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Unethical human experimentation in the United States describes numerous 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.
Such tests have occurred throughout American history, but particularly
in the 20th century. The experiments include: the exposure of humans to
many chemical and biological weapons (including infection with deadly or
debilitating diseases),
human radiation experiments, injection of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and
torture
experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide
variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children,
the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of
"medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the
subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners.
Funding for many of the experiments was provided by the
United States government, especially the
United States military, the
Central Intelligence Agency, or private corporations involved with military activities.
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 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 numerous congressional investigations and hearings,
including the
Church Committee and
Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975 and the 1994
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.
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
anaesthesia. The women—one of whom was operated on 30 times—eventually died from infections resulting from the experiments.
However, the period during which Sims operated on female slaves,
between 1845 and 1849, was one during which the new practice of
anesthesia was not universally accepted as safe and effective. 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.
It has been claimed that he addicted the women in his surgical
experiments to morphine, only providing the drugs after surgery was
already complete, in order to make them more compliant. A contrary view is presented by the gynecologic surgeon and anthropologist
L.L. Wall: "
Sims'
use of postoperative opium appears to have been well supported by the
therapeutic practices of his day, and the regimen that he used was
enthusiastically supported by many contemporary surgeons."
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. 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. 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
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.
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.
Stanley believed that his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control
crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the
"unfit" from reproducing.
Pathogens, disease and biological warfare agents
Late 19th century
In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a Californian physician working at a hospital for
lepers injected six girls under the age of 12 with
syphilis.
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 gonorrheal culture, including some where
gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children.
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. 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 without informing them of what he was
doing. All of the subjects became sick and 13 died.
Early 20th century
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 others. In the study, they refer to the
children as "material used".
In 1909, F. C. Knowles released a study describing how he had deliberately infected two children in an orphanage with
Molluscum contagiosum—a virus that causes wart-like growths—after an outbreak in the orphanage, in order to study the disease.
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.
The
Tuskegee syphilis experiment was a
clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in
Tuskegee, Alabama, by the
U.S. Public Health Service.
In the experiment, 399 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 receiving 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. The U.S.-led
Guatemala syphilis experiment is a lesser-known version of the same.
1940s
It may save you much trouble if you publish your paper... elsewhere than in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The Journal
is under 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 institution. That the tests were wholly justified goes
without saying.
Rous closely monitored the articles he published since the 1930s,
when revival of the anti-vivisectionist movement raised pressure against
certain human experimentation.
In 1941 Dr. William C. Black
inoculated a twelve-month-old baby with
herpes who was "offered as a volunteer". He submitted his research to the
Journal of Experimental Medicine
which rejected the findings due to the ethically questionable research
methods used in the study. Rous called the experiment "an abuse of
power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable
because the illness which followed had implications for science." The study was later published in the
Journal of Pediatrics.
1950s
In 1950, in
order to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the U.S.
Navy sprayed large quantities of the bacteria
Serratia marcescens – considered harmless at the time – over the city of
San Francisco during a project called
Operation Sea-Spray. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia-like illnesses, and at least one person died as a result.
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.
Serratia tests were continued until at least 1969.
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 research whose purpose was to help discover a
vaccine. 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.
In 1953
Frank Olson died after a fall from a hotel building after being unknowingly doped with
LSD by the CIA nine days prior.
The San Francisco Chronicle, December 17, 1979, p. 5 reported a claim by the
Church of Scientology that the CIA conducted an open-air biological warfare experiment in 1955 near
Tampa, Florida and elsewhere in
Florida with
whooping cough bacteria.
It was alleged that the experiment tripled the whooping cough
infections in Florida to over one-thousand cases and caused whooping
cough deaths in the state to increase from one to 12 over the previous
year. This claim has been cited in a number of later sources, although
these added no further supporting evidence.
1960s
In 1963, 22 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 medical licensing board ultimately
placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the
American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President.
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.
In 1966, the U.S. Army released
Bacillus globigii into the tunnels of the
New York City Subway system, as part of a field experiment called
A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents. The
Chicago subway system was also subject to a similar experiment by the Army.
Human radiation experiments
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 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 testicles of prison inmates, amongst other things.
Radioactive iodine experiments
In 1953, the 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-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 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.
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.
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 pounds (0.95 to 2.49 kg).
From 1955 to 1960,
Sonoma State Hospital in northern California served as a permanent drop-off location for mentally disabled children diagnosed with
cerebral palsy or lesser disorders. The children subsequently underwent painful experimentation without adult consent. Many were given
spinal taps "for which they received no direct benefit." Reporters of
60 Minutes
learned that in these five years, the brain of every child with
cerebral palsy who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied without
parental consent. According to the CBS story, over 1,400 patients died
at the clinic.
In an experiment in the 1960s, over 100 Alaskan citizens were continually exposed to radioactive iodine.
In 1962, the Hanford site again released I-131, stationing test
subjects along its path to record its effect on them. The AEC also
recruited Hanford volunteers to ingest milk contaminated with I-131
during this time.
Uranium experiments
It is desired that no
document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might
have adverse effect 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
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 viability as a
chemotherapy treatment against
brain tumors,
which all but one of the patients had (one being a misdiagnosis). Dr.
Sweet, who died in 2001, maintained that consent had been obtained from
the patients and next of kin.
Plutonium experiments
Albert Stevens, a man misdiagnosed with
stomach cancer, 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 had Stevens injected with
Pu-238 and
Pu-239 without informed consent. Stevens never had cancer; a surgery to remove cancerous cells was highly successful in removing the
benign tumor, and he lived for another 20 years with the injected plutonium.
Since Stevens received the highly radioactive 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" had worked. His cremated 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
Radiobiology Tissue Repository at
Washington State University, 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. 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.
An eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hospital, expecting to be treated for a
pituitary gland disorder, was injected with
plutonium.
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. 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.
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.
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; they were told by
hospital staff and researchers that they were joining a "science club".
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 (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.
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 as an alternative to
adenoidectomy. Similar experiments were performed on over 7,000 U.S. Army and Navy personnel during World War II. Nasal radium irradiation became a standard medical treatment and was used in over two and a half million Americans.
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 collected
cerebrospinal fluid for analysis from their brains and spines.
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.
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission funded the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology to administer
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.
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.
Fallout research
In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of
Operation Plumbbob were later determined 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.
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. 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.
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.
Irradiation experiments
Between 1960 and 1971, the Department of Defense funded non-consensual
whole body radiation
experiments on mostly poor and 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 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".
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,
advanced stage cancer patients with inoperable tumors at the
University of Cincinnati Medical Center during the
Cincinnati Radiation Experiments.
He forged consent 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 medical rationale for this study, and
contend that the main purpose of the research was to study the acute
effects of radiation exposure.
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 experiments, said that the experiments "had a little of the
Buchenwald touch".
In 1963,
University of Washington
researchers irradiated the testicles 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.
Chemical experiments
Nonconsensual tests
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.
From 1950 through 1953, the U.S. Army conducted
Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage),
spraying chemicals over six 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, Manitoba, Canada, included
zinc cadmium sulfide, which was not thought to be harmful. A 1997 study by the
U.S. National Research Council
found that it was sprayed at levels so low as not to 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."
A 1953 article in the medical/scientific journal
Clinical Science 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.
Operation Top Hat
In June 1953, the
United States Army
formally adopted guidelines regarding the use of human subjects in
chemical, biological, or radiological testing and research, where
authorization from the
Secretary of the Army
was now required for all research projects involving human subjects.
Under the guidelines, seven research projects involving chemical weapons
and human subjects were submitted by the
Chemical Corps for Secretary of the Army approval in August 1953. One project involved
vesicants, one involved
phosgene, and five were experiments which involved
nerve agents; all seven were approved.
The guidelines, however, left a loophole; they did not define
what types of experiments and tests required such approval from the
Secretary.
Operation Top Hat was among the numerous projects not submitted for approval. It was termed a "local field exercise" by the Army and took place from September 15–19, 1953 at the
Army Chemical School at
Fort McClellan,
Alabama. The experiments used Chemical Corps personnel to test
decontamination methods for biological and chemical weapons, including
sulfur mustard and
nerve agents.
The personnel were deliberately exposed to these contaminants, were not
volunteers, and were not informed of the tests. In a 1975
Pentagon Inspector General's
report, the military maintained that Operation Top Hat was not subject
to the guidelines requiring approval because it was a line of duty
exercise in the Chemical Corps.
Holmesburg program
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. In one of the studies, for which Dow Chemical paid Kligman $10,000, Kligman injected
dioxin — a highly toxic,
carcinogenic compound found in
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. 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 same amount of dioxin as that
to which Dow employees were being exposed. 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.
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
prisoners developed inflammatory
pustules and
papules.
The Holmesburg program 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.
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." A 1964 issue of Medical News reported that 9 out of 10 prisoners at Holmesburg Prison were medical test subjects.
In 1967, the U.S. Army paid Kligman to apply skin-blistering
chemicals to the faces and backs of inmates at Holmesburg, in Kligman's
words, "to learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault
from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process."
Psychological and torture experiments
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 Americans to resist torture at the hands of enemy
nations and organizations.
Truth serum
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
unconventional techniques, such as hypnosis and drugs".
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.
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. Project BLUEBIRD researchers dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with
LSD, without their knowledge or consent, at the
Edgewood Arsenal in
Maryland. Years after these experiments, more than 1,000 of these soldiers suffered from several illnesses, including
depression and
epilepsy. Many of them tried to commit suicide.
Drug deaths
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.
MKUltra
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". The MKULTRA project was under the direct command of
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the
Technical Services Division. 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
Government report on government experimentation during Project MKUltra.
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.
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
... 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
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.
In 1957, with funding from a CIA front organization,
Donald Ewen Cameron of the
Allan Memorial Institute in
Montreal, Quebec, Canada began MKULTRA Subproject 68.
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. 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.
Using CIA funding, Cameron converted the horse stables behind Allan
Memorial into an elaborate isolation and sensory deprivation chamber
where he kept patients locked in for weeks at a time. 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.
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.
The frequent screams
of the patients that echoed through the hospital did not deter Cameron
or most of his associates in their attempts to depattern their subjects
completely.
-- John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 8
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
serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles ...
In 1963, the CIA had synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the
KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, which cited the MKULTRA studies and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods. Cameron regularly 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. military received training in these psychological techniques 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 were used at U.S. military and CIA prisons such as
Guantanamo Bay and
Abu Ghraib.
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 suggested that
the 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 permanently insane.
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.
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 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.
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, In Book I, Chapter XVII, p. 389, this report states:
LSD was one of the materials tested
in the MKULTRA program. The final phase of LSD testing involved
surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in
normal life 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.
Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but
MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting,
or disabling purposes.
Experiments on patients with mental illness
Various experiments were performed on people with schizophrenia
who were stable, other experiments were performed on people with their
first episode of
psychosis. They were given
methylphenidate to see the effect on their minds.
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 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.
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 techniques, and "to provide legal cover for torture, as
well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies",
according to a 2010 report by
Physicians for Human Rights. The report stated that: "Research and medical 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 waterboarding 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 increments. 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 experienced by detainees during
interrogation" and to determine if using certain types of techniques
would increase a subject's "susceptibility to severe pain." In 2010 the
CIA denied the allegations, claiming they never performed any
experiments, and saying "The report is just wrong"; however, the U.S.
government never investigated the claims. Psychologists
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 torture, developed the "
enhanced interrogation techniques" used.
In November 2014, the American Psychological Association announced that
they would hire a lawyer to investigate claims that they were complicit
in the development of enhanced interrogation techniques that
constituted torture.
In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer
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 that "fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain."
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.
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 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.
In 1961, in response to the
Nuremberg Trials, the
Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his "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 actors and did not really
receive
electric shocks).
In 1971,
Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo 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 participants adapted to their roles
beyond Zimbardo's expectations with prison guards exhibiting
authoritarian
status and psychologically abusing the prisoners who were passive 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
intervention in the prisoner abuse.
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 being experimented on.
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.
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 (quetiapine),
Zyprexa (olanzapine), and
Risperdal (risperidone).
Writing on the circumstances surrounding Markingson's death in the
study, which was designed and funded by Seroquel manufacturer
AstraZeneca, University of Minnesota Professor of Bioethics
Carl Elliott
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
mental institution.
Further investigation revealed financial ties to AstraZeneca by
Markingson's psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen C. Olson, oversights and biases
in AstraZeneca's trial design, and the inadequacy of university
Institutional Review Board (IRB) protections for research subjects. A 2005 FDA investigation cleared the university. Nonetheless, controversy around the case has continued. A
Mother Jones article
resulted in a group of university faculty members sending a public
letter to the university Board of Regents urging an external
investigation into Markingson's death.
Other experiments
The
1846 journals of 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".
From early 1940 until 1953,
Lauretta Bender, a highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist who practiced 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,
electroconvulsive treatment
(ECT) was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital,
including Bender's experiments; from 1956 to 1969, ECT was used at
Creedmoor State Hospital
Children's Service. Publicly, Bender claimed that the results of the
"therapy" were positive, but in private memos, she expressed frustration
over mental health issues caused by the treatments. Bender would sometimes shock children with
schizophrenia
(some less than three years old) twice per day, for 20 consecutive
days. Several of the children became violent and suicidal as a result of
the treatments.
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 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.
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 one hour to three 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.
The San Antonio Contraceptive Study was a clinical research study
published in 1971 about the side effects of oral contraceptives. Women
coming to a clinic in
San Antonio, Texas, to prevent pregnancies were not told they were participating in a research study or receiving
placebos. Ten of the women became pregnant while on placebos.
During the decade of 2000–2010, artificial blood was transfused
into research subjects across the United States without their consent by
Northfield Labs. Later studies showed the artificial blood caused a significant increase in the risk of heart attacks and death.
Legal, academic and professional policy
During the
Nuremberg Medical Trials,
several of the Nazi doctors and scientists who were being tried for
their human experiments cited past unethical studies performed in the
United States in their defense, namely the
Chicago malaria experiments conducted by Dr.
Joseph Goldberger. Subsequent investigation led to a report by
Andrew Conway Ivy,
who testified that the research was "an example of human experiments
which were ideal because of their conformity with the highest ethical
standards of human experimentation". The trials contributed to the formation of the
Nuremberg Code in an effort to prevent such abuses.
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."
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".
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 Protection of Human Subjects, which recommended establishing independent review bodies to oversee experiments. These were later called
institutional review boards.
In 1974 the
National Research Act established the National 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 subjects.
In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW)
created regulations 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 use of
institutional review boards (IRBs) in experiments using human subjects.
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 scientists 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 that
the proper oversight did not exist. It made several recommendations to
help prevent future occurrences of similar events.
As of 2007, not a single U.S. government researcher had been
prosecuted for human experimentation. The preponderance of the victims
of U.S. government experiments have not received compensation or, in
many cases, acknowledgment of what was done to them.
