1972: “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years.”

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…

From the 1950s through the 70s Holmesburg Prison became the “supermarket” or “kmart” for human medical experiments conducted by Dr. Albert Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist. Under his direction hundreds of painful experiments were conducted involving nearly 1,000 inmates. He recalled his first visit to the prison: “All I…

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….

US Army and State Department funded a crash program to develop new drugs against malaria. The largest single CMR malaria experiment involved 800 prisoners at federal penitentiary in Atlanta, New Jersey State Reformatory and Illinois State Penitentiary. A series of experiments were conducted at Stateville Penitentiary by medical researchers from…

1966: NIH Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRR) created Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects calling for the establishment of independent review bodies later known as Institutional Review Boards.

1974: President Nixon signed the National Research Act establishes National Commission for the Protection of Human subjects, requiring Public Health Service to promulgate regulations for the protection of human subjects. Title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations, later known as “The Common Rule,” requires the appointment and utilization of…