William C Black MD conducted unethical medical experiments on children. He wrote a report about an experiment in which he had infected a 12-month old baby with herpes. Francis Payton Rous, editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, rejected Black’s manuscript and wrote an editorial in the Journal stating:
Dr. Payton Rous 1966 Nobel Prize Winner
“I cannot let this occasion pass without saying that in my personal view th inoculation of a twelve month old infant with herpes virus obtained from an adult was an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science. The statement that the child was ‘offered as a volunteer’ – whatever that may mean – does not palliate the action.(Rous, 1941, quoted by Michael Grodin and Leonard Glanz. Children as Research Subjects: Science, Ethics, and Law, 1994)
Nevertheless, Black published his report in the Journal of Pediatrics, 1942. Black selected at random, 23 children from his patients and injected them with infected herpes tissues to demonstrate symptoms that were caused by a single herpes virus. (Timothy Murphy. The Ethics of Research with Children, AMA, 2003)
Dr. Rous received the Nobel prize 50 years after he discovered the transmittable virus causing sarcoma cancer in chickens, but his discovery had been rejected by most pathologists. For about forty years his momentous discovery had little impact, because scientists were not prepared to think of viruses as agents of cancer.
Joseph Goldberger, MD, under orders of the US Public Health Office induces Pellagra, a debilitating fatal disease affecting the central nervous system, in twelve Mississippi inmates in an attempt to discover treatments for the disease. He determined that the disease was caused by niacin (Vitamin B3) deficiency. But the Public…
William C. Black, MD, selected at random, 23 children from his patients and injected them with infected herpes tissues to demonstrate symptoms that were caused by a single herpes virus. (Timothy Murphy, The Ethics of Research with Children, AMA, 2003) M Hines Roberts described in a major medical journal an…
Lubeck, Germany: 240 infants were vaccinated with the Calmette tuberculosis vaccine during the first 10 days of life: almost all developed tuberculosis and 72 infants died from contaminated live BCG tuberculosis vaccine. Two people who had prepared the vaccine in the local laboratory went to prison for bodily injury due…
“Whatever the motives and methods used to realise them – persuasion, education, coercion, sterilisation, segregation, euthanasia and more – eugenics has stemmed from the belief that a population, ‘race’, or even the species, is ‘degenerating’ and in urgent need of improvement and revitalisation.” (Prof. John Galloway. Review, The Oxford Handbook…
Dr. Armauer Hensen, a Norweigian microbiologist who discovered the bacterium that causes leprosy, having failed to grow the bacterium in a petri dish or any experimental animal, he tried to inoculate leprosy into the eye of a woman without her consent or knowledge. In 1880, she sued him in a…
Cornelius Rhoads, MD, a prominent, Harvard trained pathologist conducted a cancer experiment in Puerto Rico under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations resulting in the death of thirteen subjects. He was accused of purposely infecting his Puerto Rican subjects with cancer cells after a Puerto Rican physician…
