1947–1953: Project CHATTER

Sixty-four California prisoners were paralyzed with succinylcholine, a neuromuscular agent that restricts breathing. Succinylcholine has since been used in lethal injection protocols. When five prisoners in the California experiment refused to participate as subjects in the experiment, researchers were given “permission” to inject the recalcitrant prisoners against their will. (Harriet…

On July 12, 1974, President Nixon signed the National Research Act which created a commission whose task was to identify basic underlying ethical principles to be used in conducting biomedical research; and the law required codified regulations to protect human subjects during medical research in the United States. Regulations for…

NIH Multi-Site Cooperative Study of Retrolental Fibroplasia (RLF, later called, ROP), a form of blindness in premature babies was conducted at 18 hospitals nationwide. The first recorded case of RLF in a premature baby was in 1942 in Boston, decades after premature babies had been routinely provided unrestricted oxygen during…

1966: Animal Welfare Act establishes ethical use of laboratory animals in research. There is no law protecting human research subjects from unethical experimentation. 1966: Henry Beecher’s article “Ethics and Clinical Research” in New England Journal of Medicine identified 50 unethical clinical studies. But it would be eight years before a…

1946: Congress passed the National Security Act; one of its provisions created the CIA. Most of CIA officials were formerly with the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The CIA funded massive mind battering experiments aimed at incapacitating human free will modeled on the fiendish experiments at Dachau death camp….

1954: Polio vaccine was tested on one million children aged six to nine. In April 1955 the vaccine was deemed “safe and effective” by NIH; the vaccine was hailed as a medical triumph of the 20th century.