Ethics is defined as a system of moral principles. It has played a vital role in human research and the healthcare system for many decades and has helped guide moral decisions and ensured that no harm or suffering resulted from human research. Informed consent falls within the area of ​​bioethics and is an important component of medicine today. However, many cases of research involving human and biological samples in the past have had important ethical and consensual issues that have impacted the medical community. In this review, the focuses are Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells, World War II experiments, and the Tuskegee syphilis study. This review will examine the websites that examined issues of consent and ethics in each case and outline the expected paths each should have taken to make the experiments ethical. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Henrietta Lacks was a 30-year-old African American woman who was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer after having her fifth child at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Tissue samples were taken and given to a researcher who used the its cells to try to grow human cells outside the human body. This was a common practice at the time and was not unethical as Henrietta had signed a form stating that she gave consent to anything being done to her and her cells, however, this was not informed consent. The cells went on to create an immortal line of what are now known as HeLa cells and have helped create vaccines and improve understanding of diseases and viruses. Informed consent is a process that allows patients to make a voluntary “informed” decision about participating in human research, understanding the purpose, procedure, risks, benefits, and alternatives to the research in which they may be involved. This type of consent is based on ethical principles. Federal regulations in the United States state that a human subject is a living individual who has provided data to an investigator with an interaction with the individual or as identifiable private information. Therefore, when a researcher interacts with an individual and collects biological samples specifically for research, informed consent is required as this would be considered human research. However, if an investigator uses biological samples that have already been collected for another purpose and the sample comes from an anonymous person, it is no longer considered human research, so informed consent is not required. Therefore, in order not to violate consent laws, the HeLa cells would have had to be labeled with a code that was not identifiable to a researcher, in order for the study to be classified as non-human research. The mistake was that the researcher knew who the cells belonged to and called them HeLa cells, derived from the patient's full name. Henrietta Lacks was also not asked for her consent, just as her family did not know what had happened to her cells. This was also a common practice in the 1950s and is still a practice today. However, there are now more standards in place for obtaining consent. In the book Rebecca Skloot writes that lack of understanding can be more important than total consent. “If you spoke another language and needed to see the doctor, you would be provided with a translator, but if you don't understand the science, there's no one to translate for you, so you just walk away not knowing what was said. I think there should be scientific translators, trained to communicate medical topicscomplicated in a simple and easily digestible way. It would have made a huge difference to Henrietta's family.” “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” – Rebecca Skloot 2010. Privacy was also a big issue. Dr. Gey (the researcher) used parts of Lack's name in naming the samples, without her permission. There should be some anonymity and protection for Henrietta Lacks and other patients like her. As Henrietta's story becomes more and more known, information about her and her family's medical history is becoming more and more known to the public. Furthermore, there is no known owner of HeLa cells and John Hopkins has never patented them. Due to questionable ethics in the use of her cells, she is not called the "Mother of Modern Medicine", but is considered a powerful symbol of informed consent. The ethical misconduct that occurred in Nazi concentration camps during World War II is a great example of ethical and consensual issues. Nazi Germany believed that the dominant race was the Aryan one and introduced ethnic cleansing practices to somehow "purify" the population. They often sterilized non-Aryan individuals to prevent the propagation of "impure" races by X-ray radiation of the testes and ovaries. It was later discovered that this method was unsuccessful. Dr. Mengele was one of approximately 200 Nazi doctors who experimented on all manner of non-Aryan races in severely harmful and crippling ways. The experiments were conducted for many reasons, the main three being military research (finding ways to advance the Nazi army in the medical field, such as high altitude and freezing experiments), miscellaneous experiments (experiments that did not carry any scientific investigation, such as experiments on poisons and wounds). ) and racially motivated experiments. It has been estimated that around 70 medical research programs in Nazi concentration camps linked to the German medical establishment used human subjects in the camps to test drugs to combat infectious diseases and gas poisoning. While this was a horrific event that violated many ethical principles, it resulted in one of the most significant codes for promoting ethical and informed consent, the Nuremberg Code. The American Medical Association code of ethics did not address human research until 1946 and 1947 (Nuremberg Code). Before World War II, there were no explicit written codes about ethical human research, but there were rules about what could be done in the context of human research. According to unwritten, but real, ethical standards before World War II, human research was conducted only after animal testing, and it was acceptable for a researcher to experiment on himself or his family before moving on to other researchers. In relation to the rules relating to consent, if the research were linked to the possibility of harm it would require consent, but otherwise non-invasive research would not. Some people were also thought to be incapable of giving consent, such as young children and patients in psychiatric asylums. Payment of subjects was also accepted at the time and if a subject allowed a researcher to do something to them, it would be considered mental and could be considered suicidal. Due to the horrific ethical misconduct of the Nazi experiments, there has now been a debate about the ethics behind using data from these experiments in modern research. Some believe the Nazi data could have the potential to save lives. Even if the data is morally tainted, the data collected by Nazi doctors may have uncovered something that could help save countless lives or.