed five drugs and use monkeys to do the experiment, The experiment goes Like his: Step 1 :use ultra-violet light to make some cells Into cancer cells; Step 2: then Inject the cancer cells Into monkeys and make monkeys get cancer, step 3: delve the monkeys into two groups and let one group to eat the medicine to check whether the medicine works. It is obvious that the monkeys suffer really a lot. After the first stage of the experiment, about 250 monkeys died. What’s more, as the adult monkey is not easy to get cancer, Change often use baby monkeys to inject the cancer cell. There will two more stages and more monkeys will die.
What’s more, the company plan to do the hired stage of the experiment in Africa, where the company can do experiment on some cancer patients. The benefit of doing experiment In Africa is that the law there is not adequate to protect the people and Pfizer will not be caught in serious law slut if the patients die. At first, the experiment was kept secret and went well. However, one former worker In Changes lab, who was fired by Change, leaked the experiment to the news media. After broadcasting, many people were shocked by the miserable 1/6 experience of the monkeys in Changes lab and Pfizer future experiment on human.
Many animal protectors and human right protectors kept on protesting outside the Pfizer building and one of the protectors, Mr… Lee, decided to use laws. In 21 the July, 2013, Lee publicly announced that he will sue Pfizer and Change for their misbehaver. He said: “Even though Pfizer and Dry. Change are pursuing cure for the cancer, they should not take it as an excuse for abusing the monkeys and doing experiments on human as they like. Living in a world without cancer is good. However, if this comfort is traded by the ill-treatment of the baby monkeys and hurting people in less-developed areas, can anybody call it comfort?
Pfizer and Dry. Change should stop their behavior and use some better way to achieve their goal. ” Dry. Change and Pfizer were quite angry about the behavior of the fired employee and felt treated unjustly about this issue. In their defense, Dry. Change made a public announcement to the news media: “We are truly sorry for what’s going on for the monkeys and future experiment on human. However, it is important to know that there are thousands people dying for cancer. The sooner the medicine is developed, the more human lives can be saved. As monkeys are genetically similar to human, we cannot find other animal to do the experiment.
The human experiment is also needed or the medicine can never be used. We Just do the things we need to do. ” The public and the court are caught in a Dilemma. On one hand, about 700 monkeys will die because of the experiment and many African people may suffer from the unexpected effect of the medicine; on the other hand, this experiment might save thousands of human lives. How to choose? Analysis This issue is quite complex and we need to analyze it quite carefully. Professor Audio mentioned a Five-Step model for making difficult ethical decisions.
We can use it 2/6 here. 1 . Classification In this dilemma, there are three obligations for Dry. Change and the Pfizer. The first one is that their experiment on animals is cruel and cause great pain to monkeys. They should not do this to monkeys and it is against the spirit of humanity. The second one is that doing experiment on African people will cause unexpected consequence on these people. The intention of doing so for the company is Just lower the cost. Defects. The third one is beneficence, which is developing the cure for cancer patients is a good deed.
By doing so, Dry. Change and Pfizer can save thousands of lives. 2. Identification of conflicts of obligations Conflicts between first obligation and third obligation: the obligation of protecting the monkeys and curing cancers are conflicting. As Dry. Change mentions, monkeys is the irreplaceable experiment animal. Without animal experiment, we cannot know whether the drug is useful or harmful. So the conflict is quite intense and cannot be eliminated. Conflicts between second obligation and third obligation: the company has the obligation to benefit others.
Using drugs to save people’s lives is beneficence. However, developing the drug needs to do experiment on people, it will hurt them specially when the people are not well protected by the law. These two obligations are also conflicting. 3. Ethical assessment of the Obligations Protecting the animal is the obligation of every human being. With advanced technology, human dominates the world. However, being powerful doesn’t mean that we should do whatever we want. If we mistreat animals and kill them as we want, the animal will extinct sooner or later.
Natural balance will be broken and it will be us who pay the price. So protecting the animals is important. Protecting the poor people is also important. Using people who are not well protected y law to do the experiment is very inhuman. Hypothetically, if the medicine is defected and people’s health gets hurt and need long-term medical care, with limited compensation from the company and undeveloped social care, the life quality of the people will be very bad. Even though the company may save money by doing experiment in Africa, it will cause huge loss to the people there.
Curing the cancer patient is very important: every year there are thousands of thousands people losing their lives because of cancer. If the drug is developed, millions of lives will be saved. 4. Selection of ethically viable option We can see that the last obligation is more important than others. Even though the cost is huge, we can save thousands of lives. The benefit we gain is much more than the cost we bear. On other hand, the cost will only affect for a limited time, but the cure of cancer can benefit people for hundreds of years.
What’s more, with more consideration, we can set up a more reasonable plan, which can lower the cost of the medicine. The plan is as follows: 5. Decision on a course of action There is a way to let the human being be saved from the cancer and also minimize the cost. First, Pfizer must stop the plan to do experiment on African people. The company protect the patients’ right. Before the experiment, Pfizer should sign the contract with the volunteers, to make sure that volunteers have the adequate information, especially the risk, of the experiment.
Pfizer should also do its best to limit the risk of its medicine. The company should also make an adequate plan for the situation that the medicine causes bad consequence on the patients. The company should make adequate compensation for it. The method and amount of the compensation should be 4/6 negotiated by the patient and the company with the supervision of the local legal operation department. With all these procedures, the experiment on human will be more acceptable. Second, Dry. Change and Pfizer should do their best to minimize the use of monkeys in their experiment.
Even though the use of the monkey is inevitable, there are still chances that the lab can use less monkeys. Dry. Change and the company should also improve the living situation of the monkeys. Minimize the pain of the experiment on the monkeys. Euthanasia is also a good way to make the monkey suffer less. The company should also compensate for their behavior on monkeys. They should help breed the monkeys to compensate for their killing. They can donate money to the monkey breeding center or animal protection fund.
If they will kill 700 hundred monkeys, then they should help breed 700 monkeys to help the nature to regain its balance. The company should also make the sacrifice of monkeys well known, which can help the people to be with gratitude for the monkeys and protect them in return. Third, Dry. Change should refine its plan to make the medicine more likely to be effective. Development of this medicine costs quite a lot and many people are depending on it to save their lives. Dry. Change should do his best to fulfill his obligations and maximize the possibility that the medicine will be effective in the future.
After this five steps’ analysis, I have arrived at a possible solution to this dilemma. However, there will certainly be some kinds of disagree. I believe that there is no certain answer to this dilemma as using different views we will get different solutions. Postscript When I was in the college of life science in Peking University, our teacher of Animal Biology Experiment, Dry. Wang, would talk about this dilemma every time when we will dissect some animals. There are many animal protectors protest on this kind of experiments, arguing that this kind of experiment causing too much pain on animals.
However, researchers like Dry. Wang argue that those animals are died not in vain. 5/6 Their sacrifice helps the development of human science and makes the whole world a better place to live. Their debate really impressed me and leads me to think of the dilemma I mentioned above. Generally speaking, there is no certain answer to this kind of dilemma. We should use the five steps analysis and take corresponding actions according to different situations. By doing this, we can minimize the sacrifice of the animals and maximize the benefit of the human beings.
