1932–1972: Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in the history of medicine,” continued unabated 25 years after Nuremberg. Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in the history of medicine” sponsored by the U.S. Public . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

In 1942, psychiatrists debated legalizing murder (“euthanasia”) at the American Psychiatric Association. Foster Kennedy, MD, advocated killing “feebleminded” “defective” children whom he called “Nature’s mistakes” “hopeless ones who should never have been born.” (Jay Joseph. The Missing Gene… 2006) He opposed euthanasia . . . Continue reading →

A series of fiendish Hypothermia experiments subjected mental patients for prolonged periods to freezing temperatures. They were conducted by prominent psychiatrists at Harvard University’s McLean Hospital and the University of Cincinnati. DB Dill, MD, and WH Forbes, MD, described the procedure for . . . Continue reading →

Edward Cohn, MD, a Harvard biochemist injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with beef blood in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy. The antigenic irritants in bovine serum albumin could not be purified away biochemically, dooming the medical utility of the bovine protein . . . Continue reading →

1941–1945: U.S. Committee on Medical Research (CMR) was dedicated to wartime medicine; it funded and coordinated 137 institutions in the US that conducted research — including chemical warfare agents and prevention of infectious diseases tested on prisoners and children. CMR-funded infectious disease . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

1945: “Sterilization of the Insane in the USA” a report in The Lancet based on information published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that in the U.S. 77,878 people were sterilized: 20,063 (1907 to 1934); 15,815 (1935–1940); More than . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

1947–1953: U.S. Navy Project CHATTER focused on identifying and testing drugs for interrogations and recruitment of intelligence agents. CIA Mind Control

The CIA begins its secret study of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) purchased from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. The CIA in consultation with Sandoz explored LSD’s possible defensive and offensive uses. Both civilian and military human . . . Continue reading →

John Neefe and Joseph Stokes, Jr. conducted a hepatitis experiment in which prisoners in New Jersey State Prison were fed hepatic liver and hepatic feces. “The authors describe the blending of hepatic liver and hepatic feces in a Warring Blender to create . . . Continue reading →

1950: Dr. Joseph Stokes of the University of Pennsylvania deliberately infected 200 women prisoners with viral hepatitis. (Acres of Skin, 1998)

1950: U.S. Army secretly used a Navy ship outside the Golden Gate to spray supposedly harmless bacteria over San Francisco and its outskirts. Eleven people were sickened by the germs, and one of them died.

1951: In August, a joint Army-CIA project (an offshoot of CIAs secret ARTICHOKE Project) secretly tested the aerosol use of LSD as a potential weapon. They sprayed LSD on the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit causing an outbreak of delirium and insanity among . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

The Doolittle Report was alarmist and heightened fear of the prospect of annihilation by the Soviet Union; it justified the suspension of longstanding American concepts of “fair play” and lent legitimacy to the Covert Activities of the CIA: We are facing an . . . Continue reading →

Institutionalized children continued to be used as “canaries in the mines” to test the safety of experimental vaccines for infectious diseases including, malaria, influenza, dysentery, and sexually transmitted diseases for twelve years Nuremberg. The experiments were conducted at academic institutions that received . . . Continue reading →

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.

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 . . . Continue reading →

Zinc cadmium sulfide was sprayed on a housing complex in St. Louis that was home to 10,000 low-income people, 70% of who were children under age 12. Lisa Martino-Taylor is a sociologist whose life’s work has been to uncover details of the . . . Continue reading →

1966: Bacillus Globigii released into New York subway tunnels in an Army–CIA field study Bacillus Globigii was released into New York subway tunnels in an Army / CIA field study, exposing thousands of civilians. (Operation Bacterium) US Government Admits Testing Biological Agents . . . Continue reading →

1948: The American Medical Association endorsed research on prisoners The American Medical Association endorsed research on prisoners — provided consent is not coerced with knowledge of potential risks; prior animal studies and knowledge of natural history of the disease; must be expected . . . Continue reading →

DES (diethylstilbestrol) is a man-made form of estrogen which has proven to be very harmful to developing female fetuses in the womb. At the University of Chicago, every pregnant woman at the University’s Lying-In Hospital (1,646) was a test subject for a . . . Continue reading →

NIH Multi-Site Cooperative Study of Retrolental Fibroplasia (RLF, later called, ROP), a form of blindness in premature babies was conducted at 18 hospitals nationwide. The first recorded case of RLF in a premature baby was in 1942 in Boston, decades after premature . . . Continue reading →

Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Thomas Francis tested their influenza vaccine in institutionalized mental patients and prisoners in Michigan; Dr. Albert Sabin tested his live virus polio vaccine in 133 prisoners at the Federal Reformatory in Ohio; Sloan-Kettering collaborated with Ohio State . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

1965–1966: Dr. Kligman conducted dioxin experiments on 70 prisoners at Holmesburg on behalf of Dow Chemicals. Dioxin has proved fatal in laboratory animals given small doses. These experiments were uncovered in 1980 at EPA hearings. (NY Times, 1983) In testing dioxin, a . . . Continue reading →

1954: Polio vaccine was tested on one million children aged six to nine. In April 1955 the vaccine was deemed “safe and effective” by NIH; the vaccine was hailed as a medical triumph of the 20th century.

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 . . . Continue reading →

Dr. Krugman deliberately infected mentally disabled children who were confined at Willowbrook School (NY) with hepatitis B. The school housed 6,000 children in abominable conditions. In one experiment, children were fed excrement containing live hepatitis B virus. In another experiment children were . . . Continue reading →

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, . . . Continue reading →

A report by Dr. Fred Jensen, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute describes an experiment performed in patients terminally ill with cancer. The researchers took tissue from the patients, exposed the tissue to SV40, then they implanted the infected tissue . . . Continue reading →

1960–1972: University of Cincinnati Medical School conducted whole body radiation experiments on 90 seriously ill cancer patients at its charity hospital — 60% were poor African Americans. Read more Radiation experiments

Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted the first of a series of “Obedience to Authority” experiments shortly after the trial of Adolph Eichman, the Nazi criminal tried in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity. Eichman’s defense was, not guilty, claiming that he had . . . Continue reading →

Dr. Chester Southam injected live cancer cells into 22 elderly patients at Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn. After being rebuffed by his institution, Sloan-Kettering, he convinced Dr. Emanuel Mandel at Jewish Chronic Disease. He sought to learn whether people who were . . . Continue reading →

1963–1973: “Reproductive radiation experiments” were conducted on 64 prison inmates by Dr. C. Alvin Paulsen (University of Washington) under a private contract with the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Energy Department). Read more * Radiation experiments.

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.

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. . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

San Antonio Contraceptive Study conducted on 70 poor Mexican-American women. Half received oral contraceptives the other placebo. In the middle of the study the two groups were switched — none were informed that they may not receive active contraceptives. [NCBI-NIH]

Although its true birth is rooted the revelations at the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg, the birth of American Bioethics is credited to The Hastings Center and Kennedy Institute for Bioethics, Georgetown. “Bioethics was born in scandal” — the unholy trinity of American . . . Continue reading →

Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) conducted by Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D, a psychologist simulated a prison constructed in a basement at Stanford University. The 24 male subjects were screened normal Stanford undergraduates who were paid $15 a day for an experiment that was to . . . Continue reading →

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.”

1973: The Final Report of Tuskegee Syphilis Study concluded: “Society can no longer afford to leave the balancing of individual rights against scientific progress to the scientific community.”

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 . . . Continue reading →

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 . . . Continue reading →

The experiments were conducted with the cooperation and funding from the US government. [US and Norway Used Insane for Nazi-style Tests, London Times, 1998 cited by International Campaign to End Human Rights Violations Involving Classified New Weapons of Mass Destruction: Electromagnetic and . . . Continue reading →

1976: National Urban League held a conference on Human Experimentation, announcing: “We don’t want to kill science but we don’t want science to kill, mangle and abuse us.”

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 . . . Continue reading →

On July 12, 1974, President Nixon signed the National Research Act which created a commission whose task was to identify basic underlying ethical principles to be used in conducting biomedical research; and the law required codified regulations to protect human subjects during . . . Continue reading →

Part 4. U.S. WWII and Cold War Era Experiments  Abstract Discussion [after Algernon B. Reese, M.D] Re: Persistence and Hyperplasia of Primary Vitreous: Retrolental Fibroplasia in Archives of Ophthalmology, Vol 41, May 1949 Manny Bekier. Ethical Considerations of Medical Experimentation on Human . . . Continue reading →