http://www.newstarget.com/drug_trials.html

http://www.newstarget.com/021277.html

http://www.newstarget.com/021227.html

http://www.newstarget.com/019371.html

Human medical experimentation on children: The exploitation of poor children by Big Pharma (part two)

http://www.newstarget.com/019192.html

The crimes committed against children define some of the Holocaust's most morally despicable horrors. In It's My Story, Palmer told Handscomb of the abuses she received as a 13-year-old at Auschwitz. As a result of the damage done to her body by the contraceptive drug experiments forced upon her at Auschwitz, she had to undergo several painful surgeries immediately following the war and, even after the surgeries, Palmer remained unable to bear children for the rest of her life. Today, in her 70s, Palmer has cancer.
Now, no one can say for certain whether or not Palmer's cancer is linked to the medical experiments she underwent roughly 60 years earlier, but it is a likely possibility. Exposure to drugs and other chemicals produces extremely negative effects on children, especially those who are even younger than Palmer was during the experiments.

In the April 2004 Pediatrics article "Trends in Environmentally Related Childhood Diseases," Tracey Woodruff, et al. writes, "Children may be particularly susceptible to exposures in utero or during early life because the fetus' or young child’s physiology is undergoing rapid development, such as rapid cell division, changing metabolic activity, and evolving hormonal systems."

With this in mind, running experimental drug studies on children seems especially dangerous and thus horrendous, yet it is still a common occurrence even in modern society. In her Nov. 30, 2004 BBC News article "Guinea Pig Kids" and her subsequent documentary of the same name, Jamie Doran reveals New York City's Administration for Children's Services' (ACS) little-known practice of using HIV-positive children kept in the city's orphanages and foster care homes as human guinea pigs for experimental AIDS drugs. For his documentary and article, Doran interviewed Jacklyn Hoerger, a pediatric nurse who worked at the Catholic Church-run Incarnation Children's Home in Harlem. Hoerger maintains that social work authorities never told her that the drugs she and the other Incarnation employees were administering the orphans and foster care children were experimental. "We were told that if they were vomiting, if they lost their ability to walk, if they were having diarrhea, if they were dying, then all of this was because of their HIV infection," she said to BBC.

In reality, these symptoms were due to the experimental drugs that the workers were giving them. When BBC asked him his opinion on the experimental drug studies done on New York City's orphans and foster children, University of Berkeley visiting scholar Dr. David Rasnick explained, "We're talking about serious, serious side effects. These children are going to be absolutely miserable. They're going to have cramps, diarrhea and their joints are going to swell up. They're going to roll around the ground and you can't touch them." According to BBC reporter Doran, Dr. Rasnick went on to call the experimental AIDS drugs that were given to the children "lethal." If children refused to take them by mouth, workers at Incarnation force-fed them the drugs through feeding tubes inserted into their stomachs.

It's no doubt that these HIV-positive and AIDS symptomatic children needed medication. The question is why were they given experimental drugs, rather than the same medications that a child living in an expensive brownstone on the Upper East Side would have received? In the words of Alliance for Human Research Protection spokesperson Vera Sherav: "They tested these highly experimental drugs. Why didn't they provide the children with the current best treatment? That's the question we have. Why did they expose them to risk and pain, when they were helpless? Would they have done those experiments with their own children? I doubt it." Furthermore -- when you consider the fact that, according to the BBC article, 99 percent of the children in New York City children's homes are either African American or Hispanic -- issues of race and prejudice also come into play.

Hoerger told BBC that she didn't realize what was going on until she later took two children from Incarnation home as foster children. As a trained pediatric nurse, she decided to take the two children she was caring for in her home off the medications given to them while at Incarnation. This resulted in "an immediate boost to their health and happiness," according to BBC. However, soon after her decision, ACS came to her home and took the children out of her care. She was then labeled a child abuser in court and, after that, she never saw the children again.

Performing medical experiments on children is a serious accusation. Realizing this, while working on his documentary and article, Doran went to Incarnation for its side of the story, but it only referred him to its public relations firm. The expensive Manhattan firm told him that it didn't give comments about what goes on inside the home. In light of these accusations, former ACS Commissioner John B. Mattingly ordered a comprehensive review of all ACS records. By early April, based on the records they had examined, ACS staff members revealed just how common the experimentation Hoerger described at Incarnation was throughout the city:

Between 1988 and 2001, 465 foster care children and orphans were used in experimental AIDS drug trials.
Most of these children participated before 1996.
The majority of HIV-positive children living in New York City were diagnosed from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s.
The highest number of AIDS-related deaths among New York City children happened from 1990 to 1995.
The 465 children used in the studies were in approximately two dozen different independent agencies operating under contract to ACS.
Then, on Apr. 22, 2005, ACS sent out a press release stating that it had "contracted with the Vera Institute of Justice to conduct an independent review of ACS policy and practice regarding the enrollment of HIV-positive children in foster care in clinical drug trials during the late 1980s and 1990s." It also asserted: "The last child to enter an HIV-related clinical trial while in foster care did so in 2001. There are no ongoing HIV-related clinical trials involving children in foster care in New York City." This directly contradicts the conclusion Doran writes in his 2004 article: "The experiments continue to be carried out on the poor children of New York City."
ACS maintains that it ordered the studies with the best interest of HIV-positive children in mind. "The purpose of the drug trials was to develop effective treatments for pediatric AIDS, at a time when there were no known, FDA-approved medications available to treat children with the disease, and many children were dying," reads the press release. As proof of the gravity of the AIDS crisis ACS faced when conducting the trials, the press release cites the following figures from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene:

Out of the 13,927 HIV-positive children under age 13 nationwide prior to 2003 (according to CDC estimates), the percentage of HIV-positive children in New York City was "the highest by far of any jurisdiction in the country."
From 1979 through 2003, 3,634 children living in New York City and under the age of 13 were HIV positive.
Even though ACS believes that its decision to give the experimental AIDS drugs to the 465 foster children and orphans was not wrong, it is nevertheless ordering the Vera Institute to conduct the independent study, so as to assure the public and the media. As Commissioner Mattingly explained, "We are taking this step because, while we believe that the policies in place at the time reflected good practice, we acknowledge the need for transparency in all of our dealings with the public. In order for us to be effective in our mission to protect New York City’s children, we must have a sense of mutual trust with those families we seek to serve." According to the press release, the Vera Institute "will research ACS policies and procedures to ensure that HIV-positive children and children with AIDS who were in the care of ACS were appropriately enrolled in the correct clinical drug trials." This includes finding out whether:
ACS obtained consent from the children's parents or other guardians before enrolling them in the experimental drug studies.
The children enrolled in the trials met the medical criteria to do so.
ACS adequately and properly monitored the children who were enrolled.
Enrollment was "appropriate based on sound medical knowledge at the time."
As of an Oct. 5, 2005 update to its web site regarding the analysis, the Vera Institute still had not completed its investigation. It writes that it is "assembling an advisory board of medical, child welfare, legal, and community experts to review our findings and assure the public of the independence of our research." Meanwhile, in its description of the project, the Vera Institute acknowledges both sides of the controversy:
"Opponents of involving foster children in clinical trials -- where the risks and benefits are often unknown -- worry that this highly vulnerable population may be too-easily neglected or even exploited. When it comes to children of color, in particular, they point to historic examples where the health care system has acted in discriminatory and prejudicial ways.

"On the other hand, those who favor including foster children in clinical trials argue that enrollment can provide high quality care and cutting-edge medicine to children who otherwise would receive only routine medical services. In this view, excluding foster children unfairly bars them from the best the medical profession has to offer."

It will be very interesting to see the Vera Institute's findings -- which are, according to the Institute itself -- "part of Vera's mission to improve government systems." "We hope that the information we provide will contribute to the public debate that will help shape future policies regarding clinical trials and children in government custody," the site reads. On a national level, between 12,000 and 13,000 children under the age of 13 have participated in National Institutes of Health-sponsored AIDS drug trials from 1986 to 2005.

Even though the Vera Institute's findings are not yet complete, the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Apr. 8, 2005 cancellation of its Children's Health Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS) shows what a combination of intense opposition from environmental and public health groups (as well as a little help from Congress) can do to end experimentation on poverty-stricken children.


Child medical experiments at the EPA
In October 2005, the American Chemistry Council gave the EPA $2.1 million to study how children ranging from infancy to three years old ingest, inhale or absorb chemicals. Like IG Farben was for the German pharmaceutical companies of Nazi Germany, the American Chemistry Council acts much like a front group for chemical industry bigwigs like Bayer (which was incidentally also a member of IG Farben), BP, Chevron, Dow, DuPont, Exxon, Honeywell, 3M, Monsanto and Procter & Gamble. Studies have already proven that the chemicals made by these companies have long-term effects on children and adults. A short, two-year study like CHEERS would of course fail to reveal these long-term effects and the American Chemistry Council could then publicize these findings as "proof" that its chemicals were safe.
This represents an ethical problem in itself, but the demographic of the proposed child test subjects worsen the issue, especially in light of the use of foster children (the majority of which were African-American and Hispanic) by both the New York City ACS and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. According to the EPA's original study proposal, portions of which were reprinted by the Organic Consumers Association, test subjects would be chosen from six health clinics in Duvall County, Fla. Given the characteristics of these health centers, page 23 of the study proposal itself highlights that minority children from low-income families would be the likely test subjects: "Although all Duval County citizens are eligible to use the [health care] centers, they primarily serve individuals with lower incomes. In the year 2000, seventy five percent of the users of the clinics for pregnancy issues were at or below the poverty level ... The percentage of births to individuals classified as black in the U.S. Census is higher at these three hospitals than for the County as a whole."

In fact, the health care centers report that 51 percent of their births are to non-Caucasian mothers, and that 62 percent of mothers received only elementary school or secondary school educations. If the EPA were to have proceeded with CHEERS, children born to these health care centers would have been used as human guinea pigs simply because they belong to minority groups and poverty-stricken families. In return for allowing their children to be exposed to toxic chemicals, the families were to have received $970, a free video camera, a T-shirt and a framed certificate of appreciation.

Fortunately, the EPA decided not to go through with CHEERS, once U.S. Senators Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) decided to put their feet down and block President Bush's nomination of Stephen Johnson for head of the EPA. In his Apr. 8 statement, Johnson reversed the EPA's earlier decision to await a report from an independent science advisory panel before making a decision about CHEERS. He explained his decision as being a result of public and media "misrepresentations" of the study:

"Last fall, in light of questions about the study design, I directed that all work on the study stop immediately and requested an independent review. Since that time, many misrepresentations about the study have been made. EPA senior scientists have briefed me on the impact these misrepresentations have had on the ability to proceed with the study.

"I have concluded that the study cannot go forward, regardless of the outcome of the independent review. EPA must conduct quality, credible research in an atmosphere absent of gross misrepresentation and controversy."

Boxer, who says that she will continue to oppose testing toxins on humans, called CHEERS an "immoral program to test pesticides on children" and "a reprehensible idea that never should have made it out of the boardroom" in her statement to the Associated Press following Johnson's decision. Luckily, unlike Tuskegee, the study was stopped before anyone got hurt.

This story continues in part three.

Or see the Human Medical Experimentation Timeline

We are the guinea pigs!


NewsTarget.com printable article
Originally published March 6 2006


Human medical experimentation in the United States: The shocking true history of modern medicine and psychiatry (1965-2005)

by Dani Veracity

This is part two of a two-part series on human medical experimentation. Click here to read part one and the introduction.

(1966)
The CIA continues a limited number of MKULTRA plans by beginning Project MKSEARCH to develop and test ways of using biological, chemical and radioactive materials in intelligence operations, and also to develop and test drugs that are able to produce predictable changes in human behavior and physiology (Goliszek).
Dr. Henry Beecher writes, "The well-being, the health, even the actual or potential life of all human beings, born or unborn, depend upon the continuing experimentation in man. Proceed it must; proceed it will. 'The proper study of mankind is man,'" in his "exposé" on human medical experimentation Research and the Individual ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

U.S. Army scientists drop light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates and into the New York City subway system, exposing more than one million civilians to the bacteria (Goliszek).

The National Commission for the Protection of Research Subjects issues its Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects, which eventually creates what we now know as institutional review boards (IRBs) (Sharav).

(1967)
Continuing on his Dow Chemical Company-sponsored dioxin study without the company's knowledge or consent, University of Pennsylvania Professor Albert Kligman increases the dosage of dioxin he applies to 10 prisoners' skin to 7,500 micrograms, 468 times the dosage Dow official Gerald K. Rowe had authorized him to administer. As a result, the prisoners experience acne lesions that develop into inflammatory pustules and papules (Kaye).
The CIA places a chemical in the drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to see whether it is possible to spike drinking water with LSD and other substances (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers inject pregnant women with radioactive cortisol to see if the radioactive material will cross the placentas and affect the fetuses (Goliszek).

The U.S. Army pays Professor Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to Holmesburg Prison inmates' faces and backs, so as to, in Professor Kligman's words, "learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process," information which would have both offensive and defensive applications for the U.S. military (Kaye).

The CIA and Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories begin an extensive program for developing drugs that can influence human behavior. This program includes Project OFTEN -- which studies the toxicology, transmission and behavioral effects of drugs in animal and human subjects -- and Project CHICKWIT, which gathers European and Asian drug development information (Goliszek).

Professor Kligman develops Retin-A as an acne cream (and eventually a wrinkle cream), turning him into a multi-millionaire (Kaye).

Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison's special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will (Greger).

(1968)
Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans (Sharav, Sauter).
(1969)
President Nixon ends the United States' offensive biowarfare program, including human experimentation done at Fort Detrick. By this time, tens of thousands of civilians and members of the U.S. armed forces have wittingly and unwittingly acted as participants in experiments involving exposure to dangerous biological agents (Goliszek).
The U.S. military conducts DTC Test 69-12, which is an open-air test of VX and sarin nerve agents at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, likely exposing military personnel (Goliszek, Martin).

Experimental drugs are tested on mentally disabled children in Milledgeville, Ga., without any institutional approval whatsoever (Sharav).

Dr. Donald MacArthur, the U.S. Department of Defense's Deputy Director for Research and Technology, requests $10 million from Congress to develop a synthetic biological agent that would be resistant "to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease" (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

Judge Sam Steinfield's dissent in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145 marks the first time a judge has ever suggested that the Nuremberg Code be applied in American court cases (Sharav).

(1970)
A year after his request, under H.R. 15090, Dr. MacArthur receives funding to begin CIA-supervised mycoplasma research with Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division and hopefully create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent. Some experts believe that this research may have inadvertently created HIV, the virus that causes AIDS (Goliszek).
Under order from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also sponsored the Tuskegee Experiment, the free childcare program at Johns Hopkins University collects blood samples from 7,000 African-American youth, telling their parents that they are checking for anemia but actually checking for an extra Y chromosome (XYY), believed to be a biological predisposition to crime. The program director, Digamber Borganokar, does this experiment without Johns Hopkins University's permission (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

(1971)
President Nixon converts Fort Detrick from an offensive biowarfare lab to the Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center, now known as the National Cancer Institute at Frederick. In addition to cancer research, scientists study virology, immunology and retrovirology (including HIV) there. Additionally, the site is home to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute, which researches drugs, vaccines and countermeasures for biological warfare, so the former Fort Detrick does not move far away from its biowarfare past (Goliszek).
Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of college students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The "guards" had begun to act sadistic, while the "prisoners" started to show signs of depression and severe psychological stress (University of New Hampshire).

An article entitled "Viral Infections in Man Associated with Acquired Immunological Deficiency States" appears in Federation Proceedings. Dr. MacArthur and Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division have, at this point, been conducting mycoplasma research to create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent for about one year, again suggesting that this research may have produced HIV (Goliszek).

(1972)
In studies sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi gives LSD to mental patients at the University of Missouri Institute of Psychiatry and the University of Minnesota Hospital to study "ego strength" (Barker).
(1973)
An Ad Hoc Advisory Panel issues its Final Report on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, writing, "Society can no longer afford to leave the balancing of individual rights against scientific progress to the scientific community" (Sharav).
(1974)
Congress enacts the National Research Act, creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and finally setting standards for human experimentation on children (Breslow).
(1975)
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare gives the National Institutes of Health's Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects (1966) regulatory status. Title 45, known as "The Common Rule," officially creates institutional review boards (IRBs) (Sharav).
(1977)
The Kennedy Hearing initiates the process toward Executive Order 12333, prohibiting intelligence agencies from experimenting on humans without informed consent (Merritte, et al.).
The U.S. government issues an official apology and $400,000 to Jeanne Connell, the sole survivor from Col. Warren's now-infamous plutonium injections at Strong Memorial Hospital, and the families of the other human test subjects (Burton Report).

The National Urban League holds its National Conference on Human Experimentation, stating, "We don't want to kill science but we don't want science to kill, mangle and abuse us" (Sharav).

(1978)
The CDC begins experimental hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York. Its ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men. Professor Wolf Szmuness of the Columbia University School of Public Health had made the vaccine's infective serum from the pooled blood serum of hepatitis-infected homosexuals and then developed it in chimpanzees, the only animal susceptible to hepatitis B, leading to the theory that HIV originated in chimpanzees before being transferred over to humans via this vaccine. A few months after 1,083 homosexual men receive the vaccine, New York physicians begin noticing cases of Kaposi's sarcoma, Mycoplasma penetrans and a new strain of herpes virus among New York's homosexual community -- diseases not usually seen among young, American men, but that would later be known as common opportunistic diseases associated with AIDS (Goliszek).
(1979)
The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research releases the Belmont Report, which establishes the foundations for research experimentation on humans. The Belmont Report mandates that researchers follow three basic principles: 1. Respect the subjects as autonomous persons and protect those with limited ability for independence (such as children), 2. Do no harm, 3. Choose test subjects justly -- being sure not to target certain groups because of they are easily accessible or easily manipulated, rather than for reasons directly related to the tests (Berdon).
(1980)
A study reveals a high incidence of leukemia among the 18,000 military personnel who participated in 1957's Operation Plumbbob (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob">"Operation Plumbob").
According to blood samples tested years later for HIV, 20 percent of all New York homosexual men who participated in the 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).

American http://www.newstarget.com/doctors.html>doctors give experimental hormone shots to hundreds of Haitian men confined to detention camps in Miami and Puerto Rico, causing the men to develop a condition known as gynecomastia, in which men develop full-sized breasts (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

The CDC continues its 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis and Denver, recruiting over 7,000 homosexual men in San Francisco alone (Goliszek).

The FDA prohibits the use of prison inmates in pharmaceutical drug trials, leading to the advent of the experimental drug testing centers industry (Sharav).

The first AIDS case appears in San Francisco (Goliszek).

(1981)
(1981 - 1993) The Seattle-based Genetic Systems Corporation begins an ongoing medical experiment called Protocol No. 126, in which cancer patients at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle are given bone marrow transplants that contain eight experimental proteins made by Genetic Systems, rather than standard bone marrow transplants; 19 human subjects die from complications directly related to the experimental treatment (Goliszek).
A deep diving experiment at Duke University causes test subject Leonard Whitlock to suffer permanent brain damage (Sharav).

The CDC acknowledges that a disease known as AIDS exists and confirms 26 cases of the disease -- all in previously healthy homosexuals living in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles -- again supporting the speculation that AIDS originated from the hepatitis B experiments from 1978 and 1980 (Goliszek).

(1982)
Thirty percent of the test subjects used in the CDC's hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).
(1984)
SFBC Phase I research clinic founded in Miami, Fla. By 2005, it would become the largest experimental drug testing center in North America with centers in Miami and Montreal, running Phase I to Phase IV clinical trials (Drug Development-Technology.com).
(1985)
A former U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him in without his consent or even his knowledge in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669. Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments without informed consent (Merritte, et al..
(1987)
Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son's brain post mortem for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a doctrine of "implied consent," meaning that unless a patient signs a document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically implied (Merritte, et al.).
(1988)
The U.S. Justice Department pays nine Canadian survivors of the CIA and Dr. Cameron's "psychic driving" experiments (1957 - 1964) $750,000 in out-of-court settlements, to avoid any further investigations into MKULTRA (Goliszek).
(1988 - 2001) The New York City Administration for Children's Services begins allowing foster care children living in about two dozen children's homes to be used in National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) experimental AIDS drug trials. These children -- totaling 465 by the program's end -- experience serious side effects, including inability to walk, diarrhea, vomiting, swollen joints and cramps. Children's home employees are unaware that they are giving the HIV-infected children experimental drugs, rather than standard AIDS treatments (New York City ACS, Doran).

(1990)
The United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War ("Desert Storm"). More than 400,000 of these soldiers are ordered to take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome -- symptoms ranging from skin disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and vision problems -- affecting Gulf War veterans (Goliszek; Merritte, et al.).
The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).

The FDA allows the U.S. Department of Defense to waive the Nuremberg Code and use unapproved drugs and vaccines in Operation Desert Shield (Sharav).

(1991)
In the May 27 issue of the Los Angeles Times, former U.S. Navy radio operator Richard Jenkins writes that he suffers from leukemia, chronic fatigue and kidney and liver disease as a result of the radiation exposure he received in 1958's Operation Hardtack (Goliszek).
While participating in a UCLA study that withdraws schizophrenics off of their medications, Tony LaMadrid commits suicide (Sharav).

(1992)
Columbia University's New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine give 100 males -- mostly African-American and Hispanic, all between the ages of six and 10 and all the younger brothers of juvenile delinquents -- 10 milligrams of fenfluramine (fen-fen) per kilogram of body weight in order to test the theory that low serotonin levels are linked to violent or aggressive behavior. Parents of the participants received $125 each, including a $25 Toys 'R' Us gift certificate (Goliszek).
(1993)
Researchers at the West Haven VA in Connecticut give 27 schizophrenics -- 12 inpatients and 15 functioning volunteers -- a chemical called MCPP that significantly increases their psychotic symptoms and, as researchers note, negatively affects the test subjects on a long-term basis ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").
(1994)
In a double-blind experiment at New York VA Hospital, researchers take 23 schizophrenic inpatients off of their medications for a median of 30 days. They then give 17 of them 0.5 mg/kg amphetamine and six a placebo as a control, following up with PET scans at Brookhaven Laboratories. According to the researchers, the purpose of the experiment was "to specifically evaluate metabolic effects in subjects with varying degrees of amphetamine-induced psychotic exacerbation" ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").
Albuquerque Tribune reporter Eileen Welsome receives a Pulitzer Prize for her investigative reporting into Col. Warren's plutonium experiments on patients at Strong Memorial Hospital in 1945 (Burton Report).

In a federally funded experiment at New York VA Medical Center, researchers give schizophrenic veterans amphetamine, even though central nervous system stimulants worsen psychotic symptoms in 40 percent of schizophrenics ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

Researchers at Bronx VA Medical Center recruit 28 schizophrenic veterans who are functioning in society and give them L-dopa in order to deliberately induce psychotic relapse ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

President Clinton appoints the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), which finally reveals the horrific experiments conducted during the Cold War era in its ACHRE Report.

(1995)
A 19-year-old University of Rochester student named Nicole Wan dies from participating in an MIT-sponsored experiment that tests airborne pollutant chemicals on humans. The experiment pays $150 to human test subjects (Sharav).
In the Mar. 15 President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), former human subjects, including those who were used in experiments as children, give sworn testimonies stating that they were subjected to radiation experiments and/or brainwashed, hypnotized, drugged, psychologically tortured, threatened and even raped during CIA experiments. These sworn statements include:

Christina DeNicola's statement that, in Tucson, Ariz., from 1966 to 1976, "Dr. B" performed mind control experiments using drugs, post-hypnotic injection and drama, and irradiation experiments on her neck, throat, chest and uterus. She was only four years old when the experiments started.
Claudia Mullen's testimony that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (of MKULTRA fame) used chemicals, radiation, hypnosis, drugs, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, electric shock, brainwashing and emotional, sexual and verbal abuse as part of mind control experiments that had the ultimate objective of turning her, who was only a child at the time, into the "perfect spy." She tells the advisory committee that researchers justified this abuse by telling her that she was serving her country "in their bold effort to fight Communism."
Suzanne Starr's statement that "a physician, who was retired from the military, got children from the mountains of Colorado for experiments." She says she was one of those children and that she was the victim of experiments involving environmental deprivation to the point of forced psychosis, spin programming, injections, rape and frequent electroshock and mind control sessions. "I have fought self-destructive programmed messages to kill myself, and I know what a programmed message is, and I don’t act on them," she tells the advisory committee of the experiments' long-lasting effects, even in her adulthood (Goliszek).
President Clinton publicly apologizes to the thousands of people who were victims of MKULTRA and other mind-control experimental programs (Sharav).
In Dr. Daniel P. van Kammen's study, "Behavioral vs. Biochemical Prediction of Clinical Stability Following Haloperidol Withdrawal in Schizophrenia," researchers recruit 88 veterans who are stabilized by their medications enough to make them functional in society, and hospitalize them for eight to 10 weeks. During this time, the researchers stop giving the veterans the medications that are enabling them to live in society, placing them back on a two- to four-week regimen of the standard dose of Haldol. Then, the veterans are "washed-out," given lumbar punctures and put under six-week observation to see who would relapse and suffer symptomatic schizophrenia once again; 50 percent do ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

President Clinton appoints the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

Justice Edward Greenfield of the New York State Supreme Court rules that parents do not have the right to volunteer their mentally incapacitated children for non-therapeutic medical research studies and that no mentally incapacitated person whatsoever can be used in a medical experiment without informed consent (Sharav).

(1996)
Professor Adil E. Shamoo of the University of Maryland and the organization Citizens for Responsible Care and Research sends a written testimony on the unethical use of veterans in medical research to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Governmental Affairs, stating: "This type of research is on-going nationwide in medical centers and VA hospitals supported by tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers money. These experiments are high risk and are abusive, causing not only physical and psychic harm to the most vulnerable groups but also degrading our society’s system of basic human values. Probably tens of thousands of patients are being subjected to such experiments" ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").
The Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war, discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons (Merritte, et al.).

In a federally funded experiment at West Haven VA in Connecticut, Yale University researchers give schizophrenic veterans amphetamine, even though central nervous system stimulants worsen psychotic symptoms in 40 percent of schizophrenics ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

President Clinton issues a formal apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and their families (Sharav).

(1997)
In order to expose unethical medical experiments that provoke psychotic relapse in schizophrenic patients, the Boston Globe publishes a four-part series entitled "Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill" (Sharav).
Researchers give 26 veterans at a VA hospital a chemical called Yohimbine to purposely induce post-traumatic stress disorder ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

In order to create a "psychosis model," University of Cincinnati researchers give 16 schizophrenic patients at Cincinnati VA amphetamine in order to provoke repeats bouts of psychosis and eventually produce "behavioral sensitization" (Sharav).

National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) researchers give schizophrenic veterans amphetamine, even though central nervous system stimulants worsen psychotic symptoms in 40 percent of schizophrenics ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

In an experiment sponsored by the U.S. government, researchers withhold medical treatment from HIV-positive African-American pregnant women, giving them a placebo rather than AIDS medication (Sharav).

Researchers give amphetamine to 13 schizophrenic patients in a repetition of the 1994 "amphetamine challenge" at New York VA Hospital. As a result, the patients experience psychosis, delusions and hallucinations. The researchers claim to have informed consent ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

On Sept. 18, victims of unethical medical experiments at major U.S. research centers, including the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) testify before the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

(1999)
Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D. testifies on "The Unethical Use of Human Beings in High-Risk Research Experiments" before the U.S. House of Representatives' House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, alerting the House on the use of American veterans in VA Hospitals as human guinea pigs and calling for national reforms ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").
Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania inject 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger with an experimental gene therapy as part of an FDA-approved clinical trial. He dies four days later and his father suspects that he was not fully informed of the experiment's risk (Goliszek)

During a clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of Propulsid for infant acid reflux, nine-month-old Gage Stevens dies at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh (Sharav).

(2000)
The Department of Defense begins declassifying the records of Project 112, including SHAD, and locating and assisting the veterans who were exposed to live toxins and chemical agents as part of Project 112. Many of them have already died (Goliszek).
President Clinton authorizes the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act, which compensates the Department of Energy workers who sacrificed their health to build the United States' nuclear defenses (Sharav).

The U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of perchlorate -- a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses -- every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83 times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which has perchlorate in some of its drinking water. This Loma Linda study is the first large-scale study to use human subjects to test the harmful effects of a water pollutant and is "inherently unethical," according to Environmental Working Group research director Richard Wiles (Goliszek, Envirnomental Working Group).

(2001)
Healthy 27-year-old Ellen Roche dies in a challenge study at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland (Sharav).
On its website, the FDA admits that its policy to include healthy children in human experiments "has led to an increasing number of proposals for studies of safety and pharmacokinetics, including those in children who do not have the condition for which the drug is intended" (Goliszek).

During a tobacco industry-financed Alzheimer's experiment at Case Western University in Cleveland, Elaine Holden-Able dies after she drinks a glass of orange juice containing a dissolved dietary supplement (Sharav).

Radiologist Scott Scheer of Pennsylvania dies from kidney failure, severe anemia and possibly lupus -- all caused by blood pressure drugs he was taking as part of a five-year clinical trial. After his death, his family sues the Institutional Review Board of Main Line Hospitals, the hospital that oversaw the study, and two doctors. Investigators from the federal Office for Human Research Protections, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, later conclude in a Dec. 20, 2002 letter to Scheer's oldest daughter: "Your father apparently was not told about the risk of hydralazine-induced lupus … OHRP found that certain unanticipated problems involving risks to subjects or others were not promptly reported to appropriate institutional officials" (Willen and Evans, "Doctor Who Died in Drug Test Was Betrayed by System He Trusted.")

In Higgins and Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger Institute The Maryland Court of Appeals makes a landmark decision regarding the use of children as test subjects, prohibiting non-therapeutic experimentation on children on the basis of "best interest of the individual child" (Sharav).

(2002)
President George W. Bush signs the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), offering pharmaceutical companies six-month exclusivity in exchange for running clinical drug trials on children. This will of course increase the number of children used as human test subjects (Hammer Breslow).
(2003)
Two-year-old Michael Daddio of Delaware dies of congestive heart failure. After his death, his parents learn that doctors had performed an experimental surgery on him when he was five months old, rather than using the established surgical method of repairing his congenital heart defect that the parents had been told would be performed. The established procedure has a 90- to 95-percent success rate, whereas the inventor of the procedure performed on baby Daddio would later be fired from his hospital in 2004 (Willen and Evans, "Parents of Babies Who Died in Delaware Tests Weren't Warned").
(2004)
In his BBC documentary "Guinea Pig Kids" and BBC News article of the same name, reporter Jamie Doran reveals that children involved in the New York City foster care system were unwitting human subjects in experimental AIDS drug trials from 1988 to, in his belief, present times (Doran).
(2005)
In response to the BBC documentary and article "Guinea Pig Kids", the New York City Administration of Children's Services (ACS) sends out an Apr. 22 press release admitting that foster care children were used in experimental AIDS drug trials, but says that the last trial took place in 2001 and thus the trials are not continuing, as BBC reporter Jamie Doran claims. The ACS gives the extent and statistics of the experimental drug trials, based on its own records, and contracts the Vera Institute of Justice to conduct "an independent review of ACS policy and practice regarding the enrollment of HIV-positive children in foster care in clinical drug trials during the late 1980s and 1990s" (New York City ACS).
In exchange for receiving $2 million from the American Chemical Society, the EPA proposes the Children's Health Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS) to learn how children ranging from infancy to three years old ingest, inhale and absorb chemicals by exposing children from a poor, predominantly black area of Duval County, Fla., to these toxins. Due to pressure from activist groups, negative media coverage and two Democratic senators, the EPA eventually decides to drop the study on Apr. 8, 2005 (Organic Consumers Association).

Bloomberg releases a series of reports suggesting that SFBC, the largest experimental drug testing center of its time, exploits immigrant and other low-income test subjects and runs tests with limited credibility due to violations of both the FDA's and SFBC's own testing guidelines (Bloomberg).

Works cited:

Alliance for Human Research Protection. "'Monster Experiment' Taught Orphans to Stutter.". June 11, 2001.

Barker, Allen. "The Cold War Experiments." Mind Control.

Berdon, Victoria. "Codes of Medical and Human Experimentation Ethics." The Least of My Brothers.

Brinker, Wendy. "James Marion Sims: Father Butcher." Seed Show.

Burton Report. "Human Experimentation, Plutonium and Col. Stafford Warren."

Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair, eds. "Germ War: The U.S. Record." Counter Punch.

"Donald Ewan [sic] Cameron." Wikipedia.

Doran, Jamie. "Guinea Pig Kids." BBC News. 30 Nov. 2004.

Drug Development-Technology.com. "SFBC."

Elliston, Jon. "MKULTRA: CIA Mind Control." Dossier: Paranormal Government.

Environmental Working Group. "U.S.: Lockheed Martin's Tests on Humans." CorpWatch.

Global Security. Chemical Corps. 2005.

Goliszek, Andrew. In the Name of Science. New York: St. Martin's, 2003.

Greger, Michael, M.D. Heart Failure: Diary of a Third Year Medical Student.

Griffiths, Joel and Chris Bryson. "Toxic Secrets: Fluoride and the Atom Bomb." Nexus Magazine 5:3. Apr. - May 1998.

Hammer Breslow, Lauren. "The Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act of 2002: The Rise of the Voluntary Incentive Structure and Congressional Refusal to Require Pediatric Testing." Harvard Journal of Legislation Vol. 40.

"Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After." Micah Books.

Kaye, Jonathan. "Retin-A's Wrinkled Past." Mind Control. Orig. pub. Penn History Review Spring 1997.

"Manhattan Project: Oak Ridge." World Socialist Web Site. Oct. 18, 2002.

Meiklejohn, Gordon N., M.D. "Commission on Influenza." Histories of the Commissions. Ed. Theodore E. Woodward, M.D. The Armed Forced Epidemiological Board. 1994.

Merritte, LaTasha, et al.. "The Banality of Evil: Human Medical Experimentation in the United States." The Public Law Online Journal. Spring 1999.

Milgram, Stanley. "Milgram Experiment." Wikipedia. 2006.

New York City Administration of Children's Services. Press release. 22 Apr. 2005.

"Operation Plumbbob." Wikipedia. 2005.

"Operation Whitecoat." Religion and Ethics (Episode no. 708). Oct. 24, 2003.

Organic Consumers Association. "EPA and Chemical Industry to Study the Effects of Known Toxic Chemicals on Children". 12 Apr. 2005.

Pacchioli, David. Subjected to Science. Mar. 1996.

"Placebo Effect." Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine. 2006.

"Project Paperclip." Wikipedia. 2005.

"Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War." Annals of Internal Medicine 123:2. July 15, 1995.

Sharav, Vera Hassner. "Human Experiments: A Chronology of Human Rsearch." Alliance for Human Research Protection.

Sauter, Daniel. Guide to MS 83 [Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas Records, 1931 - 1999]. University of Texas Library. Apr. 2001.

"Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D." News from the Joint Hearing on Suspension of Medical Research at West Los Angeles and Sepulveda VA Medical Facilities and Informed Consent and Patient Safety in VA Medical Research. 21 Apr. 1999.

University of New Hampshire. "Chronology of Cases Involving Unethical Treatment of Human Subjects." Responsible Conduct of Research.

University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library. "Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study." 2004.

U.S. Department of Energy. "Chapter 8: Postwar TBI-Effects Experimentation: Continued Reliance on Sick Patients in Place of Healthy "Normals." Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) Final Report.

Veterans Health Administration. Project 112/Project SHAD. May 26, 2005.

Willen, Liz and David Evans. "Doctor Who Died in Drug Test Was Betrayed by System He Trusted." Bloomberg. Nov. 2, 2005.

---. "Parents of Babies Who Died in Delaware Tests Weren't Warned." Bloomberg. Nov. 2, 2005.




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Human Experimentation:
Before the Nazi Era and After


"First animals, then orphans, then the mentally retarded."

David J. Rothman, Strangers At The Bedside.



In 1907, Dr. Albert Leffingwell concluded his booklet, Illustration of Human Vivisection, with this chilling prophecy:

"At the beginning of a new century we are confronted by great problems. One of these is human vivisection in the name of scientific research. We appeal, then, to the medical press of America to beak that unfortunate silence which seems to justify or, at least, to condone it. Now and henceforth, will it not join us in condemning every such vivisector of little children, every such experimenter upon human beings? We make this appeal to it in the name of Justice and Humanity and for the sake of millions yet unborn."

The intellectual and philosophical rationalizations, as well as much of the practice of human experimentation, was well advanced by the end of the nineteenth century, and presents a continuing danger to human rights today, particularly when faced with the stimulus of crisis and war.

The history of human experimentation in the West is usefully divided into two eras: before the Nazi era and after. Human experimentation neither arose with the Nazis, nor ended with them. But the Nazi era, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson's famous statement that "Nothing concentrates a man's thoughts so much as the knowledge that he is to be hanged on the morrow"--the Nazi era concentrated our thoughts about human experimentation and, to some extent, halted its momentum. But it did not end the practice of what Dr. Leffingwell called at the beginning of the century, "the secret creed."

Vivisection was practised in the Roman era on gladiators and slaves. But this vivisection, monstrous to the living victim, was sporadic. The real history of vivisection begins in the nineteenth century with the rise of the experimental method in science, and subsequently in medicine. It arises from and accompanies animal experimentation which, with the work of Claude Bernard in the mid-nineteenth century, became the standard methodology in modern medicine. As soon as animal vivisection became standard practice, the question arose about experimental research on human beings. Animal researchers recognized that an inescapable problem had been created: the only way animal research could really be validated for human medical problems was to finally conduct the experiment on human beings, for there is no assurance from animal research itself that a given drug would be valid for human application. A famous example is the fact that aspirin kills rabbits, and if researchers had been guided in their use of aspirins by this laboratory research, human beings would have been denied a valuable drug. Michael Krater summarizes the process in his book, Doctors Under Hitler.

" One of the prerequisites that turned into a sort of fetish of this exact-scientific attitude was the experiment--it, too, a child of rationalization in the past century. At the universities, the theories had to be validated by experiments. It was unquestioned that advances in medicine (as in natural science) could be achieved only through the inductive method of formulating a hypothesis and testing it, by subjecting it to revision and verification in a controlled series of empirical observations."

However, Michael Krater's further statement is only partially true: "Throughout the 1920s and well into the Third Reich, German medical scientists were ruled by a consensus that as desirable as human experiments were, for moral reasons animals had to suffice as objects of empirical experimentation." That was the desideratum, but by the turn of the century experimentation on human beings was on its way to becoming respectable. The famous chemist, E.E. Slosson wrote on Dec. 12th,1895, in the New York Independent, "A human life is nothing compared with a new fact in science....the aim of science is the advancement of human knowledge at any sacrifice of human life....We do not know of any higher use we can put a man to." Professor Starling of University College, London, openly declared in 1906 to Britain's Parliament at its investigation into vivisection pracises, "The last experiment must be on man."

What animal research does is to provide a seemingly safety net and guidelines for procedure with human beings. Sometimes this safety net works, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it's misleading, but it is standard procedure, so that animal and human experimentation are two sides of the same coin. An article in The New Republic (April 26 and May 2, 1999) by Jerome Groopman, quixotically entitled "Merciful Medicine," describes the system very well:

"After extensive testing in small animals, drugs are tested for toxicity in human beings during what is known as Phase I trials. This first phase is designed to guage the side effects of the drugs, usually on groups of three or four people that get very low doses of the drug, followed by groups that receive successively higher doses until intolerable toxicity is reached [like LD50 drug testing in animals]. There is no expectation of clinical benefit in this first phase. Furthermore, Phase I studies take virutally all comers."

Groopman goes on to describe Phase II and Phase III of human experimentation, in an article intended as a plea to allow those who wish to to volunteer for human experimentation. It was only a matter of time until medicine would arrive at this point where the need for volunteers for human experimentation would become inescapable and would mandate a "merciful plea." As Michael Krater describes the escalation under Nazi Germany, "Because animal experimentation was known to be a poor substitute for experiments on humans, for only analogous inferences could be drawn, the crossover to human experimentation during the war became a logical consequence of prior practices that had been fettered."

The evolution from animal experimentation to human experimentation is a logical consequence of laws governing the experimental process, whether in Nazi Germany, or elsewhere, and not the result of preferring humans to animals. As Krater writes, "...the often-encountered theory that Nazis spurned human life in preference for that of animals, in particular house pets, is without basis in fact--nonsuspect societies love pets also."

The Weimar law passed in 1931 with respect to animal and human experimentation required that German and, subsequently Nazi, doctors must first conduct their experimental procedures on animals before proceding to human beings. This law was never abrogated in Nazi Germany and is similar to laws in the United States today. All experiments with human beings are and were first conducted on animals, and experimenters in and out of Nazi Germany had to validate this procedure. Thus,when Dr. Karl Rascher made his request on May 15, 1941 to the Reich Leader Himmler, "for two or three professional criminals," for high altitude test experiments of eighteen thousand meters, he pointed out that this experiment had been tried on monkeys, but that monkeys outlived their usefulness at 12,000 meters, and he now had to proceed to the use of humans. Research on animals does not protect human beings from becoming experimental guinea pigs.

The literature of the nineteenth century illustrates a continuing increase in the use of human beings for medical experiments, beginning in the last two decades of that century. With the rise of the germ theory and of the pharmaceutical companies, testing on both animals and humans proliferated at dizzying speeds. In her book, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War, Susan Lederer writes:

"The science of bacteriology engendered substantial experimentation on human beings and animals....Isolating and identifying a disease germ under the microscope was the first step. After growing the microorganism in a pure culture, the physicians needed to use the germ to produce the disease in a healthy organism.

"The use of human beings to confirm that a microbe caused a particular disease to demonstrate the mode of transmission was a harsh legacy of the germ theory of disease. Unable to find a suitable animal model in which to study the disease, physicians turned to human subjects. Before the discovery that monkeys could be infected with syphili and gonorrhea, the search for microbes of venereal disease prompted more than forty reports of experiments in which individuals were inoculated with the suspected germs of gonorrhea and syphilis. In 1895 New York pediatrician Henry Heiman...described the successful gonorrheal infection of a 4-year-old boy ("an idiot with chronic epilepsy"), a 16-year-old boy (an "idiot") and a 26-year-old man in the final stages of tuberculosis"

This information is in the medical journals of its time, The American Journal of Syphilis of 1943, and the Journal Cut. Genito-Urinary Diseases of 1895. It is germaine to the problem of informed consent that two of the subjects are described as "idiots," therefore presumably incapable of giving informed consent. Who then gave it for them, and should others have the right to give such consent for others? Should a parent in need of money have the right to give consent for a child to be experimented upon? Would this be considered "selling" a child to science. These are problems that degrade the integrity of the concept of informed consent.

Usually the human beings used for experimental purposes were--and are-- the disenfranchised, populations of prisoners, orphans, the mentally retarded, charity patients of all kinds. Dr. Leffingwell's study uncovered decades of experiments on human beings in charity wards and on children in orphan asylums. None of these experiments were as horrific as those conducted by the Nazis, but they were quite serious enough. Leffingwell documented experiments by Dr. Sydney Ringer of University Hospital of London, who experimented with poisons, such as overdoses of salicin, nitrate of sodium, gelseminum and other toxic agents, often on children under the age of ten. Due to the experiments,the children suffered from severe headaches, vomiting, twitching of limbs, burning sensations in the eyes, and other painful symptoms. Dr. Leffingwell commented:

"A distressing feature of many of these experiments is the fact that the men and women upon whom they were performed were not only ignorant, but under constraint. In this horrible case certain patients in the hospitals were not merely poisoned once, but were obliged 'on compulsion' to undergo the convulsive paroxysms and all the other agonizing symptoms a second time"

Dr. Ringer's experiments were published in a book called Handbook of Therapeutics. Far from receiving criticism for his experiments on children, Dr. Ringer's book went through eight editions and was regarded as a respectable medical book.

In 1906, the British Parliament conducted The Second Royal Commision into Vivisection Practices. H.H. Levy, the Honorable Secretary of the Personal Rights Association, told the Commission, "These experiments are not confined to animals and never have been confined to animals; they have always been performed on human beings, as well as on animals." Indeed, the Commission uncovered decades of evidence of routine human experimentation. Some of these experiments were published in 1949 in E. Westacot's book, A Century of Vivisection and Anti-Vivisection. Westacott's book describes the experiments of Professor Neisser of Vienna who, on March 29, 1899, reported in the Medical Press of Vienna, how he had inoculated eight healthy children with syphilis. Three of the children developed symptoms of the disease, and a fourth suffered later in life from a cerebral tumor. While Professor Meisner was condemned and fined by the disciplinary court of Breslau, he was rewarded by the West London Chirugical Society in England in 1911, with the Cavendish Gold Medal for his research, and a reception was held in his honor. Apart from the Nazi doctors, it is hard to find a single doctor who was seriously punished for human experimentation, and who was not in fact professionally rewarded.

In the United States, in 1913, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives recorded that 146 children had been inocluated with the syphilis virus, "through the courtesy of the various hospitals" and that 15 children in St. Vincent's House in Philadelphia had had their eyes tested with tuberculin. Several of these children became permanently blind. The experimenters were not punished. Moreover, this case further illustrates that the doctrine of "informed consent" proves to be practically inoperable in the case of instutionalized people, particularly children, because in most of these circumstances it is the institution's supervisor who is responsible for giving"informed consent" and usually gives it.

Experimentation on human beings was not confined to bacteriological research. J. Marion Sims, the "father of gynecology" performed experimental surgery, before the days of anesthesia, on several slaves, and performed thirty-four experimental operations on a single black female slave for a prolapsed uterus.

One of the most famous cases in human experimentation involves an Irish servant girl, Mary Rafferty, who entered Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati in 1874, with an ulcerated tumor on the side of her head, which had been caused by a bad burn. Mary Rafferty's case demonstrates the characteristics usually inherent in cases of human experimentation: the ambiguity involved in determining whether informed consent had been obtained, the shadowland between experimentation and therapy, the fact that only the attending physicians really know the truth of what occurred. Her physicians diagnosed the ulcer on her scalp as cancerous and apparently attempted to treat her condition surgically. When they believed that her situation could not be remedied, they proceeded to experiment on her. One of Mary's physicans, Roberts Bartholow was interested in experiments Dr. David Ferrier had made with dogs using electric shock to determine the localization of epilepsy. The experiments with Mary are described as follows:

"When the needle entered the brain substance, she complained of acute pain in the neck. In order to develop more decided reaction, the strength of the current was increased by drawing out the wooden cylinder one inch. When communication was made with the needles, her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry. Very soon, the left hand was extended as if in the act of taking hold of some object in front of her; the arm presently was agitated with clonic spasm; her eyes became fixed with pupils widely dilated; her lips were blue, and she frothed at the mouth; her breathing became stertorous; she lost consciousness and was violently convulsed on the left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes, and was succeeded by a coma. She returned to consciousness in twenty minutes from the beginning of the attack, and complained of some weakness and vertigo."

The Mary Rafferty Case illustrates a persistent pattern in issues of human experimentation: she died a few days later, and her death certificate stated that she died from cancer. There was criticism of Dr. Bartholow's experiment: it was condemned by the American Medical Association, but Dr. Bartholow did not suffer professionally. Indeed, he advanced professionally. Scandal arises, then scandal subsides, and the researcher is rewarded.

The second issue is that while Dr. Bartholow conceded that his experiment had perhaps gone too far, he asserted emphatically that Mary had given informed consent and that his experiments did not cause her death. But even if the experiments did not cause her death, she was entitled to die without unnecessary pain. The argument that "the patient was going to die anyway" is a gross argument, and one that was used by the Nazi doctors. Bad enough the patient is going to die; it is no excuse for the patient to be tortured while dying. We do not permit condemned prisoners to be tortured on the excuse that they're going to die anyway. (However, there are constant proposals from research medicine that prisoners on death row be used for experimental purposes. Would such "experiments" constitute torture or not?)

The third issue is that of Mary Rafferty's consent. Dr. Bartholow argued that she was not feeble-minded and understood his questions to her. There is a contradiction in this argument. If Mary Rafferty really understood Dr. Bartholow's description of what he was about to do, common sense tells us she would not have consented. This is the crux of the issue with most "informed consent" problems. Examination of particular experiments invariably suggests that the patient did not understand what he or she was consenting to. "Informed consent" proves to be a treacherous deception in many cases. At a conference on "The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code" at Boston University in 1989, Dr.Arthur Caplan stated that the principle of informed consent, which is the cornerstone of protection for human rights in a medical context, is now so eroded that it has evolved into "protection of the researcher" and a license to experiment.

"Informed consent" does not respond to the more common types of experimentation on human beings, where the area between therapy and experimentation is blurred, and where it is difficult to pass judgment on medical procedure. An article in The New York Times (Nov., 1996) by Gina Kolata, demonstrates the ubiquity of the problem. The Food and Drug Administration gave permission to lift the requirement of informed consent for patients who have been brought into a hospital, suffering from a head injury which has rendered them unconscious, and who have no identification. Who is to give consent in this case? Though this step marks a grave departure from the Nuremberg Code, it has aroused little public reaction. Of course, the argument in defense of the lifting of this ban is the necessity to treat a patient, even experimentally, who cannot speak for him or herself. But how many people are wandering about without any identification? The population of "unidentifiable" people is immediately identifiable: the homeless and probably illegal immigrants.

Even with alert and identifiable patients, as Jay Katz observed at the Boston University Conference, informed consent is meaningless unless the patient is educated and medically very knowledgeable, but most sick people, as Dr. Katz pointed out, are not in a position to argue with their physicians: they are "coerced by disease," by pain, by fear of death, and often by ignorance.

In real practice--not theoretical practice--the concept of "informed consent" has led to the duplicitous practice of what Bradford H. Gray calls in his book, Human Subjects in Medical Experimentations, "the engineering of consent." His study unsurprisingly reveals that "informed consent" is often a mirage, often coerced from frightened people who are in too much pain and confusion to withstand a request from a doctor. In the introduction to Gray's book, Bernard Barber exposes the myth of medical experimental outrages as the aberration of a "few bad doctors."

"There is a mistaken belief held by some medical researchers, and even by those who deplore the defects in present practices in this field, that the shortcomings and scandals that occur can be traced to a handful of individuals who lack the requisite personal qualities. They recommend that 'the honest, conscientious, compassionate physican' be the ultimate safeguard of the human research subject. But Gray's book shows that 'honest, conscientious, compassionate' physicans have been led into bad practice by a bad system."

Experimentation on human beings is not the work of a few aberrant doctors; it is systemic, because it is the system by which modern western medicine works. Exposés of outrageous experiments, such as Dr. Henry Beecher's book, Research and The Individual, written in 1966, often endorse research on human beings. Dr. Beecher wrote, "The well-being, the health, even the actual or potential life of all human beings, born or unborn, depend upon the continuing experimentation in man. Proceed it must; proceed it will. 'The proper study of mankind is man.'"

The Nuremberg trials brought to light the horrors of medical experimentation on human beings, and tried to articulate a restraining formula by stressing the concept of "informed consent," but the trials also recognized that "Medical science cannot, unless it is to be brought to a standstill, dispense with the application in suitable cases of new remedies and procedures not yet fully tested. Nor can it do entirely without scientific experiment on human beings itself." In 1931, Germany already possessed a good bioethical code which contained almost all the points of the Nuremberg Code. Yet it failed to curb the rapacious desire to experiment. By the time of the Nazi experiments, the legal procedure and conduct of experimentation with human beings had been laid down in Germany, the United States and England. Experimentation on human beings was not condemned. What was condemned in Germany was the political and racial uses of human experimentation, and its excesses. The defense of the Nazi doctors rested on the argument that their procedure was standard Western medical practice, and they submitted cartons of documentation of experiments on human beings in Western hospitals to prove their case, including an exhaustive volume, entitled, Experiments on Human Beings in World Literature, by Dr. Erich H. Hahlbach," which describes such experiments as those conducted on "eight hundred convicts from three American prisons" artificially infected with malaria, who presumably volunteered for this experiment, prisoners in Turkey sentenced to death, infected with typhus, prisoners sentenced to death infected with plague, etc. The defense pointed out that "Out of fifty-three printed sources quoted, seventeen state that the subjects consented. In thirty-six the matter was not mentioned in any way and in several of these cases it appeared that the subjects might not have presented themselves willingly." The defense's argument was that experimentation with human beings had been accepted medical procedure. The question, they asked, is whether "medical experimentation can be considered a crime." The prosecution did not argue this, but condemned the experiments because they had been used for political and racial purposes. A half hour's reading in The Encylcopedia of Bioethics , under "human experimentation," "minority subjects," reveals that it had been thus for half a century. The Encyclopedia documents cases of experimentation on human beings of minority populations and Third World populations.

Eileen Welsome's book, "The Plutonium Files," (Dial Press, 1999), documents radiation experiments on human beings in the United States from the 1940s, after the exposure of Nazi experiments and the articulation of the Nuremburg Code. Some of the doctors who conducted these experiments and were later interviewed about them, confessed that they knew of the Nurmeberg Code, but did not think it applied to them--that code was for the barbarian Nazis. William Silverman of Columbia University, said:

"'The connection bween those horrendous acts andour every day investigation was not made for reasons of self inerest, to be perfectly frank. As I see it now, I'm saddened tha e didn't see the connection, but that's what was sone. We wrapped ourselves in the flag....'" (p. 214.)

Welsome writes, "Physcians performed experiments on healthy people and sick patients without informing them of what was going on or getting their consent. Sick patients were preyed on most frequently. They were convenient, plentiful, and vulnerable, since nontherapeutic procedures could be administered easily under the guise of medical treatment....Terminally ill patients were perhaps the most vulnerable group of all....Women, children, unborn fetuses, minorities, the mentally retarded, schizophrenics, prisoners, alcoholics, and poor people of all ages and ethnic groups were targets." (p. 214-215)

There are exaples of experimentation on human beings that is more democratic. Ed Regis' book, "The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project," ( Henry Holt & Co., 2,000) writes of those experiments when U.S. Nay ships "without, it seems the knowledge of Congress, sprayed the Virginia coastal communities of Norfolk, hampton and Newport News with BG (bacillus globigii--used to stimulate the spread of anthrax) [and] 800,000 people around San Francisco ay were exposed to clouds of these microbes." ("The New York Times Book Review, Jan. 22, 2,000). Prior to this, in October, 1940, "Japanese planes dropped a mixture of grains and fleas over Chinese towns, causing two major oubreaks of bubonic plague south of Shaghai." (Ibid)

The race to develop genetic medicine has opened new temptations for doctors to experiment on human beings. The death of Jesse Gelsinger, 18 years old, who suffered from a non-threatening liver ailment, and was induced to undergo genetic treatment for it at the University of Pennsylvania, has exposed appalling practices that are now a century old: the cavalier behavior of the experimenters, the hasty patched-together "informed consent" form--after his death---other procedural misconduct.("The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2,000, page. 1, " Youth's Death Shaking Up Field of Gene Exerpiments on Humans.)

The philosopher Hans Jonas proposed that experimentation on human beings must be reserved not for the disenfranchised, but for the scientists and intellectuals themselves--both for scientific and moral reasons. Scientifically, because the class that designs the experiments can best report on the probity and results of the experiments. There were outstanding examples of this procedure in the nineteenth century, and occasionally one still hears of a medical doctor experimenting on himself (or a member of his family), but as human experimentation went from what David Rothman called "a cottage industry" in the nineteenth century to its present dimensions as an indispensable part of modern medicine requiring ever larger populations, "voluntary science martyrs" disappeared. The reasons for this are not hard to find: If Mary Rafferty had understood what she presumably was consenting to, she would not likely have consented. Some who do consent are usually those in desperately dependent positions.

Jerome Stephens offers another, more chilling reason why the medical research community does not seek out "volunteers' from the higher socio-economic brackets. Researching on the ignorant and the disenfranched allows the researchers to maintain control of the research process.

"Medical researchers, of course, are quite aware of the social, economic, and political backgrounds of those who serve as subjects, and while the researchers are interested in developing an ideology that does imply societal authority for experimentation, the primary goal seems to be to maintain their power over the neglected. It is highly unlikely, for example, that researchers would even want to include large numbers of educated and affluent individuals as subjects, because to do so would almost certainly threaten the status quo by requiring that more information be imparted, and by requiring research to be better designed to avoid the completely useless experiments now conducted. It is also obvious that more stringent regulations would emerge to control experimentation if groups with well-defined and powerful constituencies were used. At the present, the researchers, by confining their experiments primarily to the neglected, are potentially useful to the more affluent in that they may discover new knowledge, and the researchers provide no threat to the middle class. Tacit consent to exercise power, then, does reside in researchers, but it is the exercise of power, not individual choice to submit to experimentation or overt societal authority that is the core to understanding the whole process of human experimentation."

Not quite. Animal experimentation is "the core to understanding the whole process of human experimentation," for if the poor, the mentally retarded, the homeless, the orphaned and the imprisoned have little voice, the animals have no voice, and it is voicelessness and rightlessness that invests the whole procedure from animal to orphan to the mentally retarded.

We are not done with Auschwitz and Nuremberg. Their shadows are long. The silence of the medical communities in Germany and the United States after the Second World War revealed the desire of the medical communities to distance themselves from the outrages of Auschwtiz, by silence and by spreading the myth that the German experiments was the work of deranged scientists. In his anthology, When Medicine Went Mad, Arthur Caplan asks why bioethics has so little so say about the Holocaust:

"There has been almost no discussion of the roles played by medicine and science during the Nazi era in bioethic literature. Rather than see Nazi biomedicine as morally bad, the field of bioethics has generally accepted the myths that Nazi medicine was either inept, mad, or coerced. By subscribing to these myths, bioethics has been able to avoid a painful confrontation with the fact that many who committed the crimes of the Holocaust were competent physicans and health care professionals acting from their moral convictions....A fog of excuses, lies, and exculpation has been laid over the crematoria and laboratories of the concentration camps."

When the Nazi doctors were asked in the Nuremberg trials how they could have brought themselves to perform such experiments, they responded that they had been trained by doing them on animals. Time is exposing the desperate myth that animal experimentation replaces or disposes of the need for human exprimentation, and that the work of the Nazi doctors was that of "mad scientists." Some of it was bad science, but some of it wasn't, and the work of the Nazi doctors has been entering mainstream Western medicine for decades.The Columbus Dispatch in 1984 revealed that a researcher in British Columbia had been using the information from Nazi experiments on hypothermia. The Jerusalem Report of Feb. 22, 1996 revealed that Dr. Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York was dismayed to discover that his valuable and trusted book, Pernkopf's Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy contained illustrations that may be based on the cadavers of concentration camp victims. Caplan's question in When Medicine Went Mad, "Should Nazi data from the experiments be used?" has been answered: Nazi data has been used by many scientists from many nations.

Our moral horror at the Nazi medical experiments was dissipated by our government's decision not to prosecute the Japanese for almost identical experiments on an almost identical number of victims, three thousand (many of whom were American prisoners), in exchange for the information from those experiments. As Raoul Hillburg wrote in The Destruction of the European Jews, "If the world was so shocked at what it discovered to be the extremes to which experimental medicine would go, it has yet to condemn the method or find the means to control it."


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