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.
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 research travesties: Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital cancer cell…
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 last two weeks. They were randomly assigned to…
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 Common Rule,” requires the appointment and utilization of…
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 control experiments. Until Mitford’s powerful indictment, from 1962–1975,…
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 Neurological Technologies by Cheryl Welsh, 1999–2000]
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 gay community in those cities. A body of…
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 medical research in the United States. Regulations for…
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 Subjects, 2010. John Breeding. Electroshocking Children, 2014. Alan…
"Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates." Associated Press, Feb 27, 2011
