Category: Human experimentation

Complicity after the fact

Moral blindness becomes a virtue and necessity

US scientists were “accomplices after the fact” in Japanese doctors’ war crimes

Bioedge

Michael Cook*

All of contemporary bioethics springs from the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in 1947. Seven Nazi doctors and officials were hanged and nine received severe prison sentences for performing experiments on an estimated 25,000 prisoners in concentration camps without their consent. Only about 1,200 died but many were maimed and psychologically scarred.

So what did the US do to the hundreds of Japanese medical personnel who experimented on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war of many nationalities, including Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Australians, and Americans? They killed an estimated 3,000 people in the infamous Unit 731 in Harbin, in northeastern China before and during World War II – plus tens of thousands of civilians when they field-tested germ warfare. Many of the doctors were academics from Japan’s leading medical schools.
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Survivor of Nazi ‘Twin Experiments’ Talks to Doctors About Human Subjects Research

 

Science Daily

Eva Kor  will never forget the day her childhood ended. The images of that day,  and the weeks after, are burned into her memory, as brutally permanent  as the tattoo on her left forearm.

On a spring day in 1944 Kor and her twin sister Miriam, 10 years old at  the time, were taken from their family and herded into the Auschwitz  concentration camp. The twins became part of a group of children used for human experimentation by Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death. . . [Read more]

German Medical Association apologizes for physician complicty in Nazi atrocities

The German Medical Association has acknowledged and apologized for the participation of German physicians in Nazi programs of forced sterilization, euthanasia, and human experimentation.  The statement also acknowledged that “leading members of the medical community” were involved. [Washington Post]

U.S. veterans recall secret drug experiments

American soldiers were used by the U.S. military as guinea pigs in the testing of a variety of drugs like nerve gas, incapacitating agents like BZ, tear gas, barbiturates, tranquilizers, narcotics and hallucinogens like LSD.  Tests were conducted up until the late 1960’s at what is now the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center.  Veterans involved have begun a lawsuit seeking compensation for harm that is alleged to have been suffered as a result of the tests. [CNN]  The story of the tests provides an example of the kind of situation in which conscientious objection by health care workers, had it occurred, might now, in retrospect, seem to have been justified.

 

Mixed message from US government for victims of unethical medical research

From 1946 to 1948, American and Guatemalan physicians infected prostitutes and prisoners with syphilis without their knowledge or consent in order to test penicillin. The research was discovered by a Wellesley College professor in 2009, and lawyers for the victims filed a class-action lawsuit against the United States.  The Obama administration claims that the US is immune from such lawsuits, but has announced that it will spend $1 million to review new rules to protect medical research volunteers, $775,000 to fight sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala, and will develop a system to compensate anyone harmed in medical research.  Lawyers for the Guatemalan victims say that the promised action is inconsistent with the claim of immunity. [Washington Post]