Human Experimentation in the United States [Updated 8-3-19]

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There have been numerous human experiments performed 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.

Many types of experiments were performed including the deliberate infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure of people to biological and chemical weapons, human radiation experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation/torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children and mentally disabled individuals. In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor racial minorities or prisoners. Often, subjects were sick or disabled people, whose doctors told them that they were receiving "medical treatment"but instead were used as the subjects of harmful and deadly experiments, without their knowledge or consent.

Many of these experiments were funded by the United States government, especially the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States military. The human research 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 policies which attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outcry over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee, Rockefeller Commission, and Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, amongst others. However, as of 2007, not a single U.S. government researcher had been prosecuted for human experimentation, and many of the victims of U.S. government experiments have not received compensation, or in many cases, even acknowledgment of what was done to them.^[1]

[edit] Surgical experiments

Throughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is often referred to as "the father of gynecology", performed surgical experiments on enslaved African women, without anesthesia (which was readily available at the time). The women—one of whom was operated on 30 times—regularly died from infections resulting from the experiments. In order to test one of his theories about the causes of trismus in infants, Sims performed experiments where he used a shoemaker's awl to move around the skull bones of the babies of enslaved women.^[2][3][4]

In 1874, Mary Rafferty, an Irish servant woman, came to Dr. Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hospital 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^[5]. He described the experiment as follows:

When the needle entered the brain substance, 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 consciousness and was violently convulsed on the left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes, and was succeeded by a coma...

—Dr. Bartholow's "research" report^[5]

He applied electric shocks until she died a few days later, at which time he claimed that she had died as a result of her cancer.^[5]

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 if doing so would be harmful.^[6]

From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take the testicles out of executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams, goats, and boars into living prisoners. Stanley also performed various eugenics experiments, and forced sterilizations on San Quentin prisoners.^[7] Stanley believed that his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the "unfit" from reproducing.^[7][8]

[edit] Pathogens, disease, and biological warfare agents

In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a California physician working at a hospital for lepers injected twelve young girls under the age of 12 with syphilis.^[6]

In 1895, the New York pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two mentally retarded boys—one 4-year-old and one 16-year old—with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment.^[6][9]

In 1900, U.S Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and induced beriberi in 29 prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result.^[10][11]

In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected Filipino prisoners with cholera, killing 13 of them.^[12][13]

In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at the St. Vincent's House orphanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent blindness in some of the children, and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many of the other children. In the study, they referred to the children as "material used".^[14]

In 1909, F. C. Knowles released a study describing how he had deliberately infected two children in an orphanage with Molluscum contagiosum after an outbreak in the orphanage, in order to study the disease.^[6]

In 1911, Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research injected 146 hospital patients (some of whom were children) with syphilis. He was later sued by the parents of some of the child subjects, who allegedly contracted syphilis as a result of his experiments.^[15]

A subject of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment has his blood drawn, circa 1953

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment^[16] was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service. In the experiment, 400 impoverished black males who had syphilis, were offered "treatment" by the researchers, who told the test subjects that they were treating them for the disease, but in reality did nothing—even though they possessed penicillin, which was known to cure the deadly disease at the time—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. Twenty-eight 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 public outcry.^[17]

In 1941, at the University of Michigan, doctors Francis and Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with the influenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages.^[18]

In 1941 Dr. William C. Black inoculated a twelve month old baby with herpes.^[19]

The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study was 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 Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the State Department. At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the malaria experiments as part of their defense.^[10] The study continued at Stateville Penitentiary for 29 years.

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 malaria treatments on them.^[20]

In 1950 the US Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens over the city of San Francisco, California, which caused numerous citizens to contract pneumonia-like illnesses, and killed at least one person.^[10][21][22]

Also in 1950, Dr. Joseph Stokes of the University of Pennsylvania deliberately infected 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis.^[23]

From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, in research whose purpose was to help discover a vaccine.^[24] From 1963 to 1966, Saul Krugman of New York University 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 hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of patients infected with the disease.^[25]

In 1952, Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher Chester M. Southam injected live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison. Half of the prisoners in this NIH-sponsored study were black.^[11] 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.^[26]

In 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare experiment where they released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least 12 people.^[27][28][29]

In 1956 and 1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted on the cities of Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. In the experiments, Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the two towns, in order to see if the insects would spread yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis, and typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, so that they could photograph and perform medical tests on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.^[10]

In 1962, twenty-two elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York were injected with live 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 State medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President.^[11][30]

In 1966, the U.S. Army released Bacillus globigii into the tunnels of the New York subway system as part of a field study called A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents.^[10][27] The Chicago subway system was also subject to a similar experiment by the Army.^[27]

[edit] Human radiation experiments

Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of human radiation experiments to determine the effects of atomic radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless.^[31] Most of these tests were performed, funded, or supervised by the United States military, Atomic Energy Commission, or various other US federal government agencies.

The experiments included a wide array of studies, involving things like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting radium rods into the noses of school children, 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 testicles of prison inmates, amongst other things.

Ultimately, public outcry over the experiments led to the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

[edit] Radioactive iodine experiments

In 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran several studies on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women at the University of Iowa. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131, in order to study the women's aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive 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 lbs) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through an injection, so that they could measure the amount of iodine in their thyroid glands.^[32]

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 concentration of iodine in the infants' thyroid glands.^[32]

In a 1953 operation called "Green Run", the AEC dropped iodine-131 and xenon-133 over a 500,000 acre area which contained three small towns near the Hanford site in Washington.^[33]

In 1953, the AEC sponsored a study to discover if radioactive 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 lbs.^[32]

[edit] Uranium experiments

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 kilogram of body weight into six people to study how much uranium their kidneys could tolerate before becoming damaged.^[34]

Between 1953 and 1957, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. William Sweet injected eleven patients with uranium as part of research funded by the Manhattan Project.^[35] In exchange for uranium-235 for his experiments, he would send tissue from the dead bodies of his patients, so that researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory could analyze it to evaluate the potential health effects of uranium exposure for atomic bomb factory workers.^[36]

[edit] Plutonium experiments

In 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project, three patients at Billings Hospital at the University of Chicago were injected with plutonium.^[37]

In 1946, six employees of a Chicago metallurgical lab were given water that was contaminated with plutonium-239, so that researchers could study how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract.^[34]

[edit] Experiments involving other radioactive 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, but were, in fact, mixtures containing radioactive iron, to determine how fast the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. At least three children are known to have died from the experiments, from cancers and leukemias.^[38][39] 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.^[31]

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 corporation, 73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes, in order to track "how nutrients were digested". The children were not told that they were being fed radioactive chemicals and were told by hospital staff and researchers that they were joining a "science club".^{[38][40][41][42]}

In the 1950s, researchers at the Medical College of Virginia performed experiments on severe burn victims, most of them poor and black, without their knowledge or consent, with funding from the Army and in collaboration 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, was 50 times the "acceptable" dose for a healthy individual; for people with severe burns, this likely led to significantly increased death rates.^[43][44]

Between 1948 and 1954, funded by the federal government, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Hospital inserted radium rods into the noses of 582 Baltimore, Maryland schoolchildren to determine the effects of radiation on hearing loss.^[45] Similar experiments were performed on over 7,000 U.S. Army and Navy personnel during World War II.^[45]

In another study at the Walter E. Fernald State School, in 1956, researchers gave mentally disabled children radioactive 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 collect cerebrospinal fluid for analysis.^[42][46]

An eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hospital, expecting to be treated for a pituitary gland disorder, was injected with plutonium.^[47]

In 1961 and 1962, ten Utah State Prison inmates had blood samples taken which were then mixed with radioactive chemicals and reinjected back into their bodies.^[48]

In a 1967 study that was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, pregnant women were injected with radioactive cortisol to see if it would cross the placental barrier and affect the fetuses.^[49]

[edit] Fallout research

Cover of the final report of Project 4.1, which examined the effects of radioactive fallout on the natives of the Marshall Islands

In 1954, American scientists conducted fallout exposure research on the citizens of the Marshall Islands after the Castle Bravo nuclear test in Project 4.1. The Bravo test was detonated upwind of Rongelap Atoll and the residents were exposed to serious radiation levels, up to 180 rads. Of the 236 Marshallese exposed, some developed severe radiation sickness and one died, and long term effects included birth defects, "jellyfish" babies, and thyroid problems.^[50]

In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of Operation Plumbob were later determined to have released enough radiation to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer amongst U.S. citizens who were exposed to fallout from the explosions, leading to between 1,100 and 21,000 deaths.^[51]

Early in the Cold War, in studies known as Project GABRIEL and Project SUNSHINE, researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia attempted to determine just how much nuclear fallout would be required to make the Earth uninhabitable.^[52][53] They realized that atmospheric nuclear testing had provided them an opportunity 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.^[54]

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 being done with the body parts of their relatives.^[55]

[edit] 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 in reality the Pentagon were attempting 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, so he only referred to them 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".^[56]

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 Americans. He forged consent forms, and did not tell them what he was doing (they thought they were receiving medical care). He exposed their chests to 100 rads of radiation (the equivalent of about 7500 x-rays), which caused intense pain, vomiting, and bleeding from their nose and ears. At least eight, and as many as 20, of the subjects died as a result of the experiments.^[57]

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". One of the researchers who had worked with Keller on the experiments, Dr. Joseph Hamilton, said that the experiments "had a little of the Buchenwald touch".^[58]

In 1963, University of Washington researchers irradiated the testes of 232 prisoners to determine the effects of radiation 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.^[59]

[edit] Chemical experiments

From 1942 to 1944, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service 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. They refused to pay disability benefits to the victims of the experiments.^[10]

As part of its atomic bomb research, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsored experiments to test the health effects of putting fluoride in drinking water. Fluoride, which was a common byproduct of atomic bomb manufacture and of chemical manufacture in general, and was widely used as a rat poison, had numerous known adverse health effects at the time. The AEC was worried about lawsuits filed by workers at their bomb manufacturing facilities, and residents who lived nearby, who were being exposed to large amounts of fluoride and were experiencing severe health problems, and in some cases dying, as a result of exposure.^[60][61] Initial water fluoridation tests were performed on the citizens of Newburgh, New York and took place from 1944 to 1956 as part of a classified operation known as "Program F". With the assistance of New York Department of Health personnel, they then gathered blood and tissue samples from the citizens of Newburgh to test the effects.^[61] According to a 1948 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association, mention of the adverse health effects of fluoride was censored by the AEC as a threat to "national security".^[60][61]

From 1950 through 1953, the US Army sprayed toxic chemicals over 6 cities in the United States and Canada, in order to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records stated that the chemicals which were sprayed on the city of Winnipeg, Canada, included cadmium.^[10]

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.^[12]

A 1953 article in the medical/scientific journal Clinical Science^[62] described a medical experiment in which researchers 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 children. After the studies, the children's blistered skin was removed with scissors and swabbed with peroxide.^[49]

In 1967, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency injected an unknown chemical substance into the drinking water supply of the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in order to test their ability to poison drinking water with chemical agents.^[10]

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 State Prison in Pennsylvania was the site of extensive dermatological research operations, using prisoners as subjects. Led by Dr. Albert M. Kligman^[63] of the University of Pennsylvania, the studies were performed on behalf of Dow Chemical Company, the U.S. Army, and Johnson & Johnson. In one of the studies, for which Dow Chemical paid Kligman $10,000, Kligman injected dioxin—a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange, which Dow was manufacturing 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.^[10] 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 developing chloracne. In the study, Kligman applied roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees were being exposed to. In 1980 and 1981, some of the people who were used in this study sued Professor Kligman for a variety of health problems, including lupus and psychological damage.^[64]

Kligman later continued his dioxin studies, increasing the dosage of dioxin he applied to 10 prisoners' skin 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 prisoners developed inflammatory pustules and papules.^[64]

The Holmesburg program also paid hundreds of inmates a nominal stipend to test a wide range of cosmetic products and chemical compounds, whose health effects were unknown at the time.^[65][66] Upon his arrival at Holmesberg, Kligman is claimed to have said "All I saw before me were acres of skin ... It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time".^[67] It was reported in a 1964 issue of Medical News that 9 out of 10 prisoners at Holmesburg Prison were medical test subjects.^[68]

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 chemicals, the so-called hardening process."^[64]

[edit] Psychological and torture experiments

[edit] 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 intelligence agencies, and to develop techniques for resisting torture at the hands of enemy nations and organizations.

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 during interrogations of Soviet spies. Some of the chemicals tested on human subjects included mescaline and the anticholinergic drug scopolamine.^[69]

Shortly thereafter, in 1950, the CIA initiated Project Bluebird, later renamed Project Artichoke, whose stated purpose was to develop "the means to control individuals through special interrogation techniques", "way[s] to prevent the extraction of information from CIA agents", and "offensive uses of unconvential techniques, such as hypnosis and drugs".^[69][70][71] The purpose of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 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 preservation?" The project studied the use of hypnosis, forced morphine addiction and subsequent forced withdrawal, and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.^{[72][73][74][75][76]} In order to "perfect techniques for the abstraction of information from individuals, whether willing or not", Project Bluebird researchers experimented with a wide variety of psychoactive substances, including LSD, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, and ether.^[77] Project Bluebird researchers dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with LSD, without their knowledge or consent, at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. More than 1,000 of these soldiers suffered from several psychiatric illnesses, including depression and epilepsy, as a result of the tests. Many of them tried to commit suicide.^[78]

In 1952, professional tennis player Harold Blauer died when injected with a fatal dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University, by Dr. James Cattell. 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."^[79][80]

In 1953, the CIA placed several of its interrogation and mind-control programs under the direction 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".^[81] The MKULTRA project was under the direct command of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the Technical Services Division.^[81] 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 reversible, nontoxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.

—Richard Helms, internal CIA memo^[82]

In 1954, the CIA's Project QKHILLTOP was created to study Chinese brainwashing techniques, and to develop effective methods of interrogation. Most of the early studies are believed to have been performed by the Cornell University Medical School's human ecology study programs, under the direction of Dr. Harold Wolff.^[69][83][84] Wolff requested that the CIA provide him any information they could find regarding "threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, '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 experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence 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 subject, 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^[84]

Another of the MKULTRA subprojects, Operation Midnight Climax, consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York which were established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting 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 substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations.^[85]

In 1957, with funding from a CIA front organization, Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allen Memorial Hospital in Montreal, Canada began MKULTRA Subproject 68.^[86] His experiments were designed to first "depattern" individuals, erasing their minds and memories—reducing them to the mental level of an infant—and then to "rebuild" their personality in a manner of his choosing.^[87] 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 company", 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.^[87] 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.^[87] 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.^[69] Several of the children who Cameron experimented 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.^[88]

The CIA leadership had serious concerns about their unethical and illegal behavior, 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 serious repurcussions in political and diplomatic circles ...

—1957 CIA Inspector General Report^[90]

In 1957, Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed experiments on schizophrenic patients, which were funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them with high levels of LSD, and then implanted "deep electrodes" in their brains to take EEG readings.^[91][92][93]

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.^[81] Fortunately, 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, and were later released 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 investigations took place including the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.

In 1963, CIA had synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook.^[94], which cited the MKULTRA studies, and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods^[87] Cameron regularly travelled 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. military received training in these psychological techniques at places like the School of the Americas, and even today, 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.^[87][95] In the aftermath of the Congressional hearings, major news media mainly focused on sensationalistic stories related to LSD, "mind-control", and "brainwashing", and rarely used the word "torture". This put off the image 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, and who had tortured, raped, and psychologically abused young children, driving many of them permanently insane.^[87]

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 inmates 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 unaware of any long-term health effects the drugs could have on prisoners, however, documents later revealed that this was not the case.^[64]

Doctors, psychologists and other medical professionals gathered and collected data on the C.I.A.’s use of waterboardng, sleep deprivation, and other torture techniques in order to refine those techniques and ensure that they stayed within the limits established by the Bush administration’s lawyers, according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights. The data collected allowed the C.I.A. to judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques so as to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation, ostensibly to keep it from crossing the administration’s legal threshold of what it claimed constituted torture,” the report said. “There was no therapeutic purpose or intent to monitor and collect this data. “You can’t use people as laboratories,” said Jonathan D. Moreno, professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.^[96].

[edit] 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 children who spoke normally to stutter. The experiment was designed 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.^[97]

In 1961, in response to the Nuremberg Trials, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his study "Obedience to Authority Study", also known as the Milgram Experiment, 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 experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants, who were told, as part of the experiment, to apply electric shocks to test subjects (who were actually actors not really receiving electric shocks).

[edit] Pharmacological research

At Harvard University, in the late 1940s, researchers began performing experiments where they tested diethylstilbesterol, 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. None of the women were told that they were being experimented on.^[98]

Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on children, and continued their tests even after half of the children developed severe liver damage from the medications.^[49]

[edit] Other experiments

The 1846 journals of Dr. Walter F. Jones of Petersburg, 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".^[2]

In 1942, the Harvard University biochemist Edward Cohn injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow blood, as part of an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy.^[99]

In 1950, researchers at the Cleveland City Hospital ran experiments to study changes in cerebral blood flow where they injected people with spinal anesthesia, and inserted needles 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.^[49]

In a series of studies which were published in the medical journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of California Department of Pediatrics performed experiments on 113 newborns ranging in age from 1 hour to 3 days, where they studied changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one of the studies, researchers forced 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 then turned them upside down so that all of their blood rushed into their heads.^[49]

From 1963 to 1969 as part of Project Shipboard Hazard 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.^[100]

In the 2000s, artificial blood was transfused into research subjects across the United States without their consent. ^[101] Later studies showed the artificial blood caused a significant increase in the risk of heart attacks and death. ^[102]

[edit] Legal, academic and professional policy

In 1945, as part of Operation Paperclip, the United States government recruited 1,600 Nazi scientists, many of whom had performed horrific human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps. The scientists were offered immunity from any war crimes they had committed during the course of their work for the Nazi government, in return for doing research for the United States government. Many of the Nazi scientists continued their human experimentation when they arrived in the United States.^[103]

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 experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret.

—From Goliszek, In The Name of Science^[32]

At the same time, the Public Health Service was instructed 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".^[32]

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 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRR) was created, and issued its Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects which recommended establishing independent review bodies, which were later called institutional review boards.

In 1969, Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Steinfeld dissented in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145, and made the first judicial suggestion that the Nuremberg Code should be apply to American jurisprudence.

In 1974 the National Research Act established the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects, and mandated that the Public Health Service to come up with regulations that would protect the rights of human research subjects.

Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission.^[104][105]

In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) created regulation which included the recommendations 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 utilization of institutional review boards (IRBs) in experiments using human subjects.

On April 18, 1979, prompted by an investigative journalist's public disclosure of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (later renamed to Health and Human Services) released a report entitled "Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research," authored by Dan Harms, which 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 military experiments, could not sue the U.S. Army for damages.

Dissenting the verdict in U.S. v. Stanley, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated:

No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals 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 society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.

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 experiments involving the effects of ionizing radiation in federally funded research. The committee attempted to determine the causes of the experiments, and reasons why the proper oversight did not exist, and made several recommendations to help prevent future occurrences of similar events.^[106]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Further resources

[edit] General

• Google Books search results for: human medical experiments "United States"
• Wolfgang Weyers (2003). The abuse of man: an illustrated history of dubious medical experimentation. Ardor Scribendi. ISBN 9781893357211. 
• H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye, "The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA's Experiments on Children", Truthout, Wednesday 11 August 2010
• Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After, Roberta Kalechofsky

[edit] Biological warfare and disease/pathogen experiments

• Bibliography of Chemical and Biological Warfare documents
• The History of Bioterrorism in America, Richard Sanders, Race and History, Sunday, November 24, 2002 (accessed: 02/18/2010)
• Biological Weapons – Federation of American Scientists
• Franz, et al., The U.S. Biological Warfare and Biological Defense Programs
• US Army Activities in the US Biological Warfare Program, 1977 Congressional report
• Christopher et al., "Biological warfare. A historical perspective", Journal of the American Medical Association. 1997 Aug 6;278(5):412-7.
• Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities", Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2001, via American Patriot Friends Network, accessed November 13, 2008.

[edit] Human radiation experiments

[edit] Books

• Killing Our Own: The disaster of America's experience with atomic radiation, by Harvey Wasserman, Delacorte Press, c1992, ISBN 978-0440045670
• 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

[edit] Government documents

• Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) – National Security Archives
• Exposure of the American population to radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests: a review of the CDC-NCI draft report on a feasibility study of the health consequences to the American population 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 9780309087131

[edit] Journals

• "'A Little Touch of Buchenwald': America's Secret Radiation Experiments", Reviews in American History - 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

[edit] Psychological/torture/interrogation experiments

• Bibliography of U.S. interrogation/torture research
• Truth, torture, and the American way, Jennifer Harbury
• American torture: from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and beyond, Michael Otterman
• Biderman, A. Social-Psychological Needs and "Involuntary" Behavior as Illustrated by Compliance in Interrogation, Sociometry, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1960), pp. 120–147
• The CIA: Mind-Bending Disclosures – Time Magazine, Monday, Aug. 15, 1977 (accessed: 02/18/2010)
• Resources on Drug Experimentation and Related Mind Control Experiments by the U.S. Government

[edit] Video

• MKULTRA Victim Testimony A – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony B – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony C – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings
• President Clinton apologizes to MKULTRA victims
• Physicians for Human Rights Accuses CIA of Carrying Out Illegal Human Experimentation - video report by Democracy Now!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_experimentation_in_the_United_States