1947–1953: Project CHATTER

Jessica Mitford’s article “Experiments Behind Bars,” in the Atlantic Monthly, 1973, followed by her book Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business, 1973, exposed massive exploitation of U.S. prisoners who served as incarcerated “lab rats” in pharmaceutical drug research and government mind control experiments. Until Mitford’s powerful indictment, from 1962–1975,…

1967: British physician Maurice Pappworth published Human Guinea Pigs: Experimentation on Man; he was far less circumspect than Beecher. He identified researchers by name and provided their institutional affiliations, stating bluntly: “No doctor, however great his capacity or original his ideas, has the right to choose martyrs for science or…

Chester M. Southam, MD, a noted immunologist at Sloan-Kettering Institute sought to study the human immunity response to cancer. He obtained funding from the government and injected live cancer cells into 14 patients with advanced cancer and into healthy convicts at Ohio State Prison. The study in prisoners was designed…

Project 112/ Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD) Dept. of Defense tested biological and chemical warfare agents, by spraying several U.S. ships while 6,000 thousand of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. Veterans say they were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested…

Scientific evidence existed showing the vaccine was contaminated with a cancer causing monkey virus — simian virus 40 (SV40) — but public health officials refused to take precautionary action. An estimated 98 million Americans received the Salk Polio vaccine. “Few back then grasped that these vaccines might also be a…

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.”