Southam's Dilemma Case Study Answers

Part A
During the study conducted by Chester Southam and his team, Southam ask several questions including: What would happen if cultured cancer cells were injected into humans instead of animals? How would the immune system function in the presence of cancer? Ultimately, Southams goals was to learn more about the immune system, and determine whether vaccines developed by these cancer cell cultures would cause cancer themselves, in the future. It was concluded that there was no clear distinction on whether the differences made between the cancer patients and normal patients were due to the prior presence of cancer itself, or the fact that cancer patients were already weak from having cancer prior to extra exposure to cancer.

It was perceived that Southam was looking out for the mental well being of the patient when he failed to mention that they were being injected with cancer cells because he did not want to confuse them about their diagnosis or scare them. Based on Southam’s reasoning, this was still not an accurate reasoning to jeopardize the welfare and benefit of the patients
The group with incurable cancer as well as the group with no cancer bother receive injections of cancer cells. Because Southam did not “intentionally” inflict harm, it would still be accurate to say that he violated the nonmaleficence “do no harm” principle of ethics. Even though all of his experimentation clearly aligned with the questions that were presented harm was still inflicted on participants. Also, as Southam expressed with the first group that he did not want to jeopardize the mindset of the subjects by informing them of the experimentation going on, this did inflict harm on the patients in the long run because the reddening and swelling from injections persisted and 2 patients died just 6-8 weeks after the