Unethical human experimentation in the United States

Did You Know?

• In the 1840s, J. Marion Sims performed surgical experiments on enslaved African women and girls as young as 13 without anesthesia; one patient was operated on 30 times.
• In 1942, Harvard biochemist Edwin Joseph Cohn injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow blood in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy.
• In 1962, researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland continued testing experimental acne medications on children even after half developed severe liver damage.

Pathogens, disease and biological warfare agents

In the 1880s, a California physician working at a leper hospital in Hawaii injected six girls under 12 with syphilis. In 1895, New York pediatrician Henry Heiman deliberately infected two mentally disabled boys, aged four and sixteen, with gonorrhea. A review of late 19th- and early 20th-century medical literature found over 40 reports of experimental gonorrheal infections, including cases where the organism was applied to the eyes of sick children. U.S. Army doctors in the Philippines directly infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and separately induced beriberi in 29 prisoners, killing four. In 1906, Harvard professor Richard P. Strong intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with a live cholera vaccine that had become contaminated with bubonic plague; all became sick and 13 died. In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at St. Vincent Orphanage, causing permanent blindness in some and painful eye lesions; the researchers referred to the children as 'material used'. In 1909, Frank Crozer Knowles published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing how he deliberately infected two orphanage children with Molluscum contagiosum after an outbreak, despite acknowledging that the mechanisms were already well understood.

Human radiation experiments

Thousands of human radiation experiments were performed in the United States, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless, and most were funded or supervised by the U.S. military, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), or other federal agencies. These included feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting radium rods into schoolchildren's noses, deliberately releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian cities, measuring health effects of fallout from nuclear bomb tests, injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating prisoners' testicles. In 1949, the AEC's 'Green Run' operation released iodine-131 and xenon-133 near the Hanford site in Washington, contaminating a 500,000-acre area containing three small towns. In 1953, AEC studies at the University of Iowa gave pregnant women 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131 and later performed abortions to study embryos; in another study, 25 newborns under 36 hours old received iodine-131 orally or by injection to measure thyroid uptake. At the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, researchers fed iodine-131 to 28 healthy infants through a gastric tube for the same purpose.

Chemical experiments

From 1942 to 1944, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service exposed thousands of military personnel to mustard gas to test gas masks and protective clothing. From 1950 to 1953, the U.S. Army conducted Operation LAC, spraying chemicals over six U.S. and Canadian cities to test dispersal patterns; the chemicals sprayed on Winnipeg, Manitoba, included zinc cadmium sulfide, which a 1997 National Research Council study found was sprayed at levels not considered harmful. The Louisiana State Board of Health commissioned a study in which 'Negro prisoners' were fed only molasses for five weeks to test whether sulfuric acid, used in molasses production, was harmful as a food additive; one report noted that prisoners did not object because it would not do any good if they did. In 1953, a study published in Clinical Science described researchers blistering the skin on the abdomens of 41 children aged 8 to 14 using cantharide, then removing the blistered skin with scissors and swabbing with peroxide. In June 1953, the U.S. Army adopted guidelines requiring the Secretary of the Army to authorize human subject research; that August, seven projects involving chemical weapons were submitted and approved, including one with vesicants, one with phosgene, and five with nerve agents.

Psychological and torture experiments

During the Cold War, the U.S. government funded psychological experiments to develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the military and intelligence agencies, as well as techniques for Americans to resist torture. Interest in a truth serum began in 1943 with the Office of Strategic Services. From 1947 to 1953, Project CHATTER, run by the U.S. Navy, identified and tested truth serums including mescaline and scopolamine. In 1950, the CIA initiated Project BLUEBIRD, later renamed Project ARTICHOKE, directed by Army general Paul F. Gaynor, to develop means to control individuals through interrogation, prevent extraction of information from agents, and use hypnosis and drugs offensively. A January 1952 memo asked whether an individual could be controlled to do another's bidding against his will and self-preservation. Researchers studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction and withdrawal, and chemicals including LSD, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, and ether. Over 7,000 U.S. military personnel were dosed with LSD without their knowledge or consent at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland; years later, more than 1,000 suffered from depression, epilepsy, and other illnesses, and many attempted suicide.