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Publication Date

5-1991

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Professor Alexander Capron's seminal 1974 article, "Informed Consent in Catastrophic Disease Research and Treatment,"1 opens with a discussion of Karp v. Cooleys a lawsuit arising from Dr. Denton Cooley's first use of the artificial heart, in which Haskell Karp's widow unsuccessfully claimed that her husband's consent to use of the experimental device was inadequately informed. Today, more than twenty years after that surgery took place, American medical technology has markedly advanced and public awareness of informed consent has greatly increased, but doctors and patients may not have changed much at all. Both still have contradictory needs and desires. We want to do something, rather than nothing, in the face of all serious and terminal illness and to cure (or to be cured) at almost any cost.$ We do not wish to face the risks of failure and harm that are necessarily associated with the possibility of miraculous cures; nor do we wish to take the time needed to adequately assess and reduce those risks through controlled clinical research. Death, after all, is personal, and research projects are not.

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