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Unethical human experimentation in the
United States
This article is about U.S. medical experiments that are
alleged to be unethical, non-consensual, or illegal. For
the consensual, ethical, and legal use of human beings in
medical research, see Human subject research.
Particularly in the 20th century, there have been numer¬
ous experiments performed on human test subjects in the
United States that have been considered unethical, and
were often performed illegally, without the knowledge,
consent, or informed consent of the test subjects.
The experiments include: the deliberate infection of peo¬
ple with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure of peo¬
ple to biological and chemical weapons, human radiation
experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioac¬
tive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and
torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering sub¬
stances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests
were performed on children, 111 the sick, and mentally dis¬
abled individuals, often under the guise of “medical treat¬
ment”. In many of the studies, a large portion of the sub¬
jects were poor, racial minorities or prisoners.
Funding for many of the experiments was provided by
United States government, especially the United States
military. Central Intelligence Agency, or private corpo¬
rations involved with military activities. The human re¬
search programs were usually highly secretive, and in
many cases information about them was not released until
many years after the studies had been performed.
The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in
the United States medical and scientific community were
quite significant, and led to many institutions and poli¬
cies that attempted to ensure that future human subject
research in the United States would be ethical and legal.
Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery
of government experiments on human subjects led to nu¬
merous congressional investigations and hearings, includ¬
ing the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission,
both of 1975 and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Hu¬
man Radiation Experiments, among others.
1 Surgical experiments
Throughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is often re¬
ferred to as “the father of gynecology", performed sur¬
gical experiments on enslaved African women, without
anaesthesia. The women—one of whom was operated
on 30 times—regularly died from infections resulting
from the experiments. 121 In order to test one of his the¬
ories about the causes of trismus in infants, Sims per¬
formed experiments where he used a shoemaker’s awl to
move around the skull bones of the babies of enslaved
women. 131141 He also addicted the women in his surgical
experiments to morphine, only providing the drugs af¬
ter surgery was already complete, in order to make them
more compliant. 151
In 1874, Mary Rafferty, an Irish servant woman, came
to Dr. Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hos¬
pital in Cincinnati for treatment of her cancer. Seeing a
research opportunity, he cut open her head, and inserted
needle electrodes into her exposed brain matter. 161 He de¬
scribed the experiment as follows:
When the needle entered the brain sub¬
stance, she complained of acute pain in the
neck. In order to develop more decided
reactions, the strength of the current was
increased ... her countenance exhibited great
distress, and she began to cry. Very soon, the
left hand was extended as if in the act of taking
hold of some object in front of her; the arm
presently was agitated with clonic spasm; her
eyes became fixed, with pupils widely dilated;
lips were blue, and she frothed at the mouth;
her breathing became stertorous; she lost con¬
sciousness and was violently convulsed on the
left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes,
and was succeeded by a coma. She returned
to consciousness in twenty minutes from the
beginning of the attack, and complained of
some weakness and vertigo.
—Dr. Bartholow’s research report 161
In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps
on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent
of their parents, at the Children’s Hospital in Boston,
Massachusetts to discover whether doing so would be
harmful. 171
From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the
San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experi¬
ments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin. Many of
the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stan¬
ley would take the testicles out of executed prisoners and
1
2
2 PATHOGENS, DISEASE, AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGENTS
surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other ex¬
periments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams,
goats, and boars into living prisoners. Stanley also per¬
formed various eugenics experiments, and forced steril¬
izations on San Quentin prisoners. 181 Stanley believed that
his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime
(which he believed had biological causes), and prevent
the “unfit” from reproducing. 181191
2 Pathogens, disease, and biologi¬
cal warfare agents
A subject of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment has his blood
drawn, c. 1953
2.1 Late 19th century
In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a California physician working
at a hospital for lepers injected six girls under the age of
12 with syphilis. 171
In 1895, New York City pediatrician Henry Heiman
intentionally infected two mentally disabled boys—one
four-year-old and one sixteen-year old—with gonorrhea
as part of a medical experiment. A review of the medical
literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found
more than 40 reports of experimental infections with gon¬
orrheal culture, including some where gonorrheal organ¬
isms were applied to the eyes of sick children. 171110,1111
U.S Army doctors in the Philippines infected five pris¬
oners with bubonic plague and induced beriberi in 29
prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result. 11211131
In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University
intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera,
which had somehow become contaminated with plague.
He did this without the consent of the patients, and with¬
out informing them of what he was doing. All of the sub¬
jects became sick and 13 died. 11311141
2.2 Early 20th century
In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens
of children with tuberculin at the St. Vincent’s House or¬
phanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent blindness in
some of the children and painful lesions and inflamma¬
tion of the eyes in many of the others. In the study they
refer to the children as “material used”. 1 131
In 1909, F. C. Knowles released a study describing how
he had deliberately infected two children in an orphan¬
age with Molluscum contagiosum after an outbreak in the
orphanage, in order to study the disease. 171
In 1911, Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller In¬
stitute for Medical Research injected 146 hospital pa¬
tients (some of whom were children) with syphilis. He
was later sued by the parents of some of the child sub¬
jects, who allegedly contracted syphilis as a result of his
experiments. [ 161
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment 1171 was a clinical study
conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Al¬
abama, by the U.S. Public Health Service. In the exper¬
iment, 400 impoverished black males who had syphilis
were offered “treatment” by the researchers, who did
not tell the test subjects that they had syphilis and did
not give them treatment for the disease, but rather just
studied them to chart the progress of the disease. By
1947, penicillin became available as treatment, but those
running the study prevented study participants from re¬
ceiving treatment elsewhere, lying to them about their
true condition, so that they could observe the effects of
syphilis on the human body. By the end of the study
in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. 28
of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, 100 were
dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had
been infected, and 19 of their children were born with
congenital syphilis. The study was not shut down until
1972, when its existence was leaked to the press, forcing
the researchers to stop in the face of a public outcry. 1181
2.3 1940s
In 1941, at the University of Michigan, virologists
Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk and other researchers delib¬
erately infected patients at several Michigan mental insti¬
tutions with the influenza virus by spraying the virus into
their nasal passages. 1191 Francis Payton Rous, based at the
Rockefeller Institute and editor of the Journal of Experi¬
mental Medicine, wrote the following to Francis regarding
the experiments:
“It may save you much trouble if you pub¬
lish your paper... elsewhere than in the Journal
of Experimental Medicine. The Journal is un¬
der constant scrutiny by the anti-vivisectionists
who would not hesitate to play up the fact that
you used for your tests human beings of a state
2.4 1950s
3
institution. That the tests were wholly justified
goes without saying.” 1201
Rous closely monitored the articles he published since
the 1930s, when revival of the anti-vivisectionist
movement raised pressure against certain human
experimentation. 1211
In 1941 Dr. William C. Black inoculated with herpes
a twelve-month-old baby “offered as a volunteer”. He
submitted his research to The Journal of Experimental
Medicine and it was rejected on ethical grounds. The edi¬
tor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine , Francis Pay-
ton Rous, called the experiment “an abuse of power, an
infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excus¬
able because the illness which followed had implications
for science.” 122112311241 The study was later published in
the Journal of Pediatrics} 2 ^
The Stateville Penitentiary was the site of a controlled
study of the effects of malaria on the prisoners of
Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois beginning in
the 1940s. The study was conducted by the Depart¬
ment of Medicine at the University of Chicago in con¬
junction with the United States Army and the State De¬
partment. At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited
the precedent of the malaria experiments as part of their
defense. 12611271 The study continued at Stateville Peniten¬
tiary for 29 years. In related studies from 1944 to 1946,
Dr. Alf Alving, a professor at the University of Chicago
Medical School, purposely infected psychiatric patients
at the Illinois State Hospital with malaria, so that he could
test experimental treatments on them. 12 ’ 0
In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers
used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asy¬
lum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and
other sexually transmitted diseases, in order to test the
effectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs. They
later tried infecting people with “direct inoculations made
from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and
on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded ... or
in a few cases through spinal punctures”. Approximately
700 people were infected as part of the study (includ¬
ing orphan children). The study was sponsored by the
Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health
and the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the
World Health Organization's Pan American Health Or¬
ganization) and the Guatemalan government. The team
was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in
the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose to do
the study in Guatemala because he would not have been
permitted to do it in the United States. In 2010 when
the research was revealed, the US officially apologized to
Guatemala for the studies. 1291130113111321
2.4 1950s
In 1950, in order to conduct a simulation of a biologi¬
cal warfare attack, the U.S. Navy used airplanes to spray
large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens -
considered harmless at this time - over the city of San
Francisco. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia¬
like illnesses, and at least one person died as a
result. 133113411351136113711381 The family of the man who died
sued the government for gross negligence, but a federal
judge ruled in favor of the government in 1981. 1391 Ser¬
ratia tests were continued until at least 1969. 1401
Also in 1950, Dr. Joseph Stokes of the University of
Pennsylvania deliberately infected 200 female prisoners
with viral hepatitis. 1411
From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at
the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York
were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, for re¬
search whose purpose was to help discover a vaccine. 1421
From 1963 to 1966, Saul Krugman of New York Univer¬
sity promised the parents of mentally disabled children
that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in
exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that
he claimed were “vaccinations.” In reality, the procedures
involved deliberately infecting children with viral hepati¬
tis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of
patients infected with the disease. 14311441
In 1952, Chester M. Southam, a Sloan-Kettering Institute
researcher, injected live cancer cells into prisoners at the
Ohio State Prison. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy
women were injected with live cancer cells without being
told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it
might cause cancer. 1451
In 1955, the CIA allegedly conducted a biological warfare
experiment where they released whooping cough bacte¬
ria from boats outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a
whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least
12 people. 146114711481 However, some have expressed im¬
probability and lack of evidence for this claim. 1491
During the 1950s the United States conducted a series of
field tests using entomological weapons. Operation Big
Itch, in 1954, was designed to test munitions loaded with
uninfected fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis). In May 1955 over
300,000 yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) were
dropped over parts of the U.S. state of Georgia to deter¬
mine if the air-dropped mosquitoes could survive to take
meals from humans. The mosquito tests were known as
Operation Big Buzz. The U.S. engaged in at least two
other EW testing programs. Operation Drop Kick and
Operation May Day.
2.5 1960s
In 1963, 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease
Hospital in Brooklyn, New York were injected with live
4
5 HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS
cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had
done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison, in
order to “discover the secret of how healthy bodies fight
the invasion of malignant cells”. The administration of
the hospital attempted to cover the study up, but the New
York medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam
on probation for one year. Two years later, the American
Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President. 150 '
From 1963 to 1969 as part of Project Shipboard Haz¬
ard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests
which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various
biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands
of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The
personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not
given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the
U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases VX and
Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and
sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents. 1511
In 1966, the U.S. Army released the harmless Bacillus
globigii into the tunnels of the New York City Subway sys¬
tem, as part of a field study called A Study of the Vulnera¬
bility of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert At¬
tack with Biological Agents . ' 46 ' ' 52 ' ' 53 ' ' 54 ' ' 551 The Chicago
subway system was also subject to a similar experiment
by the Army. [461
3 Human radiation experiments
Main article: Human radiation experiments
Researchers in the United States have performed thou¬
sands of human radiation experiments to determine the
effects of atomic radiation and radioactive contamina¬
tion on the human body, generally on people who were
poor, sick, or powerless.' 56 ' Most of these tests were per¬
formed, funded, or supervised by the United States mil¬
itary, Atomic Energy Commission, or various other US
federal government agencies.
The experiments included a wide array of studies, in¬
volving things like feeding radioactive food to mentally
disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting
radium rods into the noses of schoolchildren, deliberately
releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian
cities, measuring the health effects of radioactive fallout
from nuclear bomb tests, injecting pregnant women and
babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating the tes¬
ticles of prison inmates, amongst other things.
Much information about these programs was classified
and kept secret. In 1986 the United States House Com¬
mittee on Energy and Commerce released a report en¬
titled American Nuclear Guinea Pigs : Three Decades
of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens ,' 57 ' In the
1990s Eileen Welsome’s reports on radiation testing for
The Albuquerque Tribune prompted the creation of the
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
by executive order of president Bill Clinton, to monitor
government tests. It published results in 1995. Welsome
later wrote a book called The Plutonium Files.
3.1 Radioactive iodine experiments
In a 1949 operation called the "Green Run,” the AEC re¬
leased iodine-131 and xenon-133 to the atmosphere near
the Hanford site in Washington, which contaminated a
500,000-acre (2,000 km 2 ) area containing three small
towns.' 581
In 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran
several studies at the University of Iowa on the health
effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant
women. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women
from 100 to 200 microcuries (3.7 to 7.4 MBq) of iodine-
13 1, in order to study the women’s aborted embryos in an
attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, ra¬
dioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In another
study, they gave 25 newborn babies (who were under 36
hours old and weighed from 5.5 to 8.5 pounds (2.5 to 3.9
kg)) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through
an injection, so that they could measure the amount of
iodine in their thyroid glands, as iodine would go to that
gland.' 591
In another AEC study, researchers at the University of
Nebraska College of Medicine fed iodine-131 to 28
healthy infants through a gastric tube to test the concen¬
tration of iodine in the infants’ thyroid glands.' 59 '
In 1953, the AEC sponsored a study to discover if ra¬
dioactive iodine affected premature babies differently
from full-term babies. In the experiment, researchers
from Harper Hospital in Detroit orally administered
iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants who
weighed from 2.1 to 5.5 pounds (0.95 to 2.49 kg).' 591
From 1955 to 1960, Sonoma State Hospital in northern
California served as a permanent drop-off location for
mentally handicapped children diagnosed with cerebral
palsy or lesser disorders. The children subsequently un¬
derwent painful experimentation without adult consent.
Many were given irradiated milk, some spinal taps “for
which they received no direct benefit.” Reporters of 60
Minutes learned that in these five years, the brain of ev¬
ery cerebral palsy child who died at Sonoma State was re¬
moved and studied without parental consent. According
to the CBS story, over 1,400 patients died at the clinic.' 601
In an experiment in the 1960s, over 100 Alaskan citizens
were continually exposed to radioactive iodine.' 61 '
In 1962, the Hanford site again released 1-131, stationing
test subjects along its path to record its effect on them.
The AEC also recruited Hanford volunteers to ingest milk
contaminated with 1-131 during this time.' 59 '
3.4 Experiments involving other radioactive materials
5
3.2 Uranium experiments
“It is desired that no document be released which refers
to experiments with humans and might have adverse ef¬
fect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents
covering such work should be classified 'secret’.”
April 17, 1947 Atomic Energy Commission memo from
Colonel O.G. Haywood, Jr. to Dr. Fidler at the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee 162
Between 1946 and 1947, researchers at the University
of Rochester injected uranium-234 and uranium-235 in
dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per kilo¬
gram of body weight into six people to study how much
uranium their kidneys could tolerate before becoming
damaged. 1631
Between 1953 and 1957, at the Massachusetts General
Hospital, Dr. William Sweet injected eleven terminally
ill, comatose and semi-comatose patients with uranium in
an experiment to determine, among other things, its via¬
bility as a chemotherapy treatment against brain tumors,
which all but one of the patients had (one being a mis¬
diagnosis). Dr. Sweet, who died in 2001, maintained that
consent had been obtained from the patients and next of
kin [64] [65]
3.3 Plutonium experiments
From April 10, 1945 to July 18, 1947, eighteen people
were injected with plutonium as part of the Manhattan
Project. 1661 Doses administered ranged from 95 to 5,900
nanocuries. 1661
Albert Stevens, a man misdiagnosed with stomach can¬
cer, received “treatment” for his “cancer” at the U.C.
San Francisco Medical Center in 1945. Dr. Joseph
Gilbert Hamilton, a Manhattan Project doctor in charge
of the human experiments in California 1671 had Stevens
injected with Pu-238 and Pu-239 without informed con¬
sent. Stevens never had cancer; a surgery to remove can¬
cerous cells was highly successful in removing the benign
tumor, and he lived for another 20 years with the injected
plutonium. 1681 Since Stevens received the highly radioac¬
tive Pu-238, his accumulated dose over his remaining life
was higher than anyone has ever received: 64 Sv (6400
rem). Neither Albert Stevens nor any of his relatives were
told that he never had cancer; they were led to believe
that the experimental “treatment” has worked. His cre¬
mated remains were surreptitiously acquired by Argonne
National Laboratory Center for Human Radiobiology in
1975 without the consent of surviving relatives. Some
of the ashes were transferred to the National Human Ra¬
diobiology Tissue Repository at Washington State Uni¬
versity, 1681 which keeps the remains of people who died
having radioisotopes in their body.
Three patients at Billings Hospital at the University of
Chicago were injected with plutonium. 1691 In 1946, six
employees of a Chicago metallurgical lab were given wa¬
ter that was contaminated with plutonium-239, so that re¬
searchers could study how plutonium is absorbed into the
digestive tract. 1631
An eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hos¬
pital, expecting to be treated for a pituitary gland disor¬
der, was injected with plutonium. 1701
3.4 Experiments involving other radioac¬
tive materials
Immediately after World War II, researchers at
Vanderbilt University gave 829 pregnant mothers in
Tennessee what they were told were “vitamin drinks” that
would improve the health of their babies. The mixtures
contained radioactive iron and the researchers were
determining how fast the radioisotope crossed into the
placenta. At least three children are known to have died
from the experiments, from cancers and leukemia. 17111721
Four of the women’s babies died from cancers as a result
of the experiments, and the women experienced rashes,
bruises, anemia, hair/tooth loss, and cancer. 1561
From 1946 to 1953, at the Walter E. Fernald State School
in Massachusetts, in an experiment sponsored by the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats corpo¬
ration, 73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal
containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes,
in order to track “how nutrients were digested”. The chil¬
dren were not told that they were being fed radioactive
chemicals; they were told by hospital staff and researchers
that they were joining a “science club”. 171117 -’ 117411751
The University of California Hospital in San Francisco
exposed 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to
total body irradiation (100-300 rad dose) to obtain data
for the military. 1761
In the 1950s, researchers at the Medical College of Vir¬
ginia performed experiments on severe burn victims,
most of them poor and black, without their knowledge or
consent, with funding from the Army and in collabora¬
tion with the AEC. In the experiments, the subjects were
exposed to additional burning, experimental antibiotic
treatment, and injections of radioactive isotopes. The
amount of radioactive phosphorus-32 injected into some
of the patients, 500 microcuries (19 MBq), was 50 times
the “acceptable” dose for a healthy individual; for people
with severe burns, this likely led to significantly increased
death rates. 17711781
Between 1948 and 1954, funded by the federal
government, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Hos¬
pital inserted radium rods into the noses of 582
Baltimore, Maryland schoolchildren as an alternative to
adenoidectomy. 179,18011811 Similar experiments were per¬
formed on over 7,000 U.S. Army and Navy personnel
during World War II. 1791 Nasal radium irradiation became
6
5 HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS
a standard medical treatment and was used in over two
and a half million Americans. 1791
In 1951 at Johns Hopkins, Henrietta Lacks had been
treated with a radium rod in her cervix, and 2 radium
plaques placed on her skin, for a cervical tumor. 1821
In another study at the Walter E. Fernald State School,
in 1956, researchers gave mentally disabled children ra¬
dioactive calcium orally and intravenously. They also
injected radioactive chemicals into malnourished babies
and then pushed needles through their skulls, into their
brains, through their necks, and into their spines to col¬
lect cerebrospinal fluid for analysis. 17511831
In 1961 and 1962, ten Utah State Prison inmates had
blood samples taken which were mixed with radioactive
chemicals and reinjected back into their bodies. 1841
The Atomic Energy Commission funded the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology to adminis¬
ter radium-224 and thorium-234 to 20 people between
1961 and 1965. Many were chosen from the Age Center
of New England and had volunteered for “research
projects on aging”. Doses were 0.2-2.4 microcuries
(7.4-88.8 kBq) for radium and 1.2-120 microcuries
(44-4,440 kBq) for thorium. 1571
In a 1967 study that was published in the Journal of Clin¬
ical Investigation , pregnant women were injected with ra¬
dioactive cortisol to see if it would cross the placental bar¬
rier and affect the fetuses. 1851
Study of Response of Human Beings
Accidentally Exposed to
Significant Fallout Radiation
by
E. P. Cronkite. Commander. MC. USN
V P. Bond. M.D.. Ph.D.
L. E Browning, Lt. Col., MC, USA
W. H. Chapman. Lt., MSC. USN
S. H. Cohn, Ph.D.
K. A. Cnnard, Commander, MC. USN
C. L. Dunham, M.D.
R. S. Farr, Lt.. MC. USN
Cover of the final report of Project 4.1, which examined the ef¬
fects of radioactive fallout on the natives of the Marshall Islands
3.5 Fallout research
In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada,
which were part of Operation Plumbbob were later deter¬
mined to have released enough radiation to have caused
from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer
among U.S. citizens who were exposed to fallout from
the explosions, leading to between 1,100 and 21,000
deaths. 1861
Early in the Cold War, in studies known as Project
GABRIEL and Project SUNSHINE, researchers in the
United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia tried
to determine how much nuclear fallout would be required
to make the Earth uninhabitable. 18711881 They realized that
atmospheric nuclear testing had provided them an op¬
portunity to investigate this. Such tests had dispersed
radioactive contamination worldwide, and examination
of human bodies could reveal how readily it was taken
up and hence how much damage it caused. Of particular
interest was strontium— 90 in the bones. Infants were the
primary focus, as they would have had a full opportunity
to absorb the new contaminants. 1891 1901 As a result of this
conclusion, researchers began a program to collect human
bodies and bones from all over the world, with a particular
focus on infants. The bones were cremated and the ashes
analyzed for radioisotopes. This project was kept secret
primarily because it would be a public relations disaster;
as a result parents and family were not told what was be¬
ing done with the body parts of their relatives. 1911
3.6 Irradiation experiments
Between 1960 and 1971, the Department of Defense
funded non-consensual whole body radiation experiments
on poor, black cancer patients, who were not told what
was being done to them. Patients were told that they were
receiving a “treatment” that might cure their cancer, but
the Pentagon was trying to determine the effects of high
levels of radiation on the human body. One of the doctors
involved in the experiments, Robert Stone, was worried
about litigation by the patients. He referred to them only
by their initials on the medical reports. He did this so that,
in his words, “there will be no means by which the patients
can ever connect themselves up with the report”, in order
to prevent “either adverse publicity or litigation”. 1921
From 1960 to 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, funded by the
Defense Atomic Support Agency, performed whole body
radiation experiments on more than 90 poor, black, ter¬
minally ill cancer patients with inoperable tumors at the
University of Cincinnati Medical Center. He forged con¬
sent forms, and did not inform the patients of the risks
of irradiation. The patients were given 100 or more rads
(1 Gy) of whole-body radiation, which in many caused
intense pain and vomiting. Critics have questioned the
7
medical rationale for this study, and contend that the main
purpose of the research was to study the acute effects of
radiation exposure. 19311941
From 1963 to 1973, a leading endocrinologist. Dr. Carl
Heller, irradiated the testicles of Oregon and Washington
prisoners. In return for their participation, he gave
them $5 a month, and $100 when they had to receive
a vasectomy upon conclusion of the trial. The surgeon
who sterilized the men said that it was necessary to
“keep from contaminating the general population with
radiation-induced mutants". Dr. Joseph Hamilton, one
of the researchers who had worked with Heller on the ex¬
periments, said that the experiments “had a little of the
Buchenwald touch”. 1951
In 1963, University of Washington researchers irradiated
the testes of 232 prisoners to determine the effects of ra¬
diation on testicular function. When these inmates later
left prison and had children, at least four of them had
offspring born with birth defects. The exact number is
unknown because researchers never followed up on the
status of the subjects. 1961
4 Chemical experiments
From 1942 to 1944, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Ser¬
vice conducted experiments which exposed thousands
of U.S. military personnel to mustard gas, in order
to test the effectiveness of gas masks and protective
clothing. 1971 [98][99][1001
From 1950 through 1953, the U.S. Army sprayed chemi¬
cals over six cities in the United States and Canada, in or¬
der to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army
records stated that the chemicals which were sprayed on
the city of Winnipeg, Canada, included zinc cadmium
sulfide, which was not thought to be harmful. 11011 A 1997
study by the US National Research Council found that it
was sprayed at levels so low as not be harmful; it said that
people were normally exposed to higher levels in urban
environments.
To test whether or not sulfuric acid, which is used in
making molasses, was harmful as a food additive, the
Louisiana State Board of Health commissioned a study
to feed “Negro prisoners” nothing but molasses for five
weeks. One report stated that prisoners didn't “object to
submitting themselves to the test, because it would not do
any good if they did”. 1141
A 1953 article in the medical/scientific journal Clinical
Science 11021 described a medical experiment in which re¬
searchers intentionally blistered the skin on the abdomens
of 41 children, who ranged in age from 8 to 14, using
cantharide. The study was performed to determine how
severely the substance injures/irritates the skin of chil¬
dren. After the studies, the children’s blistered skin was
removed with scissors and swabbed with peroxide. 1851
Chloracne resulting from exposure to dioxins, such as those that
Albert Kligman injected into prisoners at the Holmesburg Prison
From approximately 1951 to 1974, the Holmesburg
Prison in Pennsylvania was the site of extensive
dermatological research operations, using prisoners as
subjects. Led by Dr. Albert M. Kligman of the
University of Pennsylvania, the studies were performed
on behalf of Dow Chemical Company, the U.S. Army,
and Johnson & Johnson. 110311104111051 In one of the studies,
for which Dow Chemical paid Kligman $10,000, Klig¬
man injected dioxin — a highly toxic, carcinogenic com¬
pound found in Agent Orange, which Dow was manufac¬
turing for use in Vietnam at the time — into 70 prisoners
(most of them black). The prisoners developed severe
lesions which went untreated for seven months. 1121 Dow
Chemical wanted to study the health effects of dioxin
and other herbicides, and how they affect human skin,
because workers at their chemical plants were develop¬
ing chloracne. In the study, Kligman applied roughly the
same amount of dioxin as that to which Dow employees
were being exposed. In 1980 and 1981, some of the peo¬
ple who were used in this study sued Professor Kligman
for a variety of health problems, including lupus and psy¬
chological damage. 11061
Kligman later continued his dioxin studies, increasing the
dosage of dioxin he applied to the skin of 10 prisoners
to 7,500 micrograms of dioxin, which is 468 times the
dosage that the Dow Chemical official Gerald K. Rowe
had authorized him to administer. As a result, the pris¬
oners developed inflammatory pustules and papules. 11061
The Holmesburg program paid hundreds of inmates a
nominal stipend to test a wide range of cosmetic prod-
8
ucts and chemical compounds, whose health effects were
unknown at the time. 1 107111081 Upon his arrival at Holmes-
berg, Kligman is claimed to have said, “All I saw before
me were acres of skin ... It was like a farmer seeing a fer¬
tile field for the first time”. 1 1091 A 1964 issue of Medical
News reported that 9 out of 10 prisoners at Holmesburg
Prison were medical test subjects. 11101
In 1967, the U.S. Army paid Kligman to apply skin-
blistering chemicals to the faces and backs of inmates at
Holmesburg to, in Kligman’s words, “learn how the skin
protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemi¬
cals, the so-called hardening process.” 11061
5 Psychological and torture experi¬
ments
5.1 U.S. government research
The United States government funded and performed
numerous psychological experiments, especially during
the Cold War era. Many of these experiments were
performed to help develop more effective torture and
interrogation techniques for the U.S. military and intel¬
ligence agencies, and to develop techniques for Ameri¬
cans to resist torture at the hands of enemy nations and
organizations.
5.1.1 Truth serum
In studies running from 1947 to 1953, which were known
as Project Chatter, the U.S. Navy began identifying and
testing truth serums, which they hoped could be used dur¬
ing interrogations of Soviet spies. Some of the chemi¬
cals tested on human subjects included mescaline and the
anticholinergic drug scopolamine. 1 1111
Shortly thereafter, in 1950, the CIA initiated Project
Bluebird, later renamed Project Artichoke, whose stated
purpose was to develop “the means to control individu¬
als through special interrogation techniques”, “way[s] to
prevent the extraction of information from CIA agents”,
and “offensive uses of unconventional techniques, such
as hypnosis and drugs”. 111111112111131 The purpose of the
project was outlined in a memo dated lanuary 1952 that
stated, “Can we get control of an individual to the point
where he will do our bidding against his will and even
against fundamental laws of nature, such as self preser¬
vation?" The project studied the use of hypnosis, forced
morphine addiction and subsequent forced withdrawal,
and the use of other chemicals, among other meth¬
ods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in
subjects. 1114111151111611117111181 In order to “perfect tech¬
niques for the abstraction of information from individu¬
als, whether willing or not”. Project Bluebird researchers
experimented with a wide variety of psychoactive sub¬
stances, including LSD, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, PCP,
5 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND TORTURE EXPERIMENTS
mescaline, and ether. 11191 Project Bluebird researchers
dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with LSD, with¬
out their knowledge or consent, at the Edgewood Arse¬
nal in Maryland. Years after these experiments, more
than 1,000 of these soldiers suffered from several psychi¬
atric illnesses, including depression and epilepsy. Many
of them tried to commit suicide. 11201
5.1.2 Drug deaths
In 1952, professional tennis player Harold Blauer died
when injected by Dr. James Cattell with a fatal dose
of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychi¬
atric Institute of Columbia University. The United States
Department of Defense, which sponsored the injection,
worked in collusion with the Department of Justice and
the New York State Attorney General to conceal evidence
of its involvement for 23 years. Cattell claimed that he
did not know what the army had given him to inject into
Blauer, saying: “We didn't know whether it was dog piss
or what we were giving him.” 1121111221
On November 19, 1953 Dr. Frank Olson was without his
knowledge or consent given an LSD dosage before his
death 9 days later. For 22 years this was covered up until
the Project MKUltra revelations.
5.1.3 MKULTRA
Founding In 1953, the CIA placed several of its in¬
terrogation and mind-control programs under the di¬
rection of a single program, known by the code name
MKULTRA, after CIA director Allen Dulles complained
about not having enough “human guinea pigs to try these
extraordinary techniques”. 11231 The MKULTRA project
was under the direct command of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of
the Technical Services Division. 11231 The project received
over $25 million, and involved hundreds of experiments
on human subjects at eighty different institutions.
In a memo describing the purpose of one MKULTRA
program subprogram, Richard Helms said:
We intend to investigate the development
of a chemical material which causes a re¬
versible, nontoxic aberrant mental state, the
specific nature of which can be reasonably well
predicted for each individual. This material
could potentially aid in discrediting individ¬
uals, eliciting information, and implanting
suggestions and other forms of mental control.
—Richard Helms, internal CIA memo 11241
In 1954, the CIA’s Project QKHILLTOP was created
to study Chinese brainwashing techniques, and to de¬
velop effective methods of interrogation. Most of the
early studies are believed to have been performed by
5.1 U.S. government research
9
the Cornell University Medical School’s human ecol¬
ogy study programs, under the direction of Dr. Harold
Wolff. I 111 ! [125] [ 126 J Wolff' requested that the CIA provide
him any information they could find regarding “threats,
coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, tor¬
ture, 'brainwashing', 'black psychiatry', and hypnosis,
or any combination of these, with or without chemical
agents”. According to Wolff, the research team would
then:
...assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate
this information and will then undertake ex¬
perimental investigations designed to develop
new techniques of offensive/defensive intel¬
ligence use ... Potentially useful secret drugs
(and various brain damaging procedures) will
be similarly tested in order to ascertain the
fundamental effect upon human brain function
and upon the subject’s mood ... Where any of
the studies involve potential harm of the sub¬
ject, we expect the Agency to make available
suitable subjects and a proper place for the
performance of the necessary experiments.
—Dr. Harold Wolff, Cornell University
Medical School 11261
"... it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded
American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with
the sanction and bidding of the All-highest?"
George Hunter White, who oversaw drug experiments
for the CIA as part of Operation Midnight Climax 11271
Another of the MKULTRA subprojects. Operation Mid¬
night Climax, consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses
in San Francisco, Marin, and New York which were es¬
tablished in order to study the effects of LSD on uncon¬
senting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were
instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where
they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of sub¬
stances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way
glass. Several significant operational techniques were de¬
veloped in this theater, including extensive research into
sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possi¬
ble use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. 11271
In 1957, with funding from a CIA front organization.
Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute in
Montreal, Canada began MKULTRA Subproject 68. 11281
His experiments were designed to first “depattern” in¬
dividuals, erasing their minds and memories—reducing
them to the mental level of an infant—and then to “re¬
build” their personality in a manner of his choosing. 11291
To achieve this, Cameron placed patients under his “care”
into drug-induced comas for up to 88 days, and applied
numerous high voltage electric shocks to them over the
course of weeks or months, often administering up to 360
shocks per person. He would then perform what he called
“psychic driving” experiments on the subjects, where he
would repetitively play recorded statements, such as “You
are a good wife and mother and people enjoy your com¬
pany”, through speakers he had implanted into blacked-
out football helmets that he bound to the heads of the test
subjects (for sensory deprivation purposes). The patients
could do nothing but listen to these messages, played for
16-20 hours a day, for weeks at a time. In one case,
Cameron forced a person to listen to a message non-stop
for 101 days. 11291 Using CIA funding, Cameron converted
the horse stables behind Allen Memorial into an elaborate
isolation and sensory deprivation chamber which he kept
patients locked in for weeks at a time. 11291 Cameron also
induced insulin comas in his subjects by giving them large
injections of insulin, twice a day, for up to two months at
a time. 11111 Several of the children who Cameron exper¬
imented on were sexually abused, in at least one case by
several men. One of the children was filmed numerous
times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal
government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and
other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials
to ensure further funding for the experiments. 11301
“The frequent screams of the patients that echoed through
the hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his asso¬
ciates in their attempts to depattern their subjects com¬
pletely.”
John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candi¬
date. Chapter 8 11311
Concerns The CIA leadership had serious concerns
about these activities, as evidenced in a 1957 Inspector
General Report, which stated:
Precautions must be taken not only to
protect operations from exposure to enemy
forces but also to conceal these activities
from the American public in general. The
knowledge that the agency is engaging in
unethical and illicit activities would have seri¬
ous repercussions in political and diplomatic
circles ...
—1957 CIA Inspector General Report 11321
In 1963, CIA had synthesized many of the find¬
ings from its psychological research into what became
known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interroga¬
tion handbook, 11331 which cited the MKULTRA studies
and other secret research programs as the scientific ba¬
sis for their interrogation methods. 11291 Cameron regu¬
larly traveled around the U.S. teaching military personnel
about his techniques (hooding of prisoners for sensory
deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, etc.), and
how they could be used in interrogations. Latin American
paramilitary groups working for the CIA and U.S. mili¬
tary received training in these psychological techniques
10
5 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND TORTURE EXPERIMENTS
at places such as the School of the Americas. In the 21st
century, many of the torture techniques developed in the
MKULTRA studies and other programs are being used at
U.S. military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay
and Abu Ghraib. 1129111341 In the aftermath of the Congres¬
sional hearings, major news media mainly focused on sen-
sationalistic stories related to LSD, “mind-control”, and
“brainwashing”, and rarely used the word “torture”. This
suggested that CIA researchers were, as one author put
it “a bunch of bumbling sci-fi buffoons”, rather than a
rational group of men who had run torture laboratories
and medical experiments in major U.S. universities; they
had arranged for torture, rape and psychological abuse of
adults and young children, driving many of them perma¬
nently insane. 11291
Shutdown MKULTRA activities continued until 1973
when CIA director Richard Helms, fearing that they
would be exposed to the public, ordered the project
terminated, and all of the files destroyed. 11231 But, a
clerical error had sent many of the documents to the
wrong office, so when CIA workers were destroying
the files, some of them remained. They were later re¬
leased under a Freedom of Information Act request by
investigative journalist John Marks. Many people in
the American public were outraged when they learned
of the experiments, and several congressional investiga¬
tions took place, including the Church Committee and the
Rockefeller Commission.
On April 26, 1976, the Church Committee of the United
States Senate issued a report. Final Report of the Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect
to Intelligence Activities , 11351 In Book I, Chapter XVII, p.
389, this report states:
LSD was one the materials tested in the
MKULTRA program. The final phase of LSD
testing involved surreptitious administration to
unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal fife
settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of
Narcotics acting for the CIA.
A special procedure, designated
MKDELTA, was established to govern
the use of MKULTRA materials abroad. Such
materials were used on a number of occasions.
Because MKULTRA records were destroyed,
it is impossible to reconstruct the operational
use of MKULTRA materials by the CIA
overseas; it has been determined that the use
of these materials abroad began in 1953, and
possibly as early as 1950. [114][136][137][138][139]
Drugs were used primarily as an
aid to interrogations, but MKUL-
TRA/MKDELTA materials were also
used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling
purposes. [114][136][137][138][139]
5.1.4 Schizophrenic patient experiments
Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed ex¬
periments on schizophrenic patients and prisoners in
the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The experiments were
funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them
with LSD and Bulbocapnine, and implanted electrodes
into the septal area of the brain to stimulate 1 1401 it and
take EEG readings. 1141111421
5.1.5 Torture experiments
From 1964 to 1968, the U.S. Army paid $386,486 to
professors Albert Kligman and Herbert W. Copelan to
perform experiments with mind-altering drugs on 320 in¬
mates of Holmesburg Prison. The goal of the study was
to determine the minimum effective dose of each drug
needed to disable 50 percent of any given population.
Kligman and Copelan initially claimed that they were un¬
aware of any long-term health effects the drugs could
have on prisoners; however, documents later revealed that
this was not the case. 11061
Medical professionals gathered and collected data on the
CIA’s use of torture techniques on detainees during the
21st century war on terror, in order to refine those tech¬
niques, and “to provide legal cover for torture, as well
as to help justify and shape future procedures and poli¬
cies”, according to a 2010 report by Physicians for Hu¬
man Rights. The report stated that: “Research and med¬
ical experimentation on detainees was used to measure
the effects of large-volume waterboarding and adjust the
procedure according to the results.” As a result of the wa¬
terboarding experiments, doctors recommended adding
saline to the water “to prevent putting detainees in a coma
or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts
of plain water.” Sleep deprivation tests were performed
on over a dozen prisoners, in 48-, 96- and 180-hour in¬
crements. Doctors also collected data intended to help
them judge the emotional and physical effects of the
techniques so as to “calibrate the level of pain expe¬
rienced by detainees during interrogation” and to de¬
termine if using certain types of techniques would in¬
crease a subject’s “susceptibility to severe pain.” In 2010
the CIA denied the allegations, claiming they never per¬
formed any experiments, and saying “The report is just
wrong"; however, the U.S. government never investi¬
gated the claims. 114311144111451114611147111481 The psycholo¬
gists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen ran a company
that was paid $81 million by the CIA, that, according
to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA tor¬
ture, developed the “enhanced interrogation techniques”
used. 11491 In November 2014, the American Psychologi¬
cal Association announced that they would hire a lawyer
to investigate claims that they were complicit in the devel¬
opment of enhanced interrogation techniques that consti¬
tuted torture. 11501
In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer
11
Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail
in Castaic, California in order to use prisoners as test
subjects for its Active Denial System system that “fires
an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable
pain.” 11511 The device, dubbed “pain ray” by its critics,
was rejected for fielding in Iraq due to Pentagon fears that
it would be used as an instrument of torture. 1 1521
5.2 Academic research
In 1939, at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in
Davenport, Iowa, twenty-two children were the subjects
of the so-called “monster” experiment. This experiment
attempted to use psychological abuse to induce stuttering
in children who spoke normally. The experiment was de¬
signed by Dr. Wendell Johnson, one of the nation’s most
prominent speech pathologists, for the purpose of testing
one of his theories on the cause of stuttering. 11531
In 1961, in response to the Nuremberg Trials, the Yale
psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his “Obedience
to Authority Study”, also known as the Milgram Experi¬
ment, in order to determine if it was possible that the Nazi
genocide could have resulted from millions of people who
were “just following orders”. The Milgram Experiment
raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimen¬
tation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered
by the participants, who were told, as part of the experi¬
ment, to apply electric shocks to test subjects (who were
actors and did not really receive electric shocks).
In 1971, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zim-
bardo conducted the Stanford prison experiment in which
twenty-four male students were randomly assigned roles
of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the
basement of the Stanford psychology building. The par¬
ticipants adapted to their roles beyond Zimbardo’s expec¬
tations with prison guards exhibiting authoritarian status
and psychologically abusing the prisoners who were pas¬
sive in their acceptance of the abuse. The experiment
was largely controversial with criticisms aimed toward the
lack of scientific principles and a control group, and for
ethical concerns regarding Zimbardo’s lack of interven¬
tion in the prisoner abuse.
6 Pharmacological research
At Harvard University, in the late 1940s, researchers
began performing experiments in which they tested
diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen, on pregnant
women at the Lying-In Hospital of the University of
Chicago. The women experienced an abnormally high
number of miscarriages and babies with low birth weight
(LBW). None of the women were told that they were be¬
ing experimented on. 11541
In 1962, researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center
in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on
children. They continued their tests even after half of
the children developed severe liver damage from the
medications. 1851
In 2004, University of Minnesota research participant
Dan Markingson committed suicide while enrolled in an
industry-sponsored pharmaceutical trial comparing three
FDA-approved atypical antipsychotics: Seroquel (que-
tiapine), Zyprexa (olanzapine), and Risperdal (risperi¬
done). Writing on the circumstances surrounding Mark-
ingson’s death in the study, which was designed and
funded by Seroquel manufacturer AstraZeneca, Uni¬
versity of Minnesota Professor of Bioethics Carl El¬
liott noted that Markingson was enrolled in the study
against the wishes of his mother, Mary Weiss, and
that he was forced to choose between enrolling in the
study or being involuntarily committed to a state men¬
tal institution. 11551 Further investigation revealed finan¬
cial ties to AstraZeneca by Markingson’s psychiatrist.
Dr. Stephen C. Olson, oversights and biases in As¬
traZeneca’s trial design, and the inadequacy of univer¬
sity Institutional Review Board (IRB) protections for re¬
search subjects. 11561 A 2005 FDA investigation cleared
the university. Nonetheless, controversy around the case
has continued. Mother Jones resulted in a group of uni¬
versity faculty members sending a public letter to the uni¬
versity Board of Regents urging an external investigation
into Markingson’s death. 11571
7 Other experiments
The 1846 journals of Dr. Walter F. Jones of Peters¬
burg, Virginia, describe how he poured boiling water
onto the backs of naked slaves afflicted with typhoid
pneumonia, at four-hour intervals, because he thought
that this might “cure” the disease by “stimulating the
capillaries”. 1 15811159111601
From early 1940 until 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a
highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist who prac¬
ticed at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, performed
electroshock experiments on at least 100 children. The
children’s ages ranged from 3-12 years. Some reports
indicate that she may have performed such experiments
on more than 200. From 1942 to 1956, electroconvul¬
sive treatment was used on more than 500 children at
Bellevue Hospital, including Bender’s experiments; from
1956 to 1969, ECT was used at Creedmoor State Hos¬
pital Children’s Service. Publicly, Bender claimed that
the results of the “therapy” were positive, but in private
memos, she expressed frustration over mental health is¬
sues caused by the treatments. 11611 Bender would some¬
times shock schizophrenic children (some less than 3
years old) twice per day, for 20 consecutive days. Several
of the children became violent and suicidal as a result of
the treatments. 11621
In 1942, the Harvard University biochemist Edward
12
8 LEGAL, ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL POLICY
Cohn injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow
blood, as part of an experiment sponsored by the U.S.
Navy. 116311164111651
In 1950, researchers at the Cleveland City Hospital ran
experiments to study changes in cerebral blood flow: they
injected people with spinal anesthesia, and inserted nee¬
dles into their jugular veins and brachial arteries to extract
large quantities of blood and, after massive blood loss
which caused paralysis and fainting, measured their blood
pressure. The experiment was often performed multiple
times on the same subject. 1851
In a series of studies which were published in the medi¬
cal journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of
California Department of Pediatrics performed experi¬
ments on 113 newborns ranging in age from 1-hour to
3 days, in which they studied changes in blood pressure
and blood flow. In one of the studies, researchers inserted
a catheter through the babies’ umbilical arteries and into
their aortas, and then submerged their feet in ice water. In
another of the studies, they strapped 50 newborn babies
to a circumcision board, and turned them upside down so
that all of their blood rushed into their heads. 1851
The San Antonio Contraceptive Study was a clinical
research study published in 1971 about the side ef¬
fects of oral contraceptives. Women coming to a clinic
in San Antonio to prevent pregnancies were not told
they were participating in a research study or receiving
placebos. 10 of the women became pregnant while on
placebos. 1166111671 11681
In the 2000s (decade), artificial blood was transfused into
research subjects across the United States without their
consent by Northfield Labs. 11691 Later studies showed the
artificial blood caused a significant increase in the risk of
heart attacks and death. 1 1701
8 Legal, academic and professional
policy
Main article: Human subject research legislation in the
United States
During the Nuremberg Medical Trials, several of the
Nazi doctors and scientists who were being tried for
their human experiments cited past unethical studies per¬
formed in the United States in their defense, namely the
Chicago malaria experiments conducted by Dr. Joseph
Goldberger. 112,1501 Subsequent investigation led to a re¬
port by Andrew Conway Ivy, who testified that the re¬
search was “an example of human experiments which
were ideal because of their conformity with the high¬
est ethical standards of human experimentation”. 1 171 ' The
trials contributed to the formation of the Nuremberg
Code in an effort to prevent such abuses. 11721
A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled
Medical Experiments in Humans stated: “It is desired
that no document be released which refers to experi¬
ments with humans that might have an adverse reaction
on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents cov¬
ering such fieldwork should be classified Secret.” 1591
At the same time, the Public Health Service was in¬
structed to tell citizens downwind from bomb tests that
the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and that
women with radiation sickness, hair loss, and burned skin
were suffering from “housewife syndrome”. 1591
In 1964, the World Medical Association passed the
Declaration of Helsinki, a set of ethical principles for the
medical community regarding human experimentation.
In 1966, the United States National Institutes of Health
(NIH) Office for Protection of Research Subjects
(OPRR) was created. It issued its Policies for the Protec¬
tion of Human Subjects, which recommended establish¬
ing independent review bodies to oversee experiments.
These were later called institutional review boards.
In 1969, Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Ste-
infeld dissented in Strunk v>. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145.
He made the first judicial suggestion that the Nuremberg
Code should be applied to American jurisprudence.
In 1974 the National Research Act established the Na¬
tional Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects.
It mandated that the Public Health Service come up with
regulations to protect the rights of human research sub¬
jects.
Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public at¬
tention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through inves¬
tigations by the Church Committee, and by a presi¬
dential commission known as the Rockefeller Commis¬
sion. 1173111741
In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Wel¬
fare (DHEW) created regulations which included the rec¬
ommendations laid out in the NIH’s 1966 Policies for
the Protection of Human Subjects. Title 45 of the Code
of Federal Regulations, known as “The Common Rule,”
requires the appointment and use of institutional review
boards (IRBs) in experiments using human subjects.
On April 18, 1979, prompted by an investigative jour¬
nalist’s public disclosure of the Tuskegee syphilis exper¬
iments, the United States Department of Health, Educa¬
tion, and Welfare (later renamed to Health and Human
Services) released a report entitled Ethical Principles and
Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Re¬
search, written by Dan Harms. It laid out many modern
guidelines for ethical medical research.
In 1987 the United States Supreme Court ruled in United
States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, that a U.S. serviceman
who was given LSD without his consent, as part of mili¬
tary experiments, could not sue the U.S. Army for dam¬
ages.
Dissenting the verdict in U.S. v. Stanley, Justice Sandra
13
Day O'Connor stated:
No judicially crafted rule should insulate
from liability the involuntary and unknowing
human experimentation alleged to have oc¬
curred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Bren¬
nan observes, the United States played an in¬
strumental role in the criminal prosecution of
Nazi scientists who experimented with human
subjects during the Second World War, and
the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tri¬
bunals developed to judge the behavior of the
defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of
the human subject is absolutely essential ... to
satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.' If
this principle is violated, the very least that so¬
ciety can do is to see that the victims are com¬
pensated, as best they can be, by the perpetra¬
tors.
On January 15, 1994, President Bill Clinton formed the
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
(ACHRE). This committee was created to investigate and
report the use of human beings as test subjects in experi¬
ments involving the effects of ionizing radiation in feder¬
ally funded research. The committee attempted to deter¬
mine the causes of the experiments and reasons that the
proper oversight did not exist. It made several recom¬
mendations to help prevent future occurrences of similar
events. 11731
As of 2007, not a single U.S. government researcher had
been prosecuted for human experimentation. The pre¬
ponderance of the victims of U.S. government experi¬
ments have not received compensation or, in many cases,
acknowledgment of what was done to them. 11761
9 See also
• Belmont Report
• Eugenics in the United States
• Henry Cotton (doctor)
• Human rights in the United States
• Japanese human experimentation
• Nazi human experimentation
• North Korean human experimentation
• Operation Big Buzz
• Operation Crossroads
• Operation Dew
• Operation Drop Kick
• Operation LAC
• Operation May Day
• Project MKUltra
• Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services
• Research involving prisoners
10 References
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10.2
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10.2 Bibliography
• Annas, George J.; Grodin, Michael A. (1995). The
Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: human rights
in human experimentation. Oxford University Press.
ISBN 978-0-19-510106-5.
18
11 FURTHER RESOURCES
• Brody, Baruch A. (1998). The Ethics of Biomedi¬
cal Research: An international perspective. Oxford
University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509007-9.
• Cina, Stephen J.; Perper, Joshua A. (2010). When
Doctors Kill. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4419-1368-5.
• Cole, Leonard A. (1996). The Eleventh Plague:
The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare.
MacMillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-7214-3.
• Eckart, Wolfgang Uwe (2006). Man, Medicine, and
the State: The human body as an object of govern¬
ment sponsored medical research in the 20th century.
Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 978-3-515-08794-0.
• Goliszek, Andrew (2003). In The Name of Science.
New York: St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 978-0-312-
30356-3.
• Grodin, Michael A. & Glantz, Leonard H., ed.
(1994). Children as Research Subjects: Science,
ethics, and law. Oxford University Press US. ISBN
978-0-19-507103-0.
• Halpern, Sydney A. (2006). Lesser Harms: The
Morality of Risk in Medical Research. University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-31452-5.
• Hornblum, Allen M. (1998). Acres of Skin: Hu¬
man experiments at Holmesburg Prison, a story of
abuse and exploitation in the name of medical sci¬
ence. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-91990-6.
• Hornblum, Allen M. (2007). Sentenced to Science:
One Black Man's Story of Imprisonment in America.
The Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-
0-271-03336-5.
• Lederer, Susan E. (1997). Subjected to Science: Hu¬
man Experimentation in America Before the Second
World War. JHU Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5709-6.
• Loue, Sana (2000). Textbook of research ethics:
theory and practice. Springer. ISBN 978-0-306-
46448-5.
• McCoy, Alfred W. (2006). A question of torture:
CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on
Terror. New York: Metropolitan Books. ISBN 978-
0-8050-8041-4.
• Moreno, Jonathan D. (2001). Undue Risk: Secret
State Experiments on Humans. Routledge. ISBN 0-
415-92835-4.
• Otterman, Michael (2007). American torture: from
the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and beyond. Melbourne
Univ. Publishing. ISBN 978-0-522-85333-9.
• David J. Rothman (1992). Strangers at the Bedside:
A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed
Medical Decision Making. Basic Books. ISBN 978-
0-465-08210-0.
• Shamoo, Adil E.; Resnik, David B. (2009). Respon¬
sible Conduct of Research. Oxford University Press
US. ISBN 978-0-19-536824-6.
• Washington, Harriet A. (2008). Medical Apartheid:
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on
Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
Random House. ISBN 978-0-7679-1547-2.
11 Further resources
11.1 General
• “Human Research Report” - a monthly newsletter on
protecting human subjects
• Frankel, MarkS. (1975). “The Development of Pol¬
icy Guidelines Governing Human Experimentation
in the United States”. Ethics in Science and Medicine
2 .
• Hornblum, Allen M.; Newman, Judith Lynn; Dober,
Gregory J. (2013). Against Their Will: The Se¬
cret History of Medical Experimentation on Children
in Cold War America. New York, NY: Palgrave
Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-34171-5.
• Jonsen, Albert R. (1998). The Birth of Bioethics.
Oxford University Press.
• Kalechofsky, Roberta. Human Experimentation:
Before the Nazi Era and After.
• Weyers, Wolfgang (2003). The Abuse of Man: An
illustrated history of dubious medical experimenta¬
tion. Ardor Scribendi. ISBN 978-1-893357-21-1.
11.2 Biological warfare and dis¬
ease/pathogen experiments
• Bibliography of Chemical and Biological Warfare
documents
• The History of Bioterrorism in America, Richard
Sanders, Race and History , Sunday, November 24,
2002 (Retrieved February 18, 2010)
• Biological Weapons - Federation of American Sci¬
entists
• Franz, et al.. The U.S. Biological Warfare and Bio¬
logical Defense Programs
• US Army Activities in the US Biological Warfare Pro¬
gram, 1977 Congressional report
• Christopher et al., “Biological warfare. A historical
perspective”. Journal of the American Medical As¬
sociation. 6 August 1997;278(5):412-7.
11.4 Psychological/torture/interrogation experiments
19
• Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S.
Cities", Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2001,
via American Patriot Friends Network. Retrieved
November 13, 2008.
11.4 Psychological/torture/interrogation
experiments
• Bibliography of U.S. interrogation/torture research
• http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2012/09/24/ * Truth ’ torture, and the American way, Jennifer Har-
researcher-poor-st-louis-minorities-targeted-for-secfeiRiold-war-chemical-testing/
11.3 Human radiation experiments
11.3.1 Books
• Killing Our Own: The disaster of America’s experi¬
ence with atomic radiation, by Harvey Wasserman,
Delacorte Press, cl992, ISBN 978-0-440-04567-0
• The Plutonium Files: America 'v Secret Medical Ex¬
periments, by Eileen Welsome, The Dial Press,
1999, ISBN 978-0-385-31402-2
• Biderman, A. Social-Psychological Needs and “In¬
voluntary” Behavior as Illustrated by Compliance in
Interrogation, Sociometry, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June,
1960), pp. 120-147
• The CIA: Mind-Bending Disclosures - Time Maga¬
zine, Monday, August 15, 1977 (Retrieved February
18,2010)
• Resources on Drug Experimentation and Related
Mind Control Experiments by the U.S. Government
• Khatchadourian, Raffi (December 7, 2012)
“Operation Delirium”, The New Yorker
• The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in
the Cincinnati Radiation Tests, by Martha Stephens,
Duke University Press, c2002, Durham, N.C., ISBN
0-8223-2811-9
• Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in
a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World, by Holly M.
Barker, Wadsworth, 2004. ISBN 0-534-61326-8
11.3.2 Government documents
• Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experi¬
ments (ACHRE) - National Security Archives
• Exposure of the American population to radioac¬
tive fallout from nuclear weapons tests: a review of
the CDC-NCI draft report on a feasibility study of
the health consequences to the American popula¬
tion from nuclear weapons tests conducted by the
United States and other nations. National Research
Council (U.S.). Committee to Review the CDC-NCI
Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences from
Nuclear Weapons Tests, National Academies Press,
2003 ISBN 978-0-309-08713-1
11.5 Video
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony A - 1977 MKUL-
TRA Congressional Hearings
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony B - 1977 MKUL¬
TRA Congressional Hearings
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony C - 1977 MKUL¬
TRA Congressional Hearings
• President Clinton apologizes for Human Radiation
Experiments
• Complete transcript of Clinton’s apology for Human
Radiation Experiments
• Physicians for Human Rights Accuses CIA of Car¬
rying Out Illegal Human Experimentation - video
report by Democracy Now!
• The Dark History of Medical Experimentation from
the Nazis to Tuskegee to Puerto Rico - video report
by Democracy Now!
11.3.3 Journals
• '"A Little Touch of Buchenwald': America’s Secret
Radiation Experiments”, Reviews in American His¬
tory - Volume 28, Number 4, December 2000, pp.
601-606
• Chair’s Perspective on the Work of the Advisory
Committee on Human Radiation Experiments by
Ruth Faden
20
12 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES
12 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses
12.1 Text
• Unethical human experimentation in the United States Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical%20human%
20experimentation%20in%20the%20Umted%20States?oldid=649921103 Contributors: Shii, Edward, Mark Foskey, PaulinSaudi,
Andrevan, Bearcat, Alan Liefting, Piotrus, DragonflySixtyseven, Rich Farmbrough, Vsmith, ESkog, Stesmo, Geraldshieldsl 1,
Woohookitty, Tabletop, GregorB, Rjwilmsi, Tare, Ground Zero, Klosterdev, Kolbasz, Jrtayloriv, Bgwhite, Wavelength, Witan, Ytrottier,
Lusanaherandraton, Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry, Arthur Rubin, Rathfelder, Explainer, Tom Morris, SmackBot, C.Fred, Kintetsubuf-
falo, Hmains, Eug, Deli nk, Jxm, Muboshgu, DevSolar, Ohconfucius, Calvados, Gobonobo, NYCJosh, PParkerT, RhoOphuichi, Shandris,
Gregbard, Slazenger, Cydebot, Anthonyhcole, Jaerik, Maziotis, RedBanner, Sobreira, Uruiamme, Matthew Fennell, Lakmiseiru, Wolf-
manSF, Websterwebfoot, AtticusX, QuizzicalBee, Gabel972, Hzoi, Nyttend, Diego Azeta, Dmehring, Gwem, R'n'B, CommonsDelinker,
Nono64, Tgeairn, DrKiernan, Metaldev, Apostle 12, Entropy, RVJ, Hugo999, Johnfos, Philip Trueman, Mark vl.O, Thegargantua, Leav,
Wykypydya, Krushia, Plutonium27, Calliopejenl, MaynardClark, Lightmouse, Kumioko (renamed), Dodger67, Lavum, Niceguyedc,
Parkwells, Socrates2008, B5200, SpikeToronto, V7-sport, Redthoreau, SchreiberBike, Stepheng3, Aronzak, SDY, XLinkBot, Osarius, Ad-
dbot, C6541, Melab-1, Fluffernutter, Jarble, Legobot, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Julia W, Yngvadottir, PMLawrence, AnomieBOT, VanishedUser
sdu9aya9fasdsopa, Jimll38, Bluerasberry, Materialscientist, Citation bot, Eumolpo, Crimsonmargarine, Hgriggs, LilHelpa, Alexlange,
AbigailAbemathy, Boxandice8, Uniwersalista, Paramecium, Pixel Eater, Specrat, FrescoBot, CaptainFugu, Glom2215, Cs32en, Citation
bot 1, Dweezle7, Pinethicket, Skyerise, Jcsegenmd, Gellpak, Bluefist, Gegenwind, Aoidh, Mr.98, RjwilmsiBot, J36miles, EmausBot, John
of Reading, Mesora54, Dewritech, Saenger, Insipido, German E. Macias, RedSer, Still polaris, AbigailAnderson, Kraligor, Trananhl980,
Infinitjest, Packbr, Alpha Quadrant (alt), Wingman417, Rcsprinter 123, Palosirkka, Donner60, Delia Peabody, Peter Karlsen, Lguipontes,
Tyretrotter, ClueBot NG, Delawaresky, Rulew, Primergrey, Mesoderm, CopperSquare, Widr, Helpful Pixie Bot, Shannon Garcia,
Titodutta, Calabel992, KS Astoria, BG19bot, Greg Vaughan, WikiTryHardDieHard, AnthonyZZZ, NorthamericalOOO, Dartroom, Badon,
Stelpa, Cadiomals, Philpill691, Aisteco, Q2stirofechoes, Anbul21, BattyBot, Simeondahl, MassiveHeadTrauma, Ddcm8991, Khazar2,
SNAAAAKE!!, MadGuy7023, Rpafitzpatrick, Hmainsbotl, Flashscapes, Joshtaco, Fulldisclosure2012, Epicgenius, RMNixonl972,
MDubler, Elizabeth 1848, Clickyhnky, Correctrix, Nelsonsfx, AioftheStorm, Rjesar, Chronopen, VoceTyrannis, Thedeathofusernames,
Monkbot, Formerly 98, Bogdan.caprarescu, Vieque, KgLiberty, Loudlibrary, Xpctr8, Junky One Nine, Yairchaim, BUTTPLUGUE,
SPELLCHECKER90210, Sebastianhaerlin and Anonymous: 170
12.2 Images
• File :Chloracne-in-herbicide-worker.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.Org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/
Chloracne-in-herbicide-worker.png License: Public domain Contributors: OCCUPATIONAL DERMATOSES - CDC/NIOSH
Original artist: NIOSH
• File:Flag_of_the_United_States.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.Org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/Flag_of_the_United_States.svg License:
PD Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
• File:Project_4.1_final_report_cover.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.Org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Project_4.l_final_report_
cover.png License: Public domain Contributors: Source: E.P. Cronkite, V.P. Bond, L.E. Browning, W.H. Chapman, S.H. Cohn, R.A.
Conard, C.L. Dunham, R.S. Farr, W.S. Hall, R. Sharp, N.R. Shulman, Study of Response of Human Beings Accidentally Exposed to Signifi¬
cant Fallout Radiation, Operation CASTLE, Project 4.1, Naval Medical Research Institute, Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Defense
Atomic Support Agency, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Report #WT-923 (October 1954). Online at http://worf.eh.doe.gov/data/ihp2/
2776_.pdf. Original artist: United States Department of Energy
• File:Tuskegee_study.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.Org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Tuskegee_study.jpg License: Public domain
Contributors: This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC
Identifier (National Archives Identifier) 956104. Original artist: Uploaded by Taco325i