The Human Genome Experiment and Its Implications for Health Care
History of Medical Technology: Implications of Changes in the Theory and Practice of Medical Care

Innovations in medical devices and health care technologies have generated new questions concerning the precise role that race, gender and other human differences had on the theory and practice of medical care in the 20th century and what the implications of these important trends will be going forward. To determine these implications with more precision, the purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the relevant literature concerning research and development of the modern understanding of sickle cell disease, the Civil Rights Act (and subsequent desegregation) in addition to Medicare and Medicaid, and the Human Genome Project and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Following this review and analysis, a summary of the research and key findings concerning the foregoing issues are presented in the paper’s conclusion.

Review and Analysis

Prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, access to high quality health care was often limited for members of minority groups in the United States, and the research that was conducted on these populations groups was frequently highly unethical by any standards, but especially for the modern understanding of diseases (Thomas 2013). These negative experiences with the mainstream medical profession include such notorious incidents as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment that used unconsented African Americans as experimental subjects for 40 years during the mid-20th century (Smolin 2012). In this regard, Reverby reports that, “Tuskegee, Alabama, will be forever linked in America's collective memory to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In the counties surrounding this small southern community, the U.S. Public Health Service ran a forty-year study, from 1932 until 1972, of ‘untreated syphilis in the male Negro,’ while telling the men in the study that they were being ‘treated’ for their ‘bad blood’” (23).

These grisly experiences and the corresponding public backlash from the African American community are just part of the reason many members of minority groups remain skeptical about participating in clinical trials or even receiving potentially life-saving vaccines (Thomas 2013) such as the drugs being distrusted nationwide at present. The passage of the Civil Rights Act was followed by the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs in 1965 which further eliminated gender and race as eligibility factors for high quality medical care but which also limited the focus...…from the project (About the Human Genome Project 3).

In the nearly quarter century since the mapping of the human genome has been completed, researchers have gained new insights into the DNA sequence compositions that cause some human diseases as well as the manner in which the immune-response operates (Lecellier, Charles-Henri; Wasserman 2019), and these findings that will inevitably have important implications for the ongoing fight against the Covid-19 virus.

Conclusion

The research was consistent in showing that despite the enactment of major legislation during the mid-20th century such as the Civil Rights Act and federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid that eliminated gender and race as eligibility factors for access to high quality health care services, unethical medical experimentation using members of minority groups continued for two-fifths of the century. Likewise, the research also showed that research and development during the 20th century contributed to major advancements in the understanding of disease conditions such as sickle cell disease, and the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 has provided researchers with vitally important data about human DNA that holds the promise to eradicate even more diseases and extend the human lifespan well beyond the century mark barring accidents.…