1950: Two-hundred female prisoners infected with viral hepatitis

1958–1962: An Atomic Energy Commission field study — “Project Chariot” — spread radioactive materials over Inupiat land in Point Hope, Alaska. Today, cancer is the leading cause of death in Point Hope. Alaska Dispatch, 2012.

In 1978–1981, the CDC conducted a hepatitis B vaccine experiment on homosexual men living in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. HIV/AIDS was first detected among the participants in the CDC hepatitis B vaccine trial and quickly spread throughout the gay community in those cities. A body of…

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…

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…

1950s: Dr. Henry K Beecher, chief anesthetist at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, an outspoken advocate of the Nuremberg Code; who authored a seminal article in the NEJM (1966), was a secret paid CIA consultant who participated in secret, CIA- and US Navy-sponsored experiments aimed at perfecting interrogation (i.e. torture) techniques…

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…