Compares the brutal human experiments of Unit 731 during World War II to modern-day vivisection, emphasizing the importance of ethics and human dignity. Despite the legality of vivisection, he warns that financial incentives can compromise a subject’s willingness to participate.
Maruta means peeled log in Japanese, but to us, it’s a word that conjures up images of brutal human experimentation. During World War II, Japan created a special unit called “Unit 731”. This unit was notorious for its human experimentation, which was more akin to torture than military work. For about a decade starting in 1936, the 731st conducted germ experiments, verb experiments, and poison gas experiments on prisoners of war from neighboring countries like South Korea, China, and Russia. Approximately 3,000 innocent lives were lost in these heinous experiments, which included freezing and breaking the hands of living people and performing vivisection without anesthesia. Japan has been condemned by countries around the world, including the victimized nations, and Unit 731’s human experimentation is considered a criminal act born out of the desperation of wartime and would have no place in the modern world.
However, human experimentation is still happening all around us. A prime example of this is bioequivalence testing, or bioequivalence testing. In these tests, a drug that is identical in composition to a drug currently on the market is given to a third party, the test subject, to see if their body reacts the same way as the existing drug. It consists of taking the drug and then participating in several tests, and is known among young people as a “maruta part-time job”. It’s mostly for able-bodied men between the ages of 19 and 30, and despite the potential for side effects, there’s no shortage of applicants. There are even several websites dedicated to recruiting test subjects.
Of course, it’s legal to do so. In order to avoid becoming the Maruta experiment of Unit 731, the leading medical ethics code, The Nuremberg Code, must be followed. The Nuremberg Code sets out ten fundamental principles that reflect moral, ethical, and legal concepts of medical experimentation. The most important of these principles is the voluntary consent of the subject. The person involved must have the legal capacity to decide whether to consent and must be able to make a reasoned decision. Subjects must be informed of the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment, the methods and means of the experiment, any anticipated inconveniences and risks, and any health or personal effects that may result from participation in the experiment. All of these obligations mean that the subject and the experimenter are on equal footing, and the experimenter cannot force the subject to participate in the experiment.
While these standards and principles are taken for granted in modern ethical standards, the relationship between subjects and experimenters in real-world vivisection is not strictly equal. In a survey of 1,531 college-age men and women conducted by a part-time job brokerage site, 58.3% of men and 40.6% of women said they would do a Maruta part-time job if they were paid enough, with an average of 48.3%. This is because money was involved in the transaction between the subjects and the experiment designers. The subject participates in the experiment for financial gain, and the experiment organizer plays the role of the employer who pays the money. Within the noose of money, the experimenter and the subject can always be disguised as black and white.
However, this is not an argument for removing money from human experimentation. Human dignity requires that subjects be compensated for their participation, and money provides the most objective measure of this. Rather, what is needed to address these issues is a clear understanding of the relationship between the experimenter and the subject and a sense of urgency that things can go wrong. They need to recognize that in the modern world, money has the potential to interfere with human experimentation and undermine human dignity. Good ethics act as a shield to ensure that subjects realize their dignity and that experiments with precious human life are conducted only for the common good. If the law is there to uphold what we judge to be right, then ethics can be upheld through self-awareness.
This argument may seem a bit distant in times of peace. However, a sound ethic of human dignity serves as an important safeguard in times of crisis, maintaining a minimum level of humanity. In interviews with Japanese members of Unit 731 after the war, they said that they did not consider the brutal human experimentation of the time to be cruel at all; it was just business as usual for them to use prisoners for military purposes. Their ethics were distorted by the wartime situation, and it became a tragic event that severely undermined human dignity.
Recall a line from the Korean poet Lee Wolan’s Maruta Alba:
“`
The one card left in a dead end
A slender body like a test tube
Maruta of the 731st.
In front of the licensed war criminals in those white coats.
whose tainted blood is being recorded on a noble chart.
“`
We must always remember that we are human beings with dignity if we are not to become war criminals in white coats.
