1947–1953: Project CHATTER

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…

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…

The “Monster Experiment” was conceived by and conducted under the supervision of Dr. Wendell Johnson, one of the nation’s most prominent speech pathologists. The experiment induced stuttering in twenty-two children living at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport. It was designed to test Dr. Johnson’s theory about the cause…

Syphilis experiments in Guatemala were funded by the US Public Health Service (PHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (later renamed Pan Am Health Org.) The US team of researchers in Guatemala was led by John Charles Cutler, MD of the PHS who…

In July, 1961, Merck and Parke-Davis recalled their Salk vaccines — without mentioning the cancer risk. NIH officials concealed the SV40 cancer risk and never recalled the rest of the polio vaccine supply. Even after they knew that the vaccine was infected, they continued to expose millions of Americans to…

1972: Jean Heller exposes the syphilis experiment in her report in The New York Times, “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years.”