Marvel is fast becoming synonymous with the superhero—a pair of blockbusters and two critically praised Netflix shows just this year will have that effect. But they aren't the only game in (cape)town.

DC Comics might not have anything as coherent as a cinematic universe road-mapped out to the end of the decade, and Batman's box office success has yet to rub off on the Green Lantern or a 21st-century Superman. But the company is making a serious go at competent TV series as of late, particularly The CW series The Flash. However, as much as I've found myself enjoying the adventures of Barry Allen and his comrades, I can hold my peace no longer. It's time for someone to say it: Science in Central City is in desperate need of some ethical oversight.

Time and again, the Flash and his team—all trained scientists—ignore fundamental protections of research subjects and a disregard for human rights. That's no small quibble for a tentpole superhero supposedly interested in justice and doing good. But, as I'll explore, there are real-world historical precedents for many of these transgressions.

Let's start with S.T.A.R. Laboratories. The Flash's origin story revolves around this scientific organization building an experimental particle accelerator adjacent to Central City's downtown business district, which then exploded and exposed much of the city to some form of mutagenic radiation. This is the reason Barry Allen and other residents became metahumans in the first place. Surely high-energy particle physics research is better conducted in more remote locations where the danger to the public can be minimized?

Then again, there are some real-life precedents—the first human-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction (as opposed to something like the 1.7-billion-year-old Oklo reactor), for example. As part of the Anglo-American-Canadian effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II, a team of scientists, including Enrico Fermi, built Chicago Pile-1 in a squash court at the University of Chicago, just a few miles from the center of America's second city. Pile-1 was very basic—tens of thousands of graphite blocks arranged around almost 20,000 pieces of uranium metal and uranium oxide—but also very radioactive, and any accident would have posed a severe contamination risk to Chicago.

In fact, the plan was never to put it quite so close. Fermi and his boss Arthur Compton intended the first atomic pile to be built an hour away in Red Gate Woods, but industrial action by the builders put an end to that. Compton wrote in his memoirs that he and Fermi were confident the pile was safe, but "according to every rule of organizational protocol, I should have taken the matter to my superior."

But given the extreme secrecy of the Manhattan Project and the fact that it revolved around cutting-edge physics, the university's president "was in no position to make an independent judgment of the hazards involved. Based on considerations of the university's welfare, the only answer he could have given would have been no," he wrote. He was a believer in asking forgiveness rather than permission, apparently.

(Meta)human rights

Then we get to the Flash's troubling approach to (meta)human rights. The Flash is often called upon to take down other metahumans too powerful for the police. But his defeated foes don't enter the criminal justice system. Instead, they are illegally confined in a secret detention center within the core of the S.T.A.R. Laboratories particle accelerator. This black site appears to have no staff or guards, but more troubling is the lack of any concessions toward the inmates' feeding, hygiene, or mental health.

Extended solitary confinement has a significantly negative effect on mental health, and the practice is increasingly being called torture, bolstered by research that's shown PTSD is as common in victims of psychological torture as those who were physically tortured. Yet even after Central City's main prison built a new wing capable of confining metahumans, the Flash continued to detain some of his enemies in these small bathroom-less cells.

Sadly, the practice of extrajudicial imprisonment is one we're all too familiar with here in the real world, whether it be Guantanamo Bay or secret black sites operated by the federal government or Homan Square in Chicago, where that city's police department disappeared more than 7,000 people for "off-the-books interrogation."

Finally, there is the Flash's team's attitude toward informed consent. Asking someone's permission before using them as a research subject or performing a medical procedure upon them is the very core of bioethics. You explain what you want to do, including the possible risks, and wait for them to say yes before proceeding.

This approach is sorely lacking when the team is in need of a second metahuman to join with Dr. Martin Stein in the Firestorm matrix. Flash and his team first compromise patient confidentiality to identify potentially compatible metahumans and then the Flash surreptitiously samples their blood for further testing. This has disastrous consequences and results in another person being confined in the secret prison.

Even here, there are unfortunately parallels to real life. In 1947, in reaction to grotesque experiments conducted by Nazi scientists on concentration camp inmates, the Nuremberg Code laid out a series of bioethical principles as a baseline for scientists to follow. Those principles are now legally binding in the US under the Department of Health and Human Services' Human Subjects Research Protections.

These regulations were introduced too late to prevent severe ethical breaches in Tuskegee, Alabama, and Guatemala where research saw participants knowingly exposed or deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases, with treatment withheld and lied about in order to study the diseases' effects. Even the most prolific human cell line—the HeLa cells—were obtained from Henrietta Lacks without her consent.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into a TV show where a man with super-speed fights crime and other improbable metahumans. But is it too much to ask for some ethical behavior from a team of scientists defending freedom, or am I just a man shouting at his TV?