Often, when I think about an internship, I think of it as an opportunity to learn new skills and apply them at that place. The summer Fred Hutch Pathways Explorer program was no different. Over the course of the two weeks, we were connected with industry professionals such as Dr. Jeanne Chowning, and we completed fun labs like the color wheel with a micropipette lab. From all these opportunities, the one that stood out to me was the Tuskegee Syphilis study, and the concept of bioethics in general. To give some background, the study started from 1932 and ended in 1972. Over the course of 40 years, scientists were “studying” the effects of Syphilis by race. Particularly on black patients. This study involves bioethics because of the horrible treatment that the patients were given, and the lies told to convince the patients to join the study. Patients were given incorrect treatments on purpose, and were tested in horrible conditions ... The Tuskegee study highlighted the distrust that can and had been created between the scientific and general community. Today, the distrust between these communities has made it more difficult to reach herd immunity for the coronavirus pandemic, thankfully this isn’t as big of a problem. During our bioethics talks at the Hutch, we also talked about using technology for good or bad. The most interesting example of this to me was the ... scientist who genetically edited babies. While his work was cool, the ethics and morality can be questioned. In the end, the Explorers program connected me to a wide breadth of professionals and showed me an area in science which genuinely interested me!
The article I chose to analyze was called: “Cancer clinical trials exclude too many patients: That’s changing.” I found this article interesting as it is related to my interests from the Hutch. The article talks about why patients often are excluded, and the problems it can bring as well. The main issue with low trial enrollment is inaccurate and insufficient data. When there are less patients, the trial results are often skewed towards one general group of patients. The problem with clinical trials is that patients must match strict criteria which makes it increasingly difficult to admit more people. In the Hutch, since cancer research is the primary focus, clinical trials with accurate results are crucial. But again, if a patient has other pre-existing conditions such as Diabetes, HIV, Heart Disease, and Hepatitis, the results become inaccurate. These conditions also deem the patients to have “poor performance scores” aka, how ready they are for the clinical trials, and thus they are excluded. Despite these hurdles, the Hutch is striving to increase trial acceptance by adding more categories. Aside from that, adding more categories will add the know how of “a broader range of patients' response to these treatments.” – Dr. Gary Lyman. I chose to analyze this study because of how it relates to fair treatment in science. During my two weeks at the Hutch, we learned about the morality and ethicality behind using new technologies for the better of people. Clinical results are crucial to this as that is what leads to the developments of those technologies and opening up to a more diverse group of people will make the technology more inclusive!
In this image, it shows how different groups of people are represented in clinical trials across the country. We can see it is heavily skewed towards Caucasians, with very little African American or Hispanic representation. There isn’t any data on south Asian or Asian representation.
Image sourced from: https://trialfacts.com/diversity-inclusion/