Before Nuremberg

Under the undue influence of Harvard and other Ivy League eugenicists, the U.S. enacted the Immigration Restriction Act, 1924 to prevent “social inadequates” from immigrating. The established quotas according to racial and/or ethnic ancestry; and was the main tool used to prevent Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from gaining entry to the U.S.

U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Virginia forced sterilization statute of people considered “genetically unfit.” Harvard-educated eugenicist, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ infamous declaration, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough. . .” resulted in the forced sterilization not only of Carrie Buck of Charlottesville, Virginia, who was falsely “diagnosed” as mentally deficient and declared as potentially capable of…

Lubeck, Germany: 240 infants were vaccinated with the Calmette tuberculosis vaccine during the first 10 days of life: almost all developed tuberculosis and 72 infants died from contaminated live BCG tuberculosis vaccine. Two people who had prepared the vaccine in the local laboratory went to prison for bodily injury due to negligence. (Berlin, Journal of…

William C. Black, MD, selected at random, 23 children from his patients and injected them with infected herpes tissues to demonstrate symptoms that were caused by a single herpes virus. (Timothy Murphy, The Ethics of Research with Children, AMA, 2003) M Hines Roberts described in a major medical journal an experiment in which he obtained…

Cornelius Rhoads, MD, a prominent, Harvard trained pathologist conducted a cancer experiment in Puerto Rico under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations resulting in the death of thirteen subjects. He was accused of purposely infecting his Puerto Rican subjects with cancer cells after a Puerto Rican physician uncovered the experiment and a…

Germany’s Ministry of the Interior issued “Guidelines for Human Experimentation” Unambiguous informed consent is mandatory; particular care must be taken when the subject is a child under 18; exploitation of patients who poor, or socially disadvantaged is prohibited; disclosure requirements — the purpose, justification, and the manner in which research will be carried out; a…

U.S. Public Health Service begins a 25-year Syphilis experiment at Tuskegee, Alabama, involving 400 black sharecroppers. The purpose of the experiment was to study the natural course of untreated syphilis in Negro men. Notwithstanding the participation of black institutions, doctors and the pivotal nurse Eunice Rivers, the underlying premise of the Tuskegee experiment was racist:…

American Medical Association rejects request from 5,000 black physicians to join the AMA. The rejection was widely reported in German medical jounals. (Lifton, Nazi Medicine: the anti-Hippocratic Legacy) Not until July 2008, did the American Medical Association issue a formal apology for discriminating against black physicians well into the 1960s. “the AMA failed, across the…

William C Black MD conducted unethical medical experiments on children. He wrote a report about an experiment in which he had infected a 12-month old baby with herpes. Francis Payton Rous, editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, rejected Black’s manuscript and wrote an editorial in the Journal stating: “I cannot let this occasion pass without…

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) Report Ch. 2, 1995. Lawrence Altman. Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine, 1988 Appeal from the Lübeck Decision, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 1932 Nicholas Bakalar.  Where the Germs Are: A Scientific Safari, 2003 Edwin Black. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s…