For The Greater Good
If A Few Die Who Cares?
Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
Nuremberg and Helsinki gridlines eventually became the ethical guidelines for evidence based medicine and science. Whether they follow these guidelines can and should be argued. I will be giving examples why we need to question medicine and science. A few years after World War ll when a many unethical experiments were done to humans. I wonder if this was because many Nazi scientist and doctors were given positions within our government and universities?
Also the pharmaceutic industry was growing exponentially. The pharmaceutical market was producing massive amounts of new chemical types of medicine, like chemotherapy. Massive profits were being made not only with chemical based medicines but also with new surgical techniques from the war, which were integrated into hospital surgeries. Ethical restrictions through public outcry were put into effect, doctors and scientists found ingenious ways around the ethical restrictions."Nazi Influence on America's Pharmaceutical Industry."
Prisoners became the largest testing group by 1960 there were at least 20,000 prisoners in Federal US prisons that had become the volunteers for experiments. The prisons were perfect testing sites because of the restricted environment allowed 24/7 monitoring. Life styles and movements of prisoners were limited. Prisoners were easy to manipulate because of their lack of freedom. The Oklahoma State Penitentiary made lucrative deals with drug companies and provided the biggest
For becoming basically a lab rat for testing medical products prisoners were given a small amount of money and the doctors participating in the program made up to $300.000 a year. The pharmaceutical industry had no problem convincing prisoners to become test subjects and were easy to monitor because they were in a prison. The Ohio State prison inmates were injected with live cancer cells, while in Chicago doctors injected prisoners with the blood of leukemia patients. Both groups suffered no ill effects but at that time no one knew what would happen. Bluntly speaking the medical doctors didn’t know if the inmates would live or die or if they survived how long they would suffer from side effects.
The Pennsylvania Holsburg prison nine out of ten prisoners volunteered for medical experiments in return for small payments. New chemical treatments and and techniques were used in special cells just for medical experiments. Time Magazine reported at the time that our governments was granting money for medical research in fifteen out of thirty-seven federal prisons. Federal prisoners were given $25 dollars in cash and if the experiment risked the prisoners life they we given reduced prison sentences.
Federal Prisoners Cheaper Than Chimpanzees
Time Magazine quoted an American scientist claimed prisoners were cheaper to use for experiments than chimpanzees. This was a typical way of dehumanizing test subjects and individuals, transforming them into lab specimens. I could go into how this is done to many groups of humans and animals that were and are used for political gain, power, and profit.
While Americans were somewhat safe because of the Nuremberg principles, inmates were vulnerable to promises of reduced sentences and judicial legalese. Most were uneducated many suffered from mental illnesses that left them vulnerable, threats were made from loss of privileges, many were blackmailed or threatened. Never once were those who made profits from experimenting on prisoners questioned for their lack of morals and character, while just the opposite was true for the test subjects. The Nuremberg guidelines strictly ruled out using captive populations for experiments because Nazi doctors had argued criminals had no rights and were just like animals.
Report: Medical Experiments Conducted on U.S. Prisoners, PatientsThe second largest testing population were mental defectives which had the added incentive of children. Prisons provided adults and mental institutions provided children. Both were captive populations that led restricted lives and had no rights. In 1962 here in America at least fifty juvenile delinquents and mentally handicapped teenagers were used to test a new antibiotic for curing acne. Fourteen days after the first test were run the group suffered significant liver damage but the testing was not discontinued. The test group was subjected to liver biopsies, which were dangerous and painful. All subjects experienced jaundice and still the experiment continued. When the children recovered they were subjected to the same experiment, again becoming ill and going through the same liver needle test. This kind of testing was also done in England with 50 disabled teenagers or delinquents, which suffered awful rashes and one test subjected suffered broncho-pneumonia. Prisoners Cheaper Than Chimpanzees
Here in America twelve children from age one to nine years old who were mentally handicapped by hydrocephalus where used in a research project using cerebrospinal fluid, which as not related to their illness. They were injected with a radioactive compund, the needles were inserted through their skull, following the back of the neck into the lumbar spin for their cerebrospinal fluid. Mentally defective infants with no physical abnormality in their calcium metabolism were injected with radioactive compounds used in the studies in calcium metabolism. Radioactive iodine compounds which are horribly poisonous were given to another nineteen mentally handicapped children in tests for iodine metabolism.
A Dark Chapter In Medical History
I have given a few examples of medical practices that were common after WWll. The books I read that you might want to check out are Breacher’s Experimentation On Man, and Pappworths’s Human Guinea Pigs. I just heard on corporate news that people who question the safety of mandated vaccine programs are mentally ill. We are not mentally ill unless you call distrusting people and institutions that have been caught over and over harming helpless people and lying to the public over the safety of their procedures and products.
"Human guinea pigs"--a history.
A link to My Blog