You are a Doctor working for the Center for Disease Control. You are assigned to a team that is responding to a new spread of a hemorrhagic fever which kills 90% of the people it afflicts. There is a rare experimental serum which is being tested on animals. The serum shows great promise but will be very hard to manufacture in great numbers and if it is approved will only be available to a very small number of people.
You arrive home to discover your 11 year old daughter showing early signs of having this disease. As a member of the CDC team you have access to the serum. The serum is not available to give to humans and only very small amounts of it exist at this time. The long term consequences of taking this serum are unknown. Because the serum is so limited in quantity, it will be missed and an investigation will be launched if some turns up missing.
Do you steal some and try and use it to save your daughters life, or do you take her to the hospital and hope she is one of the lucky 10% which survives after being afflicted with this malady?
21 comments:
A tricky one, Laoch. Because it's a hypothetical daughter I don't think I'd take the risk. If it were my actual daughter I might.
No contest. I would steal it so fast it would make your head spin.
This actually happened in real life to me...well except for the serum. Our son came down with a mysterious illness when he was a year old. Doctors couldn't find the cause and he was dying. When it was finally diagnosed 3 months later by the CDC, he is the only one that survived the very rare form of meningitis, I learned that there is nothing I wouldn't do to save my child.
elisabeth, hypothetical daughters, I guess, are more fraught than real ones.
carole, I understand.
James Allen said "Circumstance does not make the man, it reveals him to himself."
Would I put aside the Hippocratic Oath in favor of my daughters life?
Difficult question when considering all the possible scenarios, but I'd do almost anything to protect and maintain the health of my family.
I might burn in hell, but I'll worry about it later.
For my own child - no doubt about it - I would steal it.
Jolene, it is more than just breaking your oath. In the end you probably would go to prison.
Rj, would it change your answer if it was the child of a friend?
Steal it.
Save my daughter.
Hire a hell of an attorney to keep me out of prison.
Heck, if they kept OJ out of prison, they would keep me out of prison. Right?
Nsss, OJ is in prison.
The real question is who would be the select few who would end up with this serum?
ac, the children of privilege. Of course it is also possible that the serum would not work at all.
For a child of a friend, no I would not steal the serum. The connection between a mother and child is such that you ideally love that child more than yourself or anyone else and I believe there is an innate need to ensure the survival of that child at most costs.
rj, makes sense.
Not for killing Nicole.
nsss, no, but the point is that the government will come after you again again until they do get you if they decide they want you: see further John Gotti.
Sadly (desperately?), I'm pretty sure I'd steal it in a second. Or do like the doc on Contagion and try it on myself first.
Gosh...you always get me thinking.
pl, one of the things which makes this trickier is that since it is experimental it my well make things worse rather than better.
I would steal the existing serum to save her. Not only that, I will cultivate it, and inject to immediate family members as a precaution.
hoe, ambitious but understandable.
Since the serum has never been tested on humans I doubt I would illegally test it on my child.
The scenario you present has probably been played out in some form, and I wonder what the numbers show.
Kerry, you ask a good question that I do not know the answer to.
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