The Writer's Audience Needs to Know All of the Angles

In Jane Brody's All in the Name of Science, she makes it very clear who her receptive audience should be: the average citizen that reads the Opinion section of the New York Times. All of her examples of unethical scientific testing, starting from the Tuskegee Study to a study done using convicted criminals in 1969 are biased. This is not to state that unethical testing is right (it clearly isn't) but the examples of the article are unbalanced. There are no examples of unethical testing that actually succeeded in proving a hypothesis or developing a cure. All Brody lays out on the page are experiments that were unsupervised, torturous, and were so sloppy that not even inklings of results were achieved.

If Brody was writing for a different audience, such as a group of scientists, the entire article would have to be rewritten. Many of the examples can be reused, but shown in a different light. Brody has to adjust her perceptions from an audience that is easily swayed by shock and emotion to one that is open to be receptive to the atrocities, but it also needs more information. It is not enough to see the failures, but also the struggle of those who achieved success. A scientist needs to see a situation from all sides. If Brody can become an "original writer" (Ong, 11) like Ong suggests, she can do more than project the imaginary scientific audience, she can "alter" it (Ong, 11) and then her audience will "fictionalize" itself (Ong, 12) in order to fit the role.

Besides finding other examples of unethical testings, Brody can concentrate on the sloppiness of the unsupervised testings that lead to the lack of results. One such example is the research on the prisoners in 1969. Brody claims that the prisoners are coerced into becoming voluntary patients and were examined under "highly questionable studies or drugs and donations of blood plasma" (Brody) and because of the substantial monetary gain, the prisoners failed to report if they had any signs of illness for fear of losing their income. Now, leaving behind the dubious morality of the experiments, one can logically use this example to show the negative aspects of the experiment by explaining that the results from the test because not every symptom and setback was recorded or analyzed. Therefore, the testing would be seen inconclusive and therefore useless and those prisoners lives were endangered or lost for nothing.

All in all, this article was carefully geared towards the general public and not the scientist, which is unwise on Brody's part. The average citizen can be horrified and disgusted with unethical experiments, but it is the scientist's duty to ensure that the studies they conduct are ethical and do not violate any human rights, whether they are uneducated, criminals, or disadvantaged in any other fashion. Also, it makes a much more interesting and convincing argument to hear more than one side of the debate. Brody closes the article by claiming that "there is to this day no universal agreement on what is and what is not an ethical experiment" (Brody), which I highly disagree, but perhaps ethical reforms besides the Nuremberg Code only occurred after 1972.

Bibliography

Brody, Jane E. "All in the Name of Science". New York Times, 30 July 1972. E2.

Ong, Walter J. "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction". PMLA, January 1975. Vol. 90, No. 1.