Guatemalan STD medical experiments were just one crime in a long history of medical-government collusion to use humans as guinea pigs
Natural News
It has now been widely revealed that the United States conducted medical experiments on prisoners and mental health patients in Guatemala in the 1940′s. Carried out by a government-employed doctor working in a psychiatric hospital, these experiments involved intentionally infecting Guatemalans with syphilis (and other STDs) without their knowledge in order to determine the effectiveness of penicillin. They were sponsored in part by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and they’ve now been widely reported by ABC News, the Washington Post and many other mainstream papers (who have suddenly taken an interest in a subject they normally wouldn’t touch).
The outrage against this inhumane medical science experiment is reflected in mainstream news headlines across the globe, and the Guatemalan government now characterizes this sad chapter in U.S. history as a “crime against humanity.” News reporters are shocked in reporting the story, and U.S. government officials seem to be almost beside themselves in discovering that this ever took place in America.
But what you’re about to reveal here will shock you even more.
The U.S. medical experiments on Guatemalan citizens, you see, barely scratch the surface of the criminal experiments the U.S. government and the medical industry has carried out on innocent victims over the last century.
The U.S. pretends to be surprised
The discovery of this medical experiment generated a series of official U.S. responses that can only be called political theater given how contrived they are. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton went on the record saying, “Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health… We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called the discovery “reprehensible,” and President Obama even picked up the phone to call Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom and offer a verbal apology.
You know what all these actions have in common? An implied message that this experiment from the 1940′s was somehow an aberrant mistake that never happens in America. They want you to believe this is just some lone researcher who went off his rocker and committed some atrocious crime in the name of medicine. But the reality is that Big Pharma and the U.S. government use innocent people in medical experiments every single day. This wasn’t some bizarre, rare event. It was a reflection of the way the U.S. government has consistently conspired with the medical industry to test drugs on innocent victims and find out what happens.
U.S. government and Big Pharma continue to commit crimes against humanity
This pattern extends to the modern day, of course. Remember the Gulf War veterans who were diagnosed with Gulf War Syndrome shortly after returning from serving in Iraq? It is widely believed that this syndrome is the side effect of experimental vaccines and drugs forced upon these soldiers by the U.S. government. In the timeline of medical experiments shown below, you’ll notice a disturbing pattern of governments exploiting soldiers for their experiments.
More recently, last year’s swine flu vaccine was essentially one grand medical experiment involving hundreds of millions of people around the world. The vaccine was entirely untested and had never been scientifically tested and then approved as safe by any health authority, yet it was aggressively pushed by government authorities in the hopes that people would take the shots so they could find out what happens. (It’s a lot like Nancy Pelosi trying to pass the health care reform bill so that we can all find out what’s in it…)
The timeline of medical experiments on innocent victims
What’s really interesting about this story is how the discovery of this 1940′s medical experiment suddenly came to light. It was “discovered” by Susan M. Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who said, “I almost fell out of my chair when I started reading this… Can you imagine? I couldn’t believe it.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy…)
Well maybe she should have been reading NaturalNews. We’ve been publishing the truth about medical experimentation on innocent humans for years. If Susan Reverby knew anything about how the medical industry really operates, she wouldn’t have been surprised at all. The history of medical experiments conducted in the name of the pharmaceutical industry is chock full of accounts of prisoners, blacks, women and other groups being exploited as human lab rats (see the timeline link below to read it for yourself).
Upon discovering this medical experiment, Susan Reverby was so outraged that she went public with her findings. ABC News picked up on the story and then it spread like wildfire throughout the mainstream media. That’s the curious thing about this: The mainstream media so rarely prints the truth about the history of medicine that when something truthful appears, it’s “amazing” news.
But here on NaturalNews.com, we print these kind of stories every single day. To discover that yet another group of victims was abused and exploited by a government-paid doctor working for the drug industry is routine. The abuses of human life committed by the pharmaceutical industry goes far beyond 1500 Guatemalans and actually extends to tens of millions of Americans who are being treated like guinea pigs every single day.
Psychiatry – An Industry of Death
If you really want to be freaked out by the true, documented history of how people have been tortured, abused, injected, maimed and otherwise had their lives destroyed by the medical industry, check out the Psychiatry An Industry of Death Museum created by CCHR (www.CCHR.org).
Watch the video here: http://www.cchr.org/museum.html%23/…
You can actually walk through this museum yourself. It’s in Los Angeles, and it’s one of the most disturbing things you’ll ever see about the true history of medicine. The STD experiments in Guatemala, by the way, were carried out in a psychiatric hospital. (No surprise.) I walked through this museum and practically found myself in tears before it was over. The things that psychiatrists and doctors will do to other human beings in the name of “medicine” will rock you to the core.
The psychiatric industry has done unspeakable things to women, children, prisoners, senior citizens, African Americans and racial minorities — all in the name of “science” and “medicine.” In fact, these experiments continue to this day in the form of the psychiatric drugging of children who are diagnosed with fictitious health conditions such as “ADHD.” See my disease mongering engine to invent your own psychiatric disorders, if you want a bit of satire on this subject: http://www.naturalnews.com/disease-…
Nobody has documented the real history of medicine’s criminal abuse of human beings as well as CCHR – the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights. Check out their amazing, shocking and eye-opening videos such as The Marketing of Madness (http://www.cchr.org/videos/marketin…) and Making A Killing (http://www.cchr.org/videos/making-a…).
Here, you’ll begin to scratch the surface of the true story of criminal abuse by the pharmaceutical industry — often in collusion with government. Normally, these stories are all covered up and we never hear about them. After all, to discover that the U.S. government conspired with the pharmaceutical industry to infect Guatemalans with a sexually-transmitted disease doesn’t exactly reflect the kind of image Obama wishes for people to believe about America.
A timeline of medical experiments on humans
Below, I’ve reprinted a timeline of human medical experiments that we first put together here on NaturalNews several years ago. This is just a partial list, by the way: There are more experiments that were conducted in secret and were never documented.
As you’ll see here, the experiment on Guatemalans just barely begins to paint the full picture of just how many human beings have been killed, poisoned, maimed or otherwise had their lives destroyed by criminal medical experiments carried out in the name of “medical science.”
Many of these experiments involve organizations whose names you would instantly recognize: Merck, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Sloan-Kettering Institute, the National Institutes of Health, Massachusetts General Hospital and many more. This is like a Who’s Who of the pharmaceutical industry, and they were all involved in using human beings as guinea pigs to conduct medical experiments.
And as you’ll see below, the Guatemalan experiment isn’t even the most grotesque or disturbing.
Note: Below is only a partial list of human medical experiments we’ve documented here on NaturalNews. See the full list here: http://www.naturalnews.com/022383_r…
(1845 – 1849)
J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).
(1895)
New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls “an idiot with chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).
(1896)
Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).
(1906)
Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).
(1911)
Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children’s parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis (“Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War”).
(1913)
Medical experimenters “test” 15 children at the children’s home St. Vincent’s House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).
(1915)
Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through “a thousand hells.” In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1932)
(1932-1972) The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated (Goliszek, University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library).
(1939)
In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous “Monster Experiment” on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, “in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career” (Alliance for Human Research Protection).
(1941)
Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, calls it “an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science” (Sharav).
An article in a 1941 issue of Archives of Pediatrics describes medical studies of the severe gum disease Vincent’s angina in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to healthy children with oral swabs (Goliszek).
Researchers give 800 poverty-stricken pregnant women at a Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic “cocktails” including radioactive iron in order to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women (Pacchioli).
(1942)
The Chemical Warfare Service begins mustard gas and lewisite experiments on 4,000 members of the U.S. military. Some test subjects don’t realize they are volunteering for chemical exposure experiments, like 17-year-old Nathan Schnurman, who in 1944 thinks he is only volunteering to test “U.S. Navy summer clothes” (Goliszek).
Merck Pharmaceuticals President George Merck is named director of the War Research Service (WRS), an agency designed to oversee the establishment of a biological warfare program (Goliszek).
(1944 – 1946) A captain in the medical corps addresses an April 1944 memo to Col. Stanford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Section, expressing his concerns about atom bomb component fluoride’s central nervous system (CNS) effects and asking for animal research to be done to determine the extent of these effects: “Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect … It seems most likely that the F component rather than the T is the causative factor … Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after exposure.” The following year, the Manhattan Project would begin human-based studies on fluoride’s effects (Griffiths and Bryson).
The Manhattan Project medical team, led by the now infamous University of Rochester radiologist Col. Safford Warren, injects plutonium into patients at the University’s teaching hospital, Strong Memorial (Burton Report).
(1945)
Continuing the Manhattan Project, researchers inject plutonium into three patients at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital (Sharav).
The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence and the CIA begin Operation Paperclip, offering Nazi scientists immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret government projects on aerodynamics and chemical warfare medicine in the United States (“Project Paperclip”).
(1945 – 1955) In Newburgh, N.Y., researchers linked to the Manhattan Project begin the most extensive American study ever done on the health effects of fluoridating public drinking water (Griffiths and Bryson).
(1946)
Continuing the Newburg study of 1945, the Manhattan Project commissions the University of Rochester to study fluoride’s effects on animals and humans in a project codenamed “Program F.” With the help of the New York State Health Department, Program F researchers secretly collect and analyze blood and tissue samples from Newburg residents. The studies are sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and take place at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Strong Memorial Hospital (Griffiths and Bryson).
(1946 – 1947) University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).
Six male employees of a Chicago metallurgical laboratory are given water contaminated with plutonium-239 to drink so that researchers can learn how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract (Goliszek).
Researchers begin using patients in VA hospitals as test subjects for human medical experiments, cleverly worded as “investigations” or “observations” in medical study reports to avoid negative connotations and bad publicity (Sharav).
The American public finally learns of the biowarfare experiments being done at Fort Detrick from a report released by the War Department (Goliszek).
(1947)
Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that “certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract” (Goliszek).
A secret AEC document dated April 17 reads, “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits,” revealing that the U.S. government was aware of the health risks its nuclear tests posed to military personnel conducting the tests or nearby civilians (Goliszek).
The CIA begins studying LSD’s potential as a weapon by using military and civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA program in 1953 (Sharav).
(1947 – 1953) The U.S. Navy begins Project Chatter to identify and test so-called “truth serums,” such as those used by the Soviet Union to interrogate spies. Mescaline and the central nervous system depressant scopolamine are among the many drugs tested on human subjects (Goliszek).
(1948)
Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride’s health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for “national security” reasons (Griffiths and Bryson).
(1950)
(1950 – 1953) The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
In order to determine how susceptible an American city could be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of Bacillus globigii bacteria from ships over the San Francisco shoreline. According to monitoring devices situated throughout the city to test the extent of infection, the eight thousand residents of San Francisco inhale five thousand or more bacteria particles, many becoming sick with pneumonia-like symptoms (Goliszek).
Dr. Joseph Strokes of the University of Pennsylvania infects 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis to study the disease (Sharav).
Doctors at the Cleveland City Hospital study changes in cerebral blood flow by injecting test subjects with spinal anesthesia, inserting needles in their jugular veins and brachial arteries, tilting their heads down and, after massive blood loss causes paralysis and fainting, measuring their blood pressure. They often perform this experiment multiple times on the same subject (Goliszek).
Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, later of MKULTRA infamy due to his 1957 to1964 experiments on Canadians, publishes an article in the British Journal of Physical Medicine, in which he describes experiments that entail forcing schizophrenic patients at Manitoba’s Brandon Mental Hospital to lie naked under 15- to 200-watt red lamps for up to eight hours per day. His other experiments include placing mental patients in an electric cage that overheats their internal body temperatures to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and inducing comas by giving patients large injections of insulin (Goliszek).
(1951)
The U.S. Army secretly contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia and Washington, D.C.’s National Airport with a strain of bacteria chosen because African-Americans were believed to be more susceptible to it than Caucasians. The experiment causes food poisoning, respiratory problems and blood poisoning (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1951 – 1956) Under contract with the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM), the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston begins studying the effects of radiation on cancer patients — many of them members of minority groups or indigents, according to sources — in order to determine both radiation’s ability to treat cancer and the possible long-term radiation effects of pilots flying nuclear-powered planes. The study lasts until 1956, involving 263 cancer patients. Beginning in 1953, the subjects are required to sign a waiver form, but it still does not meet the informed consent guidelines established by the Wilson memo released that year. The TBI studies themselves would continue at four different institutions — Baylor University College of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine — until 1971 (U.S. Department of Energy, Goliszek).
American, Canadian and British military and intelligence officials gather a small group of eminent psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal about Communist “thought-control techniques.” They proposed a top-secret research program on behavior modification — involving testing drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and lobotomies on humans (Barker).
(1952)
At the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute, Chester M. Southam injects live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison to study the progression of the disease. Half of the prisoners in this National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) study are black, awakening racial suspicions stemming from Tuskegee, which was also an NIH-sponsored study (Merritte, et al.).
(1953 – 1974) The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsors iodine studies at the University of Iowa. In the first study, researchers give pregnant women 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131 and then study the women’s aborted embryos in order to learn at what stage and to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In the second study, researchers give 12 male and 13 female newborns under 36 hours old and weighing between 5.5 and 8.5 pounds iodine-131 either orally or via intramuscular injection, later measuring the concentration of iodine in the newborns’ thyroid glands (Goliszek).
As part of an AEC study, researchers feed 28 healthy infants at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine iodine-131 through a gastric tube and then test concentration of iodine in the infants’ thyroid glands 24 hours later (Goliszek).
(1953 – 1957) Eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston are injected with uranium as part of the Manhattan Project (Sharav).
In an AEC-sponsored study at the University of Tennessee, researchers inject healthy two- to three-day-old newborns with approximately 60 rads of iodine-131 (Goliszek).
Newborn Daniel Burton becomes blind when physicians at Brooklyn Doctors Hospital perform an experimental high oxygen treatment for Retrolental Fibroplasia, a retinal disorder affecting premature infants, on him and other premature babies. The physicians perform the experimental treatment despite earlier studies showing that high oxygen levels cause blindness. Testimony in Burton v. Brooklyn Doctors Hospital (452 N.Y.S.2d875) later reveals that researchers continued to give Burton and other infants excess oxygen even after their eyes had swelled to dangerous levels (Goliszek, Sharav).
A 1953 article in Clinical Science describes a medical experiment in which researchers purposely blister the abdomens of 41 children, ranging in age from eight to 14, with cantharide in order to study how severely the substance irritates the skin (Goliszek).
The AEC performs a series of field tests known as “Green Run,” dropping radiodine 131 and xenon 133 over the Hanford, Wash. site — 500,000 acres encompassing three small towns (Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland) along the Columbia River (Sharav).
In an AEC-sponsored study to learn whether radioactive iodine affects premature babies differently from full-term babies, researchers at Harper Hospital in Detroit give oral doses of iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants weighing between 2.1 and 5.5 pounds (Goliszek).
(1955 – 1957) In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology, researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the thyroid gland, to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and saliva samples from the test subjects. Due to the language barrier, no one tells the test subjects what is being done to them, so there is no informed consent (Goliszek).
(1956 – 1957) U.S. Army covert biological weapons researchers release mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., to test the insects’ ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents pose as public health officials to test victims for effects and take pictures of the unwitting test subjects. These experiments result in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the two cities’ residents, as well as several deaths (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1957)
The U.S. military conducts Operation Plumbbob at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Operation Pumbbob consists of 29 nuclear detonations, eventually creating radiation expected to result in a total 32,000 cases of thyroid cancer among civilians in the area. Around 18,000 members of the U.S. military participate in Operation Pumbbob’s Desert Rock VII and VIII, which are designed to see how the average foot soldier physiologically and mentally responds to a nuclear battlefield (“Operation Plumbbob”, Goliszek).
(1957 – 1964) As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor disorders like post-partum depression and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his “psychic driving” concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one’s memory and rewriting the psyche. These “driving” experiments involve putting human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or months in order to “rewrite” the “erased” psyche. Dr. Cameron also gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy 30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron’s test subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work (Goliszek, “Donald Ewan Cameron”).
In order to study how blood flows through children’s brains, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert needles into each child’s femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale a special gas through a facemask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards (Goliszek).
(1958)
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the codename “Project Chariot” (Sharav).
(1961)
In response to the Nuremberg Trials, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram begins his famous Obedience to Authority Study in order to answer his question “Could it be that (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” Male test subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 40 and coming from all education backgrounds, are told to give “learners” electric shocks for every wrong answer the learners give in response to word pair questions. In reality, the learners are actors and are not receiving electric shocks, but what matters is that the test subjects do not know that. Astoundingly, they keep on following orders and continue to administer increasingly high levels of “shocks,” even after the actor learners show obvious physical pain (“Milgram Experiment”).
(1962)
Researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication (Goliszek).
The FDA begins requiring that a new pharmaceutical undergo three human clinical trials before it will approve it. From 1962 to 1980, pharmaceutical companies satisfy this requirement by running Phase I trials, which determine a drug’s toxicity, on prison inmates, giving them small amounts of cash for compensation (Sharav).
(1963)
Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving “some cells,” but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn’t obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society (Greger, Merritte, et al.).
Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation’s effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment (Goliszek).
(1963 – 1966) New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as “vaccinations.” In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine (Hammer Breslow).
(1963 – 1971) Leading endocrinologist Dr. Carl Heller gives 67 prison inmates at Oregon State Prison in Salem $5 per month and $25 per testicular tissue biopsy in compensation for allowing him to perform irradiation experiments on their testes. If they receive vasectomies at the end of the study, the prisoners are given an extra $100 (Sharav, Goliszek).
Researchers inject a genetic compound called radioactive thymidine into the testicles of more than 100 Oregon State Penitentiary inmates to learn whether sperm production is affected by exposure to steroid hormones (Greger).
In a study published in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of California’s Department of Pediatrics use 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old in a series of experiments used to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one study, doctors insert a catheter through the newborns’ umbilical arteries and into their aortas and then immerse the newborns’ feet in ice water while recording aortic pressure. In another experiment, doctors strap 50 newborns to a circumcision board, tilt the table so that all the blood rushes to their heads and then measure their blood pressure (Goliszek).
(1964 – 1967) The Dow Chemical Company pays Professor Kligman $10,000 to learn how dioxin — a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange — and other herbicides affect human skin because workers at the chemical plant have been developing an acne-like condition called Chloracne and the company would like to know whether the chemicals they are handling are to blame. As part of the study, Professor Kligman applies roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees are exposed to on the skin 60 prisoners, and is disappointed when the prisoners show no symptoms of Chloracne. In 1980 and 1981, the human guinea pigs used in this study would begin suing Professor Kligman for complications including lupus and psychological damage (Kaye).
See the complete list here.
