4 Israeli Doctors Arrested Over Trials

Four senior doctors in Israel were arrested for illegally conducting medical experiments on elderly patients last week. The doctors had conducted experiments on patients at hospitals in Rehovot and Gedera without obtaining proper consent and causing a long list of fatalities. After one particularly disturbing trial twelve patients died shortly after being administered the drug, but the incident was not reported to the Israeli Health Ministry.

The doctors "conducted illegal and unethical testing on thousands of elderly patients for years," said a report issued by the ministry.

The doctors have been charged abuse, aggravated assault, causing death through negligence, fraud, forgery, breach of statutory duty, and disruption of legal proceedings.

As is often the case, it was the media, and not medical authorities who uncovered evidence of the trials. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran a series of investigative articles that appeared in 2005 which spurred health officials into action.

"If "expertise" rests on illegal / unethical research such expertise rests on fraud. The question the public might ask is: What, if any, ethical standards can we legitimately insist that medical researchers follow?" said Vera Hassner Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.