Unethical human experimentation in the United States

Bartholow was criticized by fellow physicians and the American Medical Association formally condemned his experiments as he had caused direct harm to the patient, not in an attempt to treat her, but solely to gain knowledge.

[12][13] 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.

"[11][20] In 1911, Professor William Henry Welch, Board of Scientific Directors at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City urged staff member Hideyo Noguchi, who developed a diagnostic test for syphilis, to conduct human trials.

In related studies from 1944 to 1946, Dr. Alf Alving, a nephrologist and professor at the University of Chicago Medical School, purposely infected psychiatric patients at the Illinois State Hospital with malaria so that he could test experimental treatments on them.

[33] In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs.

[38] In 1950, to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the U.S. Navy sprayed large quantities of the bacterium Serratia marcescens – considered harmless at the time – over the city of San Francisco during a project called Operation Sea-Spray.

[47] 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.

In a 1949 operation called the "Green Run", the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) released iodine-131 and xenon-133 into the atmosphere near the Hanford site in Washington, which contaminated a 500,000-acre (2,000 km2) area containing three small towns.

[68] In Alaska, starting in August 1955, the AEC selected a total of 102 Inuit natives and Athapascan Indigenous peoples who would be used to study the effects of radioactive iodine on thyroid tissue, particularly in cold environments.

The purpose and risks of the radioactive iodine dosing, along with the collection of body fluid and tissue samples was not explained to the test subjects, and the AEC did not conduct any follow-up studies to monitor for long-term health effects.

[78] 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.

[64] 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 children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes, to track "how nutrients were digested".

[84][better source needed] 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.

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.

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.

[116] 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.

[126][127][128][129][130] 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.

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.In 1954, the CIA's Project QKHILLTOP was created to study Chinese brainwashing techniques, and to develop effective methods of interrogation.

[123][138][139] 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."

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 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.

[142][146] 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".

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.

[167] In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail in Castaic, California, to use prisoners as test subjects for its Active Denial System that "fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain.

[93] In 2004, University of Minnesota research participant Dan Markingson died by suicide while enrolled in an industry-sponsored pharmaceutical trial comparing three FDA-approved atypical antipsychotics: Seroquel (quetiapine), Zyprexa (olanzapine), and Risperdal (risperidone).

[176] 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".

"[68] 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".

[193] Dissenting the original 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.

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).