Unethical human experimentation in the United States

Throughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is often referred to as "the father of gynecology," performed surgical experiments on infants, enslaved African women, and girls as young as 13 without anesthesia to treat conditions including vesicovaginal fistula, neonatal tetanus, and other similar conditions. Slaveowners were willing to negotiate with Sims for access to these women due to their fertility's economic value if cured. While Sims did not use anesthesia in the experiments he performed on enslaved women, he later used it on white female patients. In 1874, Irish servant Mary Rafferty came to Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio for treatment of a head lesion. The lesion was diagnosed as a cancerous ulcer and surgical treatments were attempted. Bartholow saw Rafferty's condition as terminal but felt there was a research opportunity. With no intention of treating her, he inserted electrode needles into her exposed brain matter to gauge her responses. Although Rafferty came out of the coma caused by the experiment three days later, she died from a massive seizure the following day. Bartholow described his experiment as follows: In the subsequent autopsy, Bartholow noted that some brain damage occurred due to the electrodes but that Rafferty died due to the cancer. He was criticized by fellow physicians and the American Medical Association formally condemned his experiments as he caused direct harm to the patient not in an attempt to treat her but solely to gain knowledge. Additional issues were raised with the consent obtained. Although she gave "cheerful assent" to the procedure, she was described as "feeble-minded" and may not have fully understood. Bartholow apologized for his actions and expressed regret that some knowledge had been gained "at the expense of some injury to the patient." In 1896, Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children without their parents' knowledge or consent at Children's Hospital Boston (now Boston Children's Hospital) in Boston, Massachusetts to discover whether doing so would be harmful. From 1913 to 1951, Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would extract testicles from 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 prisoners. Stanley believed his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the "unfit" from reproducing. 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. ==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. U.S. Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with bubonic plague directly, and separately induced beriberi in 29 prisoners resulting in the deaths of four test subjects. In 1906, Professor Richard P. Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with a live cholera vaccine, which had somehow become contaminated with bubonic 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 St. Vincent Orphanage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, causing permanent blindness in some and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many others. In the study, they refer 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 children in an orphanage with Molluscum contagiosum—a virus that causes wart-like growths but usually disappears entirely—after an outbreak in the orphanage, to study the disease. The author then admits that the mechanisms studied were already well understood and described in literature, so well in fact that he found it unnecessary to go beyond providing basic explanations of the processes at work, stating quote; "The subject has been so fully described in the excellent paper of C. J. White and W. H. Eobey, Jr., that only a few of the important points will be emphasized here." 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. Of 571 subjects, 315 previously had syphilis. The rest were control. The remaining subjects were hospital patients; some of whom were between the ages of 2 and 18 years. 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 infected with syphilis were offered "treatment" by the researchers, who did not tell the test subjects that they had syphilis or treat them 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 the 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. 1940s In 1941, at the University of Michigan, virologists Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with the influenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages. Francis Peyton Rous, based at the Rockefeller Institute and editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, wrote the following to Francis regarding the experiments: 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 who was "offered as a volunteer" with herpes. The baby developed a painful symptom of the illness, and stopped eating during part of the experiment. On the same day, he inoculated a "healthy six-year-old" who experienced similar symptoms. The study was later published in the Journal of Pediatrics. The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study was a controlled study of the effects of malaria on the prisoners of Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois, beginning in the 1940s. The study was conducted by the Department of Medicine (now the Pritzker School of Medicine) at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the U.S. State Department. At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the precedent of the malaria experiments as part of their defense. The study continued at Stateville Penitentiary for 29 years. 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. 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. They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded ... or in a few cases through spinal punctures". Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study (including orphan children). The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. The team was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States. In 2010 when the research was revealed, the U.S. officially apologized to Guatemala for the studies. A lawsuit has been launched against Johns Hopkins University, Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Rockefeller Foundation for alleged involvement in the study. 1950s 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. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia-like illnesses, and at least one person died as a result. The family of the person 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. Also in 1950, Dr. Joseph Stokes of the University of Pennsylvania deliberately infected 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis. 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 1952, Chester M. Southam, a Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher, injected live cancer cells, known as HeLa cells, into prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary and cancer patients. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy females were injected with live cancer cells without being told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it might cause cancer. In 1953, Dr. Frank Olson and several other colleagues were unknowingly dosed with LSD as part of a CIA experiment, MK-ULTRA. Olson died nine days later after falling to his death from a hotel window under suspicious circumstances. 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. During the 1950s, the United States conducted a series of field tests using entomological weapons (EW). Operation Big Itch, in 1954, was designed to test munitions loaded with uninfected fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis). In May 1955 over 300,000 uninfected mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) were dropped over parts of the U.S. state of Georgia to determine if the air-dropped mosquitoes could survive to take meals from humans. The mosquito tests were known as Operation Big Buzz. The U.S. engaged in at least two other EW testing programs, Operation Drop Kick and Operation May Day. From 1963 to 1974, 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 including Bacillus globigii, Coxiella burnetii (the causative agent of Q fever), and Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia. The Chicago subway system was also subject to a similar experiment by the Army. ==Human radiation experiments==

Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of human radiation experiments to determine the effects of ionizing radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless. Most of these tests were performed, funded, or supervised by the United States military, Atomic Energy Commission, or various other U.S. federal government agencies. The experiments included a wide array of studies, such as 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. Much information about these programs was classified and kept secret. In 1986, the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a report entitled American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens. In the 1990s, Eileen Welsome's reports on radiation testing for The Albuquerque Tribune prompted the creation of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments by executive order of president Bill Clinton to monitor government tests; it published results in 1995. Welsome later wrote a book called The Plutonium Files. Radioactive iodine experiments 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 area containing three small towns. 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 between of iodine-131, and later performed abortions to study the women's 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 ) 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 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 . 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. 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). Sweet, who died in 2001, maintained that consent had been obtained from the patients and next of kin. Plutonium experiments From April 10, 1945, to July 18, 1947, eighteen people were injected with plutonium as part of the Manhattan Project. Doses administered ranged from 95 to 5,900 nanocuries. 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. which keeps the remains of people who died with 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. 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. 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. The University of California Hospital in San Francisco exposed 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to total body irradiation (100–300 rad dose) to obtain data for the military. 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, , 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. In another study at the Walter E. Fernald State School, in 1956, researchers gave mentally disabled children radioactive calcium and iron tracers orally and intravenously, without informing the children's parents. 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 for radium and for thorium. 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. These studies should not be confused with the Baby Tooth Survey, which was undertaken during the same time period. Irradiation experiments In 1927, five-year-old Vertus Hardiman and nine other children from Lyles Station, Indiana, were severely irradiated during a medical experiment conducted at the local county hospital. To get parental consent, the experiment was misrepresented as a new therapy for the scalp fungus known as ringworm. Many of the children suffered long-term effects, but Hardiman's were the most pronounced. The radiation disfigured his head and left a large, open wound on the side of his skull. The parents of the children met with a local lawyer and filed a lawsuit against the hospital, but the hospital was found not liable. 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, 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 did not "object to submitting themselves to the test, because it would not do any good if they did." 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. 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 numerous projects not submitted for approval. It was termed a "local field exercise" Dow Chemical wanted to study the health effects of dioxin and other herbicides, to discover how they affect human skin, because workers at its chemical plants were developing chloracne. In the study, Kligman applied about the same amount of dioxin to which Dow employees were being exposed. In 1980 and 1981, some of the people used in this study sued Kligman because they were suffering from various health problems, including lupus and psychological damage. Kligman later continued his dioxin studies, increasing the dosage of dioxin which 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. 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 U.S. interest in developing a truth serum began in 1943, when the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) began experimenting with a "truth drug" that would produce "uninhibited truthfulness" in an interrogated person. In studies from 1947 to 1953 known as Project CHATTER, the U.S. Navy began identifying and testing truth serums, which it hoped could be used during interrogations of Soviet spies. Some chemicals tested on human subjects included mescaline and the anticholinergic drug scopolamine. Shortly thereafter, in 1950, the CIA initiated Project Bluebird, later renamed Project Artichoke. Directed by Army general Paul F. Gaynor, its 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 attempted suicide. Drug deaths In 1952, professional tennis player Harold Blauer died when he was injected with a fatal dose of MDA at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University. The United States Department of Defense, which sponsored the injection, worked in collusion with the Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General to conceal evidence of its involvement in the experiment for 23 years. Cattell claimed that he did not know what the army had ordered him to inject into Blauer, saying: "We didn't know whether it was dog piss or what we were giving him." On November 19, 1953, Dr. Frank Olson was given a dosage of LSD without his knowledge or consent. After falling from a hotel window nine days later, he died under suspicious circumstances. Until the Project MKUltra revelations, the cause of Olson's death was covered up for 22 years. 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. 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: 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. 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. 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. In Book I, Chapter XVII, p. 389, this report states: Experiments on patients with mental illness Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed experiments on 42 patients with schizophrenia and prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary from 1950 to 1973. The experiments were funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them with LSD and bulbocapnine, and implanted electrodes into the septal area of the brain to stimulate it and take electroencephalography (EEG) readings. 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. 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, 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, 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, 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, to test 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, to determine if 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 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 to test 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 died by 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 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 ==Other experiments==

of Wetumpka, Alabama sandwiched this "wish to purchase incurably sick" enslaved people advert in between testimonials for his rheumatic cures and patent medicines (The Alabama Times, April 9, 1841) The 1846 journals of Walter F. Jones of Petersburg, Virginia, describe how he poured boiling water on the backs of naked slaves afflicted with typhoid pneumonia, at four-hour intervals, because he thought this might "cure" the disease by "stimulating the capillaries". In 1942, the Harvard University biochemist Edwin Joseph Cohn injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow blood, as part of an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy. 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. 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 significant increased the risk of heart attack and death. In the 2010s, Facebook breached ethical guidelines by conducting a research experiment to manipulate 700,000 users' emotions without their consent. According to the 2008 report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, "Developments in biotechnology, including genetic engineering, may produce a wide variety of live agents and toxins that are difficult to detect and counter; and new chemical warfare agents and mixtures of chemical weapons and biowarfare agents are being developed . . . Countries are using the natural overlap between weapons and civilian applications of chemical and biological materials to conceal chemical weapon and bioweapon production." ==Legal, academic and professional policy==

During the Nuremberg Medical Trials, several Nazi doctors and scientists being tried for human experiments cited past unethical studies performed in the United States in their defense, namely the Chicago malaria experiments conducted by Joseph Goldberger. 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." 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. On April 18, 1979, prompted by an investigative journalist's public disclosure of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (later renamed to Health and Human Services) released a report entitled Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, written by Dan Harms. It laid out many modern guidelines for ethical medical research. In 1987 the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, that a U.S. serviceman who was given LSD without his consent as part of military experiments could not sue the U.S. Army for damages. Stanley was later awarded over $400,000 in 1996, two years after Congress passed a private claims bill in reaction to the case. 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. 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, no 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. Some authors have proposed a structured ethical framework based on an Ethics of Political Commemoration for offering institutional gestures of redress for transgressions, based on an approach similar to the just war theory. ==See also==

General • "Human Research Report" - a monthly newsletter on protecting human subjects • • • • • Biological warfare and disease/pathogen experiments • Bibliography of Chemical and Biological Warfare documents • The History of Bioterrorism in America, Richard Sanders, Race and History, Sunday, November 24, 2002 (Retrieved February 18, 2010) • Introduction to Biological Weapons – Federation of American Scientists • Franz, et al., The U.S. Biological Warfare and Biological Defense Programs • US Army Activities in the US Biological Warfare Program, 1977 Congressional report • Christopher et al., "Biological warfare. A historical perspective", Journal of the American Medical Association. 6 August 1997;278(5):412-7. • "Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities", Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2001, via American Patriot Friends Network. Retrieved November 13, 2008. Human radiation experiments Books • ''Killing Our Own: The disaster of America's experience with atomic radiation'', by Harvey Wasserman, Delacorte Press, c1992, • ''The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments'', by Eileen Welsome, The Dial Press, 1999, • The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests, by Martha Stephens, Duke University Press, c2002, Durham, N.C., • Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World, by Holly M. Barker, Wadsworth, 2004. Government documents • Adherence To and Compliance With Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments - U. S. Congressional Research Service • Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) – National Security Archives • Exposure of the American population to radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests: a review of the CDC-NCI draft report on a feasibility study of the health consequences to the American population from nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States and other nations, National Research Council (U.S.). Committee to Review the CDC-NCI Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences from Nuclear Weapons Tests, National Academies Press, 2003 Journals • "'A Little Touch of Buchenwald': America's Secret Radiation Experiments", Reviews in American History – Volume 28, Number 4, December 2000, pp. 601–606 • Chair's Perspective on the Work of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments by Ruth Faden Psychological/torture/interrogation experiments • Bibliography of U.S. interrogation/torture research • Truth, torture, and the American way, Jennifer Harbury • Biderman, A. Social-Psychological Needs and "Involuntary" Behavior as Illustrated by Compliance in Interrogation, Sociometry, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June 1960), pp. 120–147 • The CIA: Mind-Bending Disclosures – Time Magazine, Monday, August 15, 1977 (Retrieved February 18, 2010) • Resources on Drug Experimentation and Related Mind Control Experiments by the U.S. Government • Khatchadourian, Raffi (December 7, 2012) "Operation Delirium", The New Yorker Video • MKULTRA Victim Testimony A – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings • MKULTRA Victim Testimony B – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings • MKULTRA Victim Testimony C – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings • President Clinton apologizes for Human Radiation Experiments • Complete transcript of Clinton's apology for Human Radiation Experiments • Physicians for Human Rights Accuses CIA of Carrying Out Illegal Human Experimentation – video report by Democracy Now! • The Dark History of Medical Experimentation from the Nazis to Tuskegee to Puerto Rico – video report by Democracy Now!