Faculty Bibliography

The malfeasance is very grave. Top government officials at the Atomic Energy Commission, NASA and the Public Health Service approved of experiments in which unsuspecting American soldiers were exposed to high doses of radiation, prisoners in Oregon and Washington state received large doses of radiation and compulsory vasectomies, retarded children were fed food laced with radioactive iron and calcium, seriously ill patients were given trace amounts of plutonium in doses known to be high enough to cause harm, medical students and hospital patients were injected with radioactive iron and chrome and newborn boys in four states were injected with weak doses of iodine 131, a radioactive isotope, without the explicit permission of their parents

Fessing up to wrongdoing, even wrongdoing that is decades old, in your own department is not likely to endear [Hazel O'Leary] to the spin doctors and risk managers of the [Clinton] administration or Congress. Going the next step and declaring that government ought to be prepared to compensate those it has harmed means that O'Leary had better prepare herself for a lot of lonely nights as she is scratched off the A-list for Washington parties and banquets

Fessing up to wrongdoing, even wrongdoing that is decades old, in your own department is not likely to endear [Hazel O'Leary] to the spin doctors and risk managers of the [Clinton] administration or Congress. Going the next step and declaring that government ought to be prepared to compensate those it has harmed means that O'Leary had better prepare herself for a lot of lonely nights as she is scratched off the A-list for Washington parties and banquets

How could U.S. government officials have sanctioned these experiments? How could researchers from such elite schools and institutions as M.I.T., Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, the University of Tennessee and the University of Oregon have gotten involved with such patently immoral research?

The decreased survival of patients undergoing lung retransplantation has raised ethical concerns regarding the "fairness" of using organs for retransplantation. This emphasis on organ utility could have important consequences for the doctor-patient relationship and the practice of retransplantation. In an attempt to balance the responsibilities of individual physicians toward their patients and the responsibilities of transplantation programs toward the public resource of donated organs, we propose a limit on the percentage of organs used for experimental or innovative procedures such as retransplantation. This limit would allow the physician to function as the patient advocate, ensure that organs are realistically allocated to patients most likely to benefit from transplantation, and permit an evolving definition of the medical efficacy of retransplantation.

The escalation of health care costs in the United States has become a problem now that business and taxpayers are paying larger shares of these costs. Many believe that the only way to cope with rising costs is to institute explicit rationing of access to health care services. Proposals to ration based upon age, "sin" exclusions, physician gatekeeper incentives, patient ability to pay, and community values all have shortcomings. An alternative approach to controlling costs that emphasizes efficiency by cutting administrative and malpractice overhead costs and universally providing those medical services that have proven patient benefit is proposed. Physicians must take a more active role in the debate to ensure that patient needs are met and that expenditures are directed toward effective therapies.

Opposing viewpoints on whether smokers should be denied coronary bypass surgery unless they quit smoking are offered. One man says it's a matter of who will benefit most from the surgery, while another says denying a person access to surgery based upon behavior seems far too moralistic