Community | March 01, 2011 | 2 comments

Shocking History of Medical Experiments on People

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Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States — studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect — they violated the concept of "first do no harm," a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

"When you give somebody a disease — even by the standards of their time — you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.


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2 comments // Shocking History of Medical Experiments on People

  • corndog67
  • PressCore
    • +3
      PressCore  
    • That picture says a lot. The victimizers all covered up to protect
      themselves, a long rod to distance themselves from their infection,
      and the victim raw & exposed. How predatory. Not hard to see that
      modern humans supposedly evolved from primitives, themselves
      somewhat closer to the reptile brain stems of 1 million years ago.
      Makes you think we can take the humans out of the jungle, but
      we still can't take the jungle out of the people. Jesus' Golden Rule
      was issued only 2,000 years ago, but I'd be loathe to believe it
      makes us ahead of our time to adhere to it in universal practice.
      Because if that takes another 1 Million years to be natural, the
      human race is doomed.If animalia libero were still with us, he'd
      have some choice things to say about how they experiment on
      other animals.

    • 1 year ago
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