In 1977, a Senate
subcommittee chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy was
convened to investigate the CIA's testing of LSD on
unwitting citizens. Frank
Olsen was one such citizen. After drinking punch the
CIA spiked with LSD,
Olsen became terribly frightened of cars, thinking
they were monsters out to
get him. Before the CIA could make arrangements to
treat him, Olsen checked
into a hotel and threw himself out of his tenth
story room.
Then there was the
CIA's "Operation Midnight Climax." Taxpayer dollars
at work hiring prostitutes to lure men from bars
back to safehouses after their
drinks had been spiked with LSD. Captain George
Hunter White, who headed
many of these experiments, wrote to the head of the
CIA's Technical Services
Staff upon leaving government service in 1966:
I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled
wholeheartedly in the
vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun....
Where else could a
red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal,
rape and pillage with
the sanction and blessings of the
all-highest?
First, Do No Harm
The landmark
article on human experimentation was written by Harry
Beecher. It was rejected by JAMA, but picked up by
the New England Journal
of Medicine. It created a furor both inside and
outside the medical
profession. He described a sampling of experiments
he gleaned from the
medical literature at the time detailing prestigious
scientists egregiously
violating Nuremburg principles.
Dr. Alf Alving of the University of Chicago under [a
government grant]...
purposely infected [Illinois State Hospital
psychotic, back-ward
patients] with malaria through blood
transfusions and then
gave them experimental antimalarial
therapies.
Dr. Saul Krugman purposefully infected retarded children
with hepatitis. He
became the chairman of pediatrics at New York
University and won the
Lasker prize (the American equivalent of
the Nobel).
Dr. Chester Southam
injected cancer cells into elderly and senile patients.
The subjects were merely told they would be
receiving "some cells," the word
cancer was entirely omitted. Dr. Chester Southam was
elected president of
the American Association for Cancer Research.
This Won't Hurt a Bit
The list goes on.
In 1963, the United States Public Health Service, the
American Cancer Society, and the Jewish Chronic
Disease Hospital of
Brooklyn, participated in an experiment in which
physicians injected live
cancer cells into twenty-two chronically ill and
debilitated African American
patients. The patients did not consent, nor were
they aware that they were
being injected with cancer.
During the 1970s,
the government collected blood samples from seven
thousand Black youths. Parents were told that their
children were being tested
for anemia, but instead, the government was looking
for signs that the children
were genetically predisposed to criminal activity.
At least eighty-two
"charity" patients were exposed to full-body radiation
at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. The
patients were exposed to
radiation ten times the level believed to be safe at
the time twenty-five patients
died. Three-quarters of the patients in the study
were Black men and women.
The consent signatures were forged.
Loretta Bender,
president of the Society of Biological Psychiatry: "In the
children's unit of Creedmore State Hospital with a
resident population of 450
patients, ages 4 to 15, we have investigated the
responses of some of these
children to lysergic acid [LSD] and related drugs in
the psychiatric,
psychological, and biochemical areas."
MK-Ultra
In 1977, a Senate
subcommittee chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy was
convened to investigate the CIA's testing of LSD on
unwitting citizens. Frank
Olsen was one such citizen. After drinking punch the
CIA spiked with LSD,
Olsen became terribly frightened of cars, thinking
they were monsters out to
get him. Before the CIA could make arrangements to
treat him, Olsen checked
into a hotel and threw himself out of his tenth
story room.
Then there was the
CIA's "Operation Midnight Climax." Taxpayer dollars
at work hiring prostitutes to lure men from bars
back to safehouses after their
drinks had been spiked with LSD. Captain George
Hunter White, who headed
many of these experiments, wrote to the head of the
CIA's Technical Services
Staff upon leaving government service in 1966:
I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled
wholeheartedly in the
vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun....
Where else could a
red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal,
rape and pillage with
the sanction and blessings of the
all-highest?
A Glowing Report
On November
19,1996, the Secretary of Energy announced that a $4.8
million settlement will be paid to the families of
12 people injected with
radioactive materials during the Cold War period.
The official "Report of
the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments" was published in
JAMA. The committee found, "serious deficiencies in
the current system of
protections for human subjects...."
Unlucky charms.
Beginning in 1949, the Quaker Oats company, the
National Institutes of Health, and the Atomic Energy
Commission fed minute
doses of radioactive materials to boys at the
Fernald School for the mentally
retarded in Waltham, Massachusetts via breakfast
cereal. The unwitting
subjects were told that they were joining a science
club. The consent form sent
to the boys' parents made no mention of the
radiation experiment. Tricks
are for kids.
The Advisory Committee reserved its harshest criticism for
those cases in which
physicians used patients without their consent
as subjects in
research from which the patients could not possibly
benefit medically.
These cases included a series of experiments in
which 18 patients,
some but not all of whom were terminally ill,
were injected with
plutonium at... the University of Chicago and
the University of
California, San Francisco, as well as 2
experiments in which
seriously ill patients were injected with
uranium, 6 at the
University of Rochester and 11 at Massachusetts
General Hospital,
Boston.
Ebb Cabe, for
example, a 53-year-old "colored male" who was
hospitalized following an auto accident but was
other wise in good health, was
injected with plutonium. A lawyer for the plaintiffs
in ensuing suits said
that the scientists, "had a code word for plutonium
in the medical records, so
people couldn't figure out that these people were
injected."
Very Poor Effect
We are lucky to
know this much. A recently leaked Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) document: "It is desired that no
document be released
which refers to experiments on humans and might have
an adverse effect on
public opinion or resulting legal suits." Government
for the people, by the
people.
When the AEC considered declassifying some of these
research reports, its
declassification officer concluded that such a
step was unthinkable:
'The document appears to be most
dangerous since it
describes experiments performed on human
subjects, including
the actual injection of plutonium into the
body.... The coldly
scientific manner in which the results are
tabulated and
discussed would have a very poor effect on the
public.'
A Sort of Memorial
When confronted,
what do the researchers who participated in these
experiments have to say for themselves?
Patricia Durbin, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory in
California who participated in plutonium
experiments, recently
said: 'These things were not done to plague
people or make them
sick and miserable. They were not done to kill
people. They were done
to gain potentially valuable information.
The fact that they
were injected and provided this valuable data
should almost be sort
of a memorial rather than something to be
ashamed of. It doesn't
bother me to talk about the plutonium
injections because of
the value of the information they provided.'
Other doctors speak
to other memorials. Dr. Joseph Hamilton, a
neurologist at the University of California hospital
in San Francisco, referred to
his own human radiation experiments in the 1940s as
having, "a little of the
Buchenwald touch."
Special Free Treatment
No discussion would
be complete without mention of Tuskegee. On May
16, 1997, President Bill Clinton apologized in a
White House ceremony for the
Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the 40-year
government study in which 399 Black
men from Macon County, Alabama were deliberately
denied effective
treatment for syphilis. In fact, the United States
Public Health Service went to
extreme lengths to ensure that they would not
receive any treatment, in their
words, "in order to document the natural history of
the disease."
The Public Health Service leaders' excuse was that
with the advent of
antibiotics, no one would ever again be able to
trace the long term effects of the
disease. The press reported that as of 1969, at
least 28 and perhaps as
many as 100 men had died as a direct result of
complications caused by
syphilis. The women these men passed the disease to
are rarely
mentioned.
The physicians
conducting the study deceived the men, telling them they
were being treated for "bad blood." The men were
informed that the lumbar
punctures were therapeutic, not diagnostic. The
regular spinal taps were
described as, "special free treatment."
From Perspectives in Medical Sociology:
The Los Angeles Times... editors qualified their accusation
that Public Health
Service officials had persuaded hundreds of
black men to become
'human guinea pigs' by adding: 'Well,
perhaps not quite
that, because the doctors obviously did not regard
their subjects as
completely human.'
As late as 1969, a
committee from the Centers for Disease Control
examined the study and decided to continue it. As
one of the longest medical
studies in history, the
Tuskegee Syphilis Study continued until 1976 despite
having been openly discussed in conferences at
professional meetings. As
described in Perspectives in Medical Sociology, "It
continued despite more than
a dozen articles appearing in some of the nation's
best medical journals, which
described the study to a combined readership of well
over a hundred thousand
physicians."
References
"They Were Cheap and Available: Prisoners as
Research Subjects in
Twentieth Century America." British Medical Journal
315:1437.
Mellanby, K. Human Guinea Pigs London: Merlin
Press, 1973.
Lifton, RJ. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing
and the Psychology of
Genocide New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Kaye, J. "Retin-A's Wrinkled Past." Pennsylvania
History Review
1997(Spring).
Rothman, DJ. Strangers at the Bedside A
History of How Law & Bioethics
Transformed Medical Decision-Making New York: Basic
Books, 1992:15.
Beecher, HK. "Ethics and Clinical Research."
New England Journal of
Medicine 274(1966):1354-1360.
Rothman, DJ. Strangers at the Bedside A
History of How Law & Bioethics
Transformed Medical Decision-Making New York: Basic
Books, 1992:77.
"Autonomic Nervous System Responses in
Hospitalized Children Treated
with LSD and UML." Proceedings of the 19th Annual
Convention and Scientific
Program of the Society of Biological Psychiatry Los
Angeles, 13 May 1964.
Martin, HV and D Caul. "Mind Control." Napa
Sentinel
www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon8.html, 1991.
Guinea Pig Zero 3:7.
Rothman, DJ. "Radiation." Journal of the American Medical
Association
276(1996):421-423.
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments. "Research Ethics
and the Medical Profession." Journal of the American
Medical Association
276(1996):403-409.
Ensign, T and G Alcalay. "Duck and Cover[up]."
Covert Action Quarterly
52(1995).
Gamble, VN. "Americans and Medical Research."
American Journal of
Preventive Medicine 9(1):35-38.
Gamble VN. "Under the Shadow of Tuskegee:
African Americans and
Health Care." American Journal of Public Health
7(1997):1773-1778.
Brown, P. Perspectives in Medical Sociology
Prospect Heights: Waveland
Press, 1996:538.
Youngson, RM. Medical Blunders: Amazing True
Stories of Mad, Bad &
Dangerous Doctors New York: New York University
Press 1999:344.