[2] The U.S. Army estimated millions of man-hours lost due to malaria throughout the war; thus it was critically important to mitigate the effects of the disease in the interest of the military.
[2] The new risks of malaria posed by World War II called for experimentation at an unprecedented scale, with a particular focus on human subjects.
Participants of the studies were exclusively white men, of similar age and health, which was the primary demographic of Stateville Penitentiary.
Offers of parole reevaluation, as well as financial incentives, typically $25–100 for an experimental trial (adjusted for inflation, $460–1,860 in 2021), which yielded an exceptionally high availability of subjects willing to participate.
[4] In 1944, the U.S. Committee on Medical Research formed a contract with the University of Chicago to test novel malaria treatments at the Stateville Penitentiary.
[3] P. vivax, the predominant form of malaria in the Pacific, is associated with milder symptoms and unlike Plasmodium falciparum, it typically is not deadly.
A well-known participant of the study was Nathan Leopold, who (together with Richard Loeb, who was killed after being sentenced) kidnapped and murdered a teenager, while they were students at the University of Chicago.
[4] While a series of research publications came out of the Stateville Penitentiary experiments, the results had a minimal long-term impact on malaria treatment methods.
The main legacy of the study is instead the ethical contention raised by prisoner experimentation, manifesting in the trials of Nazi Germany for its experiments on human subjects.
The international Nuremberg Code of human experimentation ethics, which resulted from the trials, contained clauses directly violated by the Stateville experiments.
The Green Report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and opened the door for legal, ethical experimentation on prisoners in the United States.
Until later in the century, the medical community in the United States largely regarded the Nuremberg Code to be applicable to war criminals and not to the practices of U.S. researchers.