ABSTRACT
Doubling and duplicity in both language and action have become the hallmark of experimentation on humans in the United States and most of the developed world. The way language is used to obscure the truth and justify the unjustifiable can be illustrated by some cold war radiation experiments performed in the United States in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and contemporary experiments on terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients. Moreover, ninety-four percent of investigators concede that patients (adults) enroll in Phase I studies "mostly for the possible medical benefit". Self-deception permits both researchers and subjects to "double" themselves: it permits researchers to see themselves as physicians and subjects to see themselves (and their children) as patients. One must stop treating terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients as subhuman by [irrationally] offering them questionable experiments in the guise of treatment. In short, for many potential research subjects, deception or self-deception is inherent in our current research endeavors.
