TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS EXPERIMENT TO "ELIMINATE PROJECT": A CRITICAL MEDICO JURISPRUDENTIAL APPRAISAL OF THE UNOBTRUSIVE, OBJECTIONABLE MENS REA INHERENT IN CERTAIN MEDICO-PROPHYLACTIC PROGRAMMES

Abstract

Ingenious and fascinating as the uniqueness of the human person is, it has more often than not occasioned a professional "horns of dilemma" for certain prophylactic and therapeutic endeavours in medical practice. Successful experimental therapeutic measures carried out on primates and mammals, closely related to homosapeans have often proved unsatisfactory and occasionally even disastrous when applied to humans. Presumably, in view of the foregoing, practitioners of the art and science of medicine have often been left with no choice than to involve fellow humans in these trials, if the medical profession must advance. Unfortunately in pursuit of the above, considerations of racial peculiarities and/or indeed racial inequalities seem to rear their ugly heads in the choice of subjects for such experimentation. Deliberately or inadvertently victims of such endeavors have always been chosen from a particular race or stratum of humans, unarguably with little or no considerations for informed consent, consequences of the act on the victims and their family. It is noteworthy that on many occasions the perpetrators of the experimentation deliberately either misinformed or with-held information from the victims of their act. Medico-legal jurisprudence on such occasions has been either hugely uninformed or when informed barked and could not bite. This work is a humble attempt by the author to rekindle the conscience of law as to the existence of this act even in contemporary times, draw attention to the need for concern and humbly proffer some solutions.