During the recent Ebola epidemic, some commentators and stakeholders argued that it would be unethical to carry out a study that withheld a potential treatment from affected individuals with such a serious, untreatable disease. As a result, the initial trials of experimental treatments did not have control arms, despite important scientific reasons for their inclusion. In this paper, we consider whether the duty to rescue entails that it would be unethical to withhold an experimental treatment from patient-participants with serious diseases for which there are no effective treatments, even when doing so is scientifically necessary to test the effectiveness of the treatment. We argue that the duty to rescue will rarely apply. The context of medical research also throws new light on the content of the duty to rescue, since the interests of future patients—who stand to benefit from the fruits of medical research—are relevant to whether the duty applies.

中文翻译：

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拯救涉及严重疾病的随机对照试验的义务

在最近的埃博拉疫情期间，一些评论员和利益相关者认为，开展一项研究拒绝对患有如此严重、无法治愈的疾病的受影响个体进行潜在治疗是不道德的。因此，尽管有重要的科学原因将其包括在内，但实验性治疗的初始试验没有对照组。在本文中，我们考虑了救援的责任是否意味着对患有严重疾病且没有有效治疗方法的患者进行实验性治疗是不道德的，即使这样做在科学上是必要的，以测试其有效性。治疗。我们认为，救助义务很少适用。医学研究的背景也为救援义务的内容提供了新的思路，