Introduction: Unconscionable U.S. Government-Funded Medical Experiments exposed human subjects to serious risk of harm without any intended benefit to the individual. They were conducted without voluntary, informed consent decades after the Nuremberg Code set ethical standards for civilized medical experiments. The human subjects were either coerced or unwitting: they included military troops, prisoners, mentally disabled persons, institutionalized children, and hospitalized patients. Thousands suffered irreparable harm and an untold number died.
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…
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 Army’s ultra-secret military experiments carried out in St….
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 on US Cities.
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 to yield results not otherwise obtainable; must be…
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 DES experiment without their knowledge or consent. Half…
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 babies had been routinely provided unrestricted oxygen during…
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 University, and conducted cancer experiments in which live…
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…
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 State Prison. The study in prisoners was designed…
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 component of Agent Orange, Kligman went beyond Dow…
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 grasped that these vaccines might also be a…
