(1895)
New York
pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls "an
idiot with chronic epilepsy" with gonorrhea as part of a medical
experiment (
"Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").
(1896)
Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29
children at Boston's Children's Hospital into human
guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (
Sharav).
(1906)
Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects
prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the
disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi
doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (
Greger,
Sharav).
(1911)
Dr.
Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research
publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the
skin of 146
hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a
skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children's
parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis (
"Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War").
(1913)
Medical experimenters "test" 15 children at the children's
home St. Vincent's House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent
blindness
in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished
for the experiments (
"Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").
(1915)
Dr.
Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office,
produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central
nervous system,
in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One
test subject later says that he had been through "a thousand hells." In
1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S
Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that
it was caused by a niacin
deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials,
Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical
experiments on concentration camp inmates (
Greger;
Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1932)
(1932-1972)
The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor,
black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their
illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the
symptoms
and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis
and their families are never told that they could have been treated
(Goliszek,
University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library).
(1939)
In
order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech
pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous "Monster Experiment"
on 22 children at the
Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate
students
put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to
switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some
of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, "in the aftermath of
World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on
human subjects, which could destroy his career" (
Alliance for Human Research Protection).
(1941)
Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with
herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the
Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, calls it "an
abuse
of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not
excusable because the illness which followed had implications for
science" (
Sharav).
An article in a 1941 issue of
Archives of Pediatrics describes medical
studies of the severe gum disease Vincent's angina in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to
healthy children with oral swabs (Goliszek).
Researchers give 800 poverty-stricken
pregnant women at a Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic "cocktails" including radioactive
iron in order to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women (
Pacchioli).
(1942)
The Chemical Warfare Service begins mustard gas and lewisite experiments on 4,000 members of the U.S.
military. Some test subjects don't realize they are
volunteering
for chemical exposure experiments, like 17-year-old Nathan Schnurman,
who in 1944 thinks he is only volunteering to test "U.S. Navy summer
clothes" (Goliszek).
Merck Pharmaceuticals President George
Merck is named director of the War Research Service (WRS), an agency designed to oversee the establishment of a biological
warfare program (Goliszek).
(1944
- 1946) A captain in the medical corps addresses an April 1944 memo to
Col. Stanford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project's Medical Section,
expressing his concerns about atom bomb component fluoride's central
nervous system (CNS) effects and asking for animal
research
to be done to determine the extent of these effects: "Clinical evidence
suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central
nervous system effect ... It seems most likely that the F [code for
fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the
causative factor ... Since work with these compounds is essential, it
will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after
exposure." The following year, the Manhattan Project would begin human-based studies on fluoride's effects (
Griffiths and Bryson).
The
Manhattan Project medical team, led by the now infamous University of
Rochester radiologist Col. Safford Warren, injects plutonium into
patients at the University's teaching hospital, Strong Memorial (
Burton Report).
(1945)
Continuing
the Manhattan Project, researchers inject plutonium into three patients
at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital (
Sharav).
The U.S. State Department, Army
intelligence and the CIA begin Operation Paperclip, offering Nazi
scientists immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret
government projects on aerodynamics and chemical warfare
medicine in the United States (
"Project Paperclip").
(1945
- 1955) In Newburgh, N.Y., researchers linked to the Manhattan Project
begin the most extensive American study ever done on the
health effects of fluoridating public drinking water (
Griffiths and Bryson).
(1946)
Continuing
the Newburg study of 1945, the Manhattan Project commissions the
University of Rochester to study fluoride's effects on animals and
humans in a
project
codenamed "Program F." With the help of the New York State Health
Department, Program F researchers secretly collect and analyze
blood
and tissue samples from Newburg residents. The studies are sponsored by
the Atomic Energy Commission and take place at the University of
Rochester Medical Center's Strong Memorial Hospital (
Griffiths and Bryson).
(1946
- 1947) University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two
female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages
ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of
body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).
Six male
employees of a Chicago metallurgical laboratory are given
water
contaminated with plutonium-239 to drink so that researchers can learn
how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract (Goliszek).
Researchers begin using patients in VA
hospitals
as test subjects for human medical experiments, cleverly worded as
"investigations" or "observations" in medical study reports to avoid
negative connotations and bad publicity (
Sharav).
The
American public finally learns of the biowarfare experiments being done
at Fort Detrick from a report released by the War Department
(Goliszek).
(1947)
Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075)
dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that "certain radioactive substances are
being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a
part of the work of the contract" (Goliszek).
A secret AEC
document dated April 17 reads, "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," revealing
that the U.S. government was aware of the health risks its nuclear
tests posed to military personnel conducting the tests or nearby civilians (Goliszek).
The
CIA
begins studying LSD's potential as a weapon by using military and
civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even
knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA
program in 1953 (
Sharav).
(1947
- 1953) The U.S. Navy begins Project Chatter to identify and test
so-called "truth serums," such as those used by the Soviet Union to
interrogate spies. Mescaline and the central nervous system depressant
scopolamine are among the many
drugs tested on human subjects (Goliszek).
(1948)
Based
on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning
in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948
edition of the
Journal of the American Dental Association,
detailing fluoride's health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC) quickly censors it for "national security" reasons (
Griffiths and Bryson).
(1950)
(1950 - 1953) The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian
cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly
toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (
Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
In order to determine how susceptible an American city could be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of
Bacillus globigii bacteria from ships over the
San Francisco
shoreline. According to monitoring devices situated throughout the city
to test the extent of infection, the eight thousand residents of San
Francisco inhale five thousand or more bacteria particles, many becoming
sick with pneumonia-like symptoms (Goliszek).
Dr. Joseph Strokes of the University of Pennsylvania infects 200 female prisoners with viral
hepatitis to study the disease (
Sharav).
Doctors at the Cleveland City Hospital study changes in cerebral
blood flow by injecting test subjects with spinal anesthesia, inserting needles in their jugular veins and brachial
arteries, tilting their heads down and, after massive blood loss causes paralysis and fainting, measuring their
blood pressure. They often perform this experiment multiple times on the same subject (Goliszek).
Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, later of MKULTRA infamy due to his 1957 to1964 experiments on
Canadians, publishes an article in the
British Journal of Physical Medicine,
in which he describes experiments that entail forcing schizophrenic
patients at Manitoba's Brandon Mental Hospital to lie naked under 15- to
200-watt red lamps for up to eight hours per day. His other experiments
include placing mental patients in an electric cage that overheats
their internal
body temperatures to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and inducing comas by giving patients large injections of insulin (Goliszek).
(1951)
The U.S. Army secretly contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia and
Washington,
D.C.'s National Airport with a strain of bacteria chosen because
African-Americans were believed to be more susceptible to it than
Caucasians. The experiment causes food
poisoning, respiratory problems and blood poisoning (
Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1951 - 1956) Under contract with the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM), the University of
Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston begins studying the effects of radiation on
cancer patients
-- many of them members of minority groups or indigents, according to
sources -- in order to determine both radiation's ability to treat
cancer and the possible long-term
radiation
effects of pilots flying nuclear-powered planes. The study lasts until
1956, involving 263 cancer patients. Beginning in 1953, the subjects are
required to sign a waiver form, but it still does not meet the informed
consent guidelines established by the Wilson memo released that year.
The TBI studies themselves would continue at four different institutions
-- Baylor University College of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Institute for Cancer Research, the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda and
the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine -- until 1971 (
U.S. Department of Energy, Goliszek).
American,
Canadian and British military and intelligence officials gather a small
group of eminent psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton
Hotel in Montreal about Communist "thought-control techniques." They
proposed a top-secret research program on
behavior modification -- involving testing drugs,
hypnosis, electroshock and lobotomies on humans (
Barker).
(1952)
At the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute, Chester M. Southam injects live
cancer cells
into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison to study the progression of the
disease. Half of the prisoners in this National Institutes of
Health-sponsored (NIH) study are black, awakening racial suspicions
stemming from Tuskegee, which was also an NIH-sponsored study (
Merritte, et al.).
(1953 - 1974) The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsors
iodine studies at the University of Iowa. In the first study, researchers give pregnant
women
100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131 and then study the women's aborted
embryos in order to learn at what stage and to what extent
radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In the second study, researchers give 12 male and 13 female
newborns
under 36 hours old and weighing between 5.5 and 8.5 pounds iodine-131
either orally or via intramuscular injection, later measuring the
concentration of iodine in the newborns'
thyroid glands (Goliszek).
As part of an AEC study, researchers feed 28 healthy
infants
at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine iodine-131 through a
gastric tube and then test concentration of iodine in the infants'
thyroid glands 24 hours later (Goliszek).
(1953 - 1957) Eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in
Boston are injected with uranium as part of the Manhattan Project (
Sharav).
In
an AEC-sponsored study at the University of Tennessee, researchers
inject healthy two- to three-day-old newborns with approximately 60 rads
of iodine-131 (Goliszek).
Newborn Daniel Burton becomes blind when
physicians at Brooklyn Doctors Hospital perform an experimental high
oxygen treatment for Retrolental Fibroplasia, a retinal
disorder affecting premature infants, on him and other
premature babies. The physicians perform the experimental
treatment despite earlier studies showing that high oxygen levels cause blindness. Testimony in
Burton v. Brooklyn Doctors Hospital
(452 N.Y.S.2d875) later reveals that researchers continued to give
Burton and other infants excess oxygen even after their eyes had swelled
to dangerous levels (Goliszek,
Sharav).
A 1953 article in
Clinical Science
describes a medical experiment in which researchers purposely blister
the abdomens of 41 children, ranging in age from eight to 14, with
cantharide in order to study how severely the substance irritates the
skin (Goliszek).
The AEC performs a series of field tests known
as "Green Run," dropping radiodine 131 and xenon 133 over the Hanford,
Wash. site -- 500,000 acres encompassing three small towns (Hanford,
White Bluffs and Richland) along the Columbia River (
Sharav).
In
an AEC-sponsored study to learn whether radioactive iodine affects
premature babies differently from full-term babies, researchers at
Harper Hospital in Detroit give oral doses of iodine-131 to 65 premature
and full-term infants weighing between 2.1 and 5.5 pounds (Goliszek).
(1955
- 1957) In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology,
researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive
tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the
thyroid gland,
to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They
study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and
saliva samples from the test subjects. Due to the language barrier, no
one tells the test subjects what is being done to them, so there is no
informed consent (Goliszek).
(1956 - 1957) U.S. Army covert biological weapons researchers release mosquitoes infected with yellow
fever
and dengue fever over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., to test the
insects' ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents pose as
public health
officials to test victims for effects and take pictures of the
unwitting test subjects. These experiments result in a high incidence of
fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid
among the two cities' residents, as well as several deaths (
Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
(1957)
The
U.S. military conducts Operation Plumbbob at the Nevada Test Site, 65
miles northwest of Las Vegas. Operation Pumbbob consists of 29 nuclear
detonations, eventually creating radiation expected to result in a total
32,000 cases of thyroid cancer among civilians in the area. Around
18,000 members of the U.S. military participate in Operation Pumbbob's
Desert Rock VII and VIII, which are designed to see how the average foot
soldier physiologically and mentally responds to a nuclear battlefield (
"Operation Plumbbob", Goliszek).
(1957
- 1964) As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department
of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies
and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor
disorders like post-partum
depression
and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the
Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The
CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his "psychic driving"
concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one's memory
and rewriting the psyche. These "driving" experiments involve putting
human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory
deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then
playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or
months in order to "rewrite" the "erased" psyche. Dr. Cameron also
gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive
therapy
30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron's test
subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work (Goliszek,
"Donald Ewan Cameron").
In
order to study how blood flows through children's brains, researchers
at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment
on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert
needles into each child's femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein
(neck), bringing the blood down from the
brain. Then, they force each
child to inhale a special gas through a facemask. In their subsequent
Journal of Clinical Investigation article
on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the
experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by
bandaging them to boards (Goliszek).
(1958)
The U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point
Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the
codename "Project Chariot" (
Sharav).
(1961)
In
response to the Nuremberg Trials, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram
begins his famous Obedience to Authority Study in order to answer his
question "Could it be that (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices
in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all
accomplices?" Male test subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 40 and
coming from all education backgrounds, are told to give "learners"
electric shocks for every wrong answer the learners give in response to
word pair questions. In reality, the learners are actors and are not
receiving electric shocks, but what matters is that the test subjects do
not know that. Astoundingly, they keep on following orders and continue
to administer increasingly high levels of "shocks," even after the
actor learners show obvious physical pain (
"Milgram Experiment").
(1962)
Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in
Maryland test experimental
acne
antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the
young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the
experimental
medication (Goliszek).
The
FDA begins requiring that a new pharmaceutical undergo three human clinical trials before it will approve it. From 1962 to 1980,
pharmaceutical companies satisfy this requirement by
running Phase I trials, which determine a drug's toxicity, on prison inmates, giving them small amounts of cash for compensation (
Sharav).
(1963)
Chester
M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer
cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile,
African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease
Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells
the patients that they are receiving "some cells," but leaves out the
fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn't obtain informed
consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by
telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his
medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes
president of the American Cancer Society (
Greger,
Merritte, et al.).
Researchers
at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232
prison inmates in order to determine radiation's effects on testicular
function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at
least four have babies born with
birth
defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow
up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment
(Goliszek).
(1963 - 1966) New York University researcher Saul
Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite
enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a
resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange
for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as "
vaccinations."
In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with
viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of
infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral
hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine (
Hammer Breslow).
(1963
- 1971) Leading endocrinologist Dr. Carl Heller gives 67 prison inmates
at Oregon State Prison in Salem $5 per month and $25 per testicular
tissue biopsy in compensation for allowing him to perform
irradiation experiments on their testes. If they receive vasectomies at the end of the study, the prisoners are given an extra $100 (
Sharav, Goliszek).
Researchers
inject a genetic compound called radioactive thymidine into the
testicles of more than 100 Oregon State Penitentiary inmates to learn
whether sperm production is affected by exposure to steroid hormones (
Greger).
In a study published in
Pediatrics,
researchers at the University of California's Department of Pediatrics
use 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old in a
series of experiments used to study
changes
in blood pressure and blood flow. In one study, doctors insert a
catheter through the newborns' umbilical arteries and into their aortas
and then immerse the newborns' feet in ice water while recording aortic
pressure. In another experiment, doctors strap 50 newborns to a
circumcision board, tilt the table so that all the blood rushes to their
heads and then measure their blood pressure (Goliszek).
(1964 -
1967) The Dow Chemical Company pays Professor Kligman $10,000 to learn
how dioxin -- a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange --
and other herbicides affect human skin because workers at the chemical
plant have been developing an acne-like condition called Chloracne and
the company would like to know whether the
chemicals
they are handling are to blame. As part of the study, Professor Kligman
applies roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees are exposed to on
the skin 60 prisoners, and is disappointed when the prisoners show no
symptoms of Chloracne. In 1980 and 1981, the human guinea pigs used in
this study would begin suing Professor Kligman for complications
including lupus and psychological damage (
Kaye).
(1965)
As part of a test codenamed "Big Tom," the Department of Defense sprays Oahu, Hawaii's most heavily populated island, with
Bacillus globigii in order to simulate an attack on an island complex.
Bacillus globigii causes
infections in people with weakened immune systems, but this was not known to scientists at the time (Goliszek,
Martin).
(1966)
U.S. Army scientists drop light bulbs filled with
Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates and into the
New York City subway system, exposing more than one million civilians, including women and children, to the bacteria (Goliszek).
(1967)
The CIA places a chemical in the
drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to see whether it is possible to spike
drinking water with LSD and other substances (
Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).
In a study published in the
Journal of Clinical Investigation,
researchers inject pregnant women with radioactive cortisol to see if
the radioactive material will cross the placentas and affect the fetuses
(Goliszek).
The U.S. Army pays Professor Kligman to apply
skin-blistering chemicals to Holmesburg Prison inmates' faces and backs,
so as to, in Professor Kligman's words, "learn how the skin protects
itself against chronic assault from
toxic chemicals,
the so-called hardening process," information which would have both
offensive and defensive applications for the U.S. military (
Kaye).
Professor Kligman develops Retin-A as an acne cream (and eventually a wrinkle cream), turning him into a multi-millionaire (
Kaye).
Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in
California
with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces
suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners
refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison's special
treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners
with the
drug against their will (
Greger).
(1968)
Planned
Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest
Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study
on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral
contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a
placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans (
Sharav,
Sauter).
(1969)
Experimental
drugs are tested on mentally disabled children in Milledgeville, Ga.,
without any institutional approval whatsoever (
Sharav).
Judge Sam Steinfield's dissent in
Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145 marks the first time a judge has ever suggested that the Nuremberg Code be applied in American court cases (
Sharav).
(1970)
Under order from the
National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also sponsored the Tuskegee Experiment, the free childcare program at Johns Hopkins University collects
blood samples
from 7,000 African-American youth, telling their parents that they are
checking for anemia but actually checking for an extra Y chromosome
(XYY), believed to be a biological predisposition to crime. The program
director, Digamber Borganokar, does this experiment without Johns
Hopkins University's permission (
Greger,
Merritte, et al.).
(1971)
Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of
college
students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students
are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the
role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has
to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The
"guards" had begun to act sadistic, while the "prisoners" started to
show signs of depression and severe psychological stress (
University of New Hampshire).
An article entitled "Viral Infections in Man Associated with Acquired Immunological Deficiency States" appears in
Federation Proceedings.
Dr. MacArthur and Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division have, at
this point, been conducting mycoplasma research to create a synthetic
immunosuppressive agent for about one year, again suggesting that this
research may have produced
HIV (Goliszek).
(1973)
An
Ad Hoc
Advisory Panel issues its Final Report on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study,
writing, "Society can no longer afford to leave the balancing of
individual rights against scientific progress to the scientific
community" (
Sharav).
(1977)
The National Urban League holds its National Conference on Human Experimentation, stating, "We don't want to kill
science but we don't want science to kill, mangle and abuse us" (
Sharav).
(1978)
The
CDC begins experimental
hepatitis B
vaccine trials in New York. Its ads for research subjects specifically
ask for promiscuous homosexual men. Professor Wolf Szmuness of the
Columbia University School of Public Health had made the vaccine's
infective serum from the pooled blood serum of hepatitis-infected
homosexuals and then developed it in
chimpanzees,
the only animal susceptible to hepatitis B, leading to the theory that
HIV originated in chimpanzees before being transferred over to humans
via this
vaccine. A few months after 1,083 homosexual men receive the vaccine, New York physicians begin noticing cases of Kaposi's sarcoma,
Mycoplasma penetrans and a new strain of herpes
virus among New York's homosexual
community
-- diseases not usually seen among young, American men, but that would
later be known as common opportunistic diseases associated with
AIDS (Goliszek).
(1980)
According
to blood samples tested years later for HIV, 20 percent of all New York
homosexual men who participated in the 1978 hepatitis B vaccine
experiment are
HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).
The first AIDS case appears in San Francisco (Goliszek).
(1981)
The
CDC acknowledges that a disease known as AIDS exists and confirms 26
cases of the disease -- all in previously healthy homosexuals living in
New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles -- again supporting the
speculation that AIDS originated from the hepatitis B experiments from
1978 and 1980 (Goliszek).
(1982)
Thirty percent of the test subjects used in the CDC's hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).
(1985)
A former U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him in without his consent or even his knowledge in
United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669.
Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military
from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments
without informed consent (
Merritte, et al..
(1987)
Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son's brain
post mortem
for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a
doctrine of "implied consent," meaning that unless a patient signs a
document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically
implied (
Merritte, et al.).
(1988)
(1988
- 2001) The New York City Administration for Children's Services begins
allowing foster care children living in about two dozen children's
homes to be used in National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH)
experimental AIDS
drug trials. These children -- totaling 465 by the program's end -- experience serious
side effects,
including inability to walk, diarrhea, vomiting, swollen joints and
cramps. Children's home employees are unaware that they are giving the
HIV-infected children
experimental drugs, rather than standard AIDS treatments (
New York City ACS,
Doran).
(1990)
The
United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent
of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the
Gulf War
("Desert Storm"). More than 400,000 of these soldiers are ordered to
take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which
is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome -- symptoms
ranging from skin
disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and
vision problems -- affecting Gulf War veterans (Goliszek;
Merritte, et al.).
The
CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500
six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an
"experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in
the United States. Adding to the
risk,
children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin
around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development
because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never
informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was
experimental (Goliszek).
The FDA allows the U.S. Department of Defense to waive the Nuremberg Code and use unapproved drugs and
vaccines in Operation Desert Shield (
Sharav).
(1992)
Columbia
University's New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Mount Sinai
School of Medicine give 100 males -- mostly African-American and
Hispanic, all between the ages of six and 10 and all the younger
brothers of juvenile delinquents -- 10 milligrams of fenfluramine
(fen-fen) per kilogram of body
weight
in order to test the theory that low serotonin levels are linked to
violent or aggressive behavior. Parents of the participants received
$125 each, including a $25 Toys 'R' Us gift certificate (Goliszek).
(1994)
President
Clinton appoints the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments
(ACHRE), which finally reveals the horrific experiments conducted
during the Cold War era in its
ACHRE Report.
(1995)
A
19-year-old University of Rochester student named Nicole Wan dies from
participating in an MIT-sponsored experiment that tests airborne
pollutant chemicals on humans. The experiment pays $150 to human test
subjects (
Sharav).
In
the Mar. 15 President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments (ACHRE), former human subjects, including those who were
used in experiments as children, give sworn testimonies stating that
they were subjected to radiation experiments and/or brainwashed,
hypnotized, drugged, psychologically tortured, threatened and even raped
during CIA experiments. These sworn statements include:
- Christina
DeNicola's statement that, in Tucson, Ariz., from 1966 to 1976, "Dr. B"
performed mind control experiments using drugs, post-hypnotic injection
and drama, and irradiation experiments on her neck, throat, chest and
uterus. She was only four years old when the experiments started.
- Claudia Mullen's testimony
that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (of MKULTRA fame) used chemicals, radiation,
hypnosis, drugs, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, electric
shock, brainwashing
and emotional, sexual and verbal abuse as part of mind control
experiments that had the ultimate objective of turning her, who was only
a child at the time, into the "perfect spy." She tells the advisory
committee that researchers justified this abuse by telling her that she
was serving her country "in their bold effort to fight Communism."
- Suzanne
Starr's statement that "a physician, who was retired from the military,
got children from the mountains of Colorado for experiments." She says
she was one of those children and that she was the victim of experiments
involving environmental
deprivation to the point of forced psychosis, spin programming,
injections, rape and frequent electroshock and mind control sessions. "I
have fought self-destructive programmed messages to kill myself, and I
know what a programmed message is, and I don’t act on them," she tells
the advisory committee of the experiments' long-lasting effects, even in
her adulthood (Goliszek).
President Clinton publicly
apologizes to the thousands of people who were victims of MKULTRA and
other mind-control experimental programs (
Sharav).
President Clinton appoints the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (
Sharav).
Justice
Edward Greenfield of the New York State Supreme Court rules that
parents do not have the right to volunteer their mentally incapacitated
children for non-therapeutic
medical research studies and that no mentally incapacitated person whatsoever can be used in a medical experiment without informed consent (
Sharav).
(1996)
Professor
Adil E. Shamoo of the University of Maryland and the organization
Citizens for Responsible Care and Research sends a written testimony on
the unethical use of
veterans
in medical research to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Governmental
Affairs, stating: "This type of research is on-going nationwide in
medical centers and VA hospitals supported by tens of millions of
dollars of taxpayers money. These experiments are high risk and are
abusive, causing not only physical and psychic harm to the most
vulnerable groups but also degrading our society’s system of basic human
values. Probably tens of thousands of patients are being subjected to
such experiments" (
"Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").
The
Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to
chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted
with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war,
discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a
result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons (
Merritte, et al.).
President Clinton issues a formal apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and their families (
Sharav).
(1997)
In
an experiment sponsored by the U.S. government, researchers withhold
medical treatment from HIV-positive African-American pregnant women,
giving them a placebo rather than AIDS medication (
Sharav).
On
Sept. 18, victims of unethical medical experiments at major U.S.
research centers, including the National Institutes of Mental Health
(NIMH) testify before the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (
Sharav).
(1999)
Adil
E. Shamoo, Ph.D. testifies on "The Unethical Use of Human Beings in
High-Risk Research Experiments" before the U.S. House of
Representatives' House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, alerting the
House on the use of American veterans in VA Hospitals as human guinea
pigs and calling for national reforms (
"Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").
Doctors
at the University of Pennsylvania inject 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger
with an experimental gene therapy as part of an FDA-approved clinical
trial. He dies four days later and his father suspects that he was not
fully informed of the experiment's risk (Goliszek)
During a
clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of Propulsid for infant
acid reflux, nine-month-old Gage Stevens dies at Children's Hospital in
Pittsburgh (
Sharav).
(2000)
The
U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda
University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of
perchlorate
-- a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the
thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses --
every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83
times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which
has perchlorate in some of its drinking water. This Loma Linda study is
the first large-scale study to use human subjects to test the harmful
effects of a water pollutant and is "inherently unethical," according to
Environmental Working Group research director Richard Wiles (Goliszek,
Envirnomental Working Group).
(2001)
On its website,
the FDA
admits that its policy to include healthy children in human experiments
"has led to an increasing number of proposals for studies of
safety and pharmacokinetics, including those in children who do not have the condition for which the drug is intended" (Goliszek).
In
Higgins and Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger Institute
The Maryland Court of Appeals makes a landmark decision regarding the
use of children as test subjects, prohibiting non-therapeutic
experimentation on children on the basis of "best interest of the
individual child" (
Sharav).
(2002)
President George W. Bush signs the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), offering pharmaceutical
companies
six-month exclusivity in exchange for running clinical drug trials on
children. This will of course increase the number of children used as
human test subjects (
Hammer Breslow).
(2003)
Two-year-old Michael Daddio of Delaware dies of congestive
heart failure. After his death, his parents learn that doctors had performed an experimental
surgery
on him when he was five months old, rather than using the established
surgical method of repairing his congenital heart defect that the
parents had been told would be performed. The established procedure has a
90- to 95-percent success rate, whereas the inventor of the procedure
performed on
baby Daddio would later be fired from his hospital in 2004 (
Willen and Evans, "Parents of Babies Who Died in Delaware Tests Weren't Warned").
(2004)
In his BBC
documentary "Guinea Pig Kids" and
BBC
News article of the same name, reporter Jamie Doran reveals that
children involved in the New York City foster care system were unwitting
human subjects in experimental AIDS drug trials from 1988 to, in his
belief, present times (
Doran).
(2005)
In response to the BBC documentary and article
"Guinea Pig Kids", the New York City Administration of Children's Services (
ACS)
sends out an Apr. 22 press release admitting that foster care children
were used in experimental AIDS drug trials, but says that the last trial
took place in 2001 and thus the trials are not continuing, as BBC
reporter Jamie Doran claims. The ACS gives the extent and statistics of
the experimental drug trials, based on its own records, and contracts
the Vera Institute of Justice to conduct "an independent
review
of ACS policy and practice regarding the enrollment of HIV-positive
children in foster care in clinical drug trials during the late 1980s
and 1990s" (
New York City ACS).
Bloomberg
releases a series of reports suggesting that SFBC, the largest
experimental drug testing center of its time, exploits immigrant and
other low-income test subjects and runs tests with limited credibility
due to violations of both the FDA's and SFBC's own testing guidelines (
Bloomberg).
In October 2005, the American Chemistry Council gave the
EPA
$2.1 million to study how children ranging from infancy to three years
old ingest, inhale or absorb chemicals. Like IG Farben was for the
German pharmaceutical companies of Nazi Germany, the
American Chemistry Council acts much like a front group for
chemical industry
bigwigs like Bayer (which was incidentally also a member of IG Farben),
BP, Chevron, Dow, DuPont, Exxon, Honeywell, 3M, Monsanto and Procter
& Gamble. Studies have already proven that the chemicals made by
these companies have
long-term effects on children and adults. A
short, two-year study like CHEERS would of course fail to reveal these
long-term effects and the American Chemistry Council could then
publicize these findings as "proof" that its chemicals were safe.
2006 - 2007
Merck begins pushing U.S. states to mandate the vaccination of
teenage girls
with Gardasil, a vaccine they claim prevents HPV, a
sexually-transmitted virus. In February 2007, Texas Gov. Rick Perry --
who was revealed to have financial ties with Merck, the vaccine
manufacturer -- mandates the vaccine in teenage girls (see
http://www.NaturalNews.com/021572.html ). A key Merck lobbyist named Mike Toomey, it turned out, had served as Gov. Rick Perry's chief of staff.
The
Texas decision to mandate the vaccine was a notable and troubling
milestone in public health policy because it is the first time a vaccine
is mandated for a disease that cannot be contracted through casual
contact in public schools. It also invoked "
gunpoint medicine," or the threat of arrest at gunpoint for not agreeing to receive state-mandated injections.
The
Gardasil
vaccinations remain a grand medical experiment being performed on
children because it is not yet known what the long-term side effects of
the
vaccination will be, nor whether the vaccinations will actually lower rates of cervical cancer as intended.
2007
Maryland's
governor and public health officials, fed up with the unwillingness of
over 2,000 parents to have their children vaccinated, invoke gunpoint
medicine yet again by threatening the parents with arrest and up to 30
days of imprisonment if they don't submit their children to
state-mandated vaccinations. The children and parents are later rounded
up at a county courthouse, guarded by attack dogs and
security personnel, while a district Judge oversees the mass injection of schoolchildren with vaccines that contain toxic mercury. (See
http://www.NaturalNews.com/022242.html )
Present day:
New Jersey mandates the mass vaccination of all children with four
different vaccines, stripping away the health freedoms of parents and
unleashing a mass medical experiment that exploits the bodies of
children and enriches pharmaceutical companies while criminalizing
parents who refuse to participate.
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Friday, December 14, 2007