Word: ille
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ANDREW GOLDSTEIN, a staff writer, went to Tulsa, Okla., for this week's cover story and interviewed terminally ill patients taking an experimental melanoma vaccine found to have been manufactured, stored and tested improperly...
...precisely where the balance lies is a matter of serious, even bitter debate. At one extreme are those who believe that most trials are tainted because they play on the fears of desperately ill patients, involve some sort of subtle coercion like money or free medicine or fail to warn patients of the very real dangers they face. Some critics argue as well that there are simply too many trials, as pharmaceutical companies looking for a share of the blockbuster drug market pump out copycat medicines that no one really needs...
...their financial backers could decide for themselves what constituted ethical research. Most of the time their judgment was sound, but there were plenty of appalling exceptions. In the 1950s Army doctors gave LSD to soldiers without telling them what it was. In 1963 researchers injected prisoners and terminally ill patients with live cancer cells to test their immune responses; they were told only that it was a "skin test." In the 1950s mentally retarded children at Willowbrook, a state institution in New York, were deliberately infected with hepatitis so that scientists could work on an experimental vaccine. And in perhaps...
Going strictly by the numbers, Nocera's case is not typical. Most clinical trials--80%, according to one report--have trouble mustering enough volunteers to get started. But for the desperately ill, a clinical trial often represents one last chance--even if that chance is participation in a Phase I study unlikely to help them. "The cancer patients I work with are an ignored species," says Duke University researcher Dr. Johannes Vieweg. "Nobody wants to deal with them because there's so little that can be done. We try to address their unmet needs...
...just the terminally ill who benefit from the attention. Researchers point to cases of medically neglected or poorly informed subjects who come out of their trials with a much better understanding of what exactly is wrong with them--including previously undiagnosed conditions...