Edward M. Opton, Jr., Ph.D., J.D, is a lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law, which provides legal services for low-income children. A graduate of Yale, he received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke University, a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. His…
A public advocate for human rights is the founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP) which serves as an information resource and public interest watchdog organization whose goal is to unlock the walls of secrecy in biomedical research and bring accountability to that endeavor. AHRP Infomails…
Hepatitis B is a serious disease. It is highly prevalent in many countries in Asia (nearly 10% of Chinese carried the illness in 1992). Fortunately its prevalence in the US is very low. According to CDC data, the overall reported US incidence rate for 2013 was 1.0 case of hepatitis B…
1998: Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill, a prize winning research expose by The Boston Globe In November, 1998, the first of a four-part series by Robert Whitaker and Dolores Kong shed light on the abusive research parameters of non-therapeutic experiments conducted on mentally incapacitated individuals. They focused on several…
Posted by Meryl Nass, MD In the last few days there have been multiple news articles and testimonies in the Maine and Vermont legislatures about the need to impose vaccine mandates to protect immunocompromised children.[1] [2] I attended the vaccine bills’ hearing in Augusta, Maine on May 11, which lasted…
The National Heart Blood and Lung Institute (NHBLI) has embarked on a far-ranging, dubious unethical experimental research paradigm that puts vulnerable, (often) critically ill patients at increased risk of harm; merely to document the resulting harm. Thousands of patients accross the United States are being subjected to experiments that put…
Probably few Bible scholars or scientists are aware that Daniel—the same Daniel who was cast into the lion’s den—was also a scientist. Daniel proposed (what is now recognized as) a classic experimental design: comparing the effect of a vegetable and water diet to a diet of the king’s meat and…
The Hippocratic medical ethics oath is attributed to Hippocrates, and was adopted as a guide to the medical profession conduct throughout the ages and still used in the graduation ceremonies of many medical schools. In essence, the Hippocratic Oath: “Primum non nocere” (“First do no harm” or “Above all, do…
In the first century B.C. Cleopatra devised an experiment to test the accuracy of the theory that it takes 40 days to fashion a male fetus fully and 80 days to fashion a female fetus. When her handmaids were sentenced to death under government order, Cleopatra had them impregnated and…
“The eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and health of Thy creatures. May the love for my art actuate me at all time; may neither avarice nor miserliness, nor thirst for glory or for a great reputation engage my mind; for the enemies of truth and…
Dr. Maitland inoculated six prisoners with smallpox, promising them release from prison. (Read D. Wooton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates, 2006.)
Jenner used children to test a theory — based on folklore, not scientific evidence — that cowpox, a disease common in the rural parts of western England in the late eighteenth century, conferred immunity against subsequent exposure to smallpox. He tested his theory primarily on healthy children. He injected eight-year-old…
