Medical experiments that should not have been done

Medical experiments that should not have been done                         

There have been medical experiments that were undertaken which had ended up as complete failures but for the most part, the integrity and motives of the experimenters were honourable. Then there were however other experiments in which the experimenter’s integrity and motives were far less honourable.

 

During the Second World War, there were Japanese doctors who cut open their victim’s bellies. The purpose of the doctors was to explore the innards of their victims. The horrible doctors gave their victims no general anesthesia to suppress the agonizing pain that their victims were enduring. Other doctors subjected their victims to mustard gas and other fatal gasses to see how long they would survive. Others cut off limbs without applying general anesthesia first so that they could develop new surgical skills.

 

The Nazis conducted many experiments that were horrid, to say the least. One of them was to place their victims into extreme and fatal high pressure chambers to see how long they would last without an oxygen mask. There was another which may seem strange but its findings did have a valid result. They placed their victims in sub-zero cold water and after they passed out, they would try various means of bringing them back to consciousness. They for the most part, failed. However as fate would intervene, that particular experiment had an interesting result. The experimenters had concluded from the experiments that if the back of a man`s head was kept out of freezing water, he had a greater chance of survival, The results of that conclusion saved thousands of lives because all life jackets that were made after the war are made to also keep the back of the head out of the water.

 

Alas, there were experiments in democratic countries that have brought shame to these countries. I will name two of them. They are; the United States and Canada.                 

United States

 

There were horrifying medical experiments performed in the United States on impoverished people and their children all in the name of scientific progress. Many of these medical experiments were conducted on these people without their knowledge or permission.

 

In 1980, I came upon a report which said that young offenders incarcerated in US federal young offender facilities were subjected to medical experiments and when some of them died, they were buried in unmarked graves and their parents were told that their children had escaped and that the authorities didn`t know where they were.

 

I was so outraged when I read that report, I decided in 1980, after excepting the UN invitation to address a United Nations Congress (conference) dealing with the treatment of offenders, my main speech would be on this very subject. All the delegates from the almost 100 nations attending that conference were equally shocked when I read my speech to them as I had been after I found a copy of the report. The Americans on the other hand already knew that what I said was true. After my speech was over, the head of the UN delegation asked for permission to speak again (something that isn’t permitted in the rules of UN Congresses after the experts have spoken) Permission was granted. The head of the delegation admitted that what I had said was true and he said that his delegation supported my recommendation that there be a United Nations bill of rights for young offenders to prevent abuses against young offenders by governments anywhere in the world. He then asked for nine countries to second their resolution that would instruct the UN to create a bill of rights for young offenders. The next day, all the nations attending the conference approved of the American resolution and the rest is history because five years later, the UN General Assembly passed the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice which has an effect on the lives of millions of children world-wide.

This was one of the few instances were horrid medical experiments ended up having a beneficial effect on the lives of others which unfortunately was at a terrible cost.

In Tuskegee, Alabama, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted an experiment on 400 impoverished black males who had syphilis. They were offered ‘treatment’ by the researchers, who did not tell the test subjects that the volunteers had syphilis and they did not give them treatment for the disease. By 1947, penicillin became available as treatment, but those running the study prevented study participants from receiving treatment elsewhere and lied to them about their true condition. They did this 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 still alive. 28 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis in which 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.

 

The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study was the site of 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 at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the US State Department. After the war at the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the Statesville 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 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 malaria treatments on them. None of these victims really knew what was going to be the end result of the experiments conducted on them.

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, in which the purpose of the research was to help discover a vaccine. 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 merely 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, Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher Chester M. Southam injected live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison. Half of the prisoners in this NIH-sponsored study were black. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy women were injected with live cancer cells without being told.

In 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare experiment where they released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least 12 people.   

In 1956 and 1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted on two towns in Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. In the experiments, Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of infected mosquitoes on the two towns, in order to see if the insects could potentially spread yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis, and typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, so that they could photograph and perform medical tests on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.

In 1962, twenty-two elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison, in order (as he claimed) to “discover the secret of how healthy bodies fight the invasion of malignant cells.”. The administration of the hospital attempted to cover the study up, but the New York State medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President. That reminds me of what happened to those horrid Japanese experimenters. Many of them after the war were give prestigious positions in the Japanese medical profession.

I won’t go into all the American radiation experiments conducted on unsuspecting victims but instead I will tell you of two medical experiments conducted on unsuspecting victims in Canada.

Canada

In March, 1942, and after months of planning, a group of scientific and medical researchers travelled by bush plane and dog sled to the Cree communities of Norway House, Cross Lake, God’s Lake Mine, Rossville, and The Pas in Northern Manitoba. The trip was jointly sponsored by Canadian Indian Affairs, the New York-based Milbank Memorial Fund, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and the Hudson’s Bay Company but had been spearheaded by Indian Affairs Branch Superintendent of Medical Services Dr. Percy Moore and RCAF Wing Commander Dr. Frederick Tisdall – Canada’s leading nutrition expert and the co-inventor of the infant food Pablum.

The goal was to ‘study the state of nutrition of the Indian by newly developed medical procedures’, which meant that in addition to collecting information on local subsistence patterns; the research team conducted detailed physical examinations, blood tests, and x-rays on nearly 400 Aboriginal residents of these communities. But even before they began to administer their battery of medical tests, the researchers were immediately struck by the frightening toll that malnutrition and hunger appeared to be taking. At both Norway House and Cross Lake, they reported that, “while most of the people were going about trying to make a living, they were really sick enough to be in bed under treatment.”

 

Following a visit to the homes of some of the elderly residents of Norway House at the request of the Chief and Council, the researchers found that “conditions were deplorable where the old people were almost starved and were plainly not getting enough food to enable them to much more than keep alive.”

In their official reports, the researchers drew explicit connections between the hunger and malnutrition they had witnessed and the broader health problems facing these northern Cree communities which, they noted, included tuberculosis. 

The result, over the next decade, was not just a single examination of these communities in Northern Manitoba, but instead an unprecedented series of nutritional studies of First Nations communities and Indian residential schools by some of Canada’s leading nutrition experts in cooperation with Indian Affairs and, after 1945, with the Indian Health Services Branch of the Department of National Health and Welfare.  All the time they were conducting their research, they made no effort to bring in extra food to the Indians so that the Indians would reach the desired level of appropriate nutrition. The researchers just stood by and watched their subjects suffer.

A report for the Anglican Journal written by David Napier who is a freelance journalist stated that the federal government carried out medical experiments on children at Indian residential schools, often without parental consent. Napier said in his article, "The big problem that I've come across is that there doesn't seem to have been parental consent secured in all cases.” Dr. L.B. Pett, (now deceased) the physician who supervised the study says that wasn't possible. His rather shabby excuse was, and I quote: “We couldn't find the parents at the time. They were mostly in the bush, and we had to accept the authority of the principal of the Residential schools.” In 1933, (the year I was born) principals were made the legal guardians of all native students, under the oversight of the federal Department of Mines and Resources. Every native parent was forced by law to surrender legal custody of their children to the principal who was a church employee.

Both Indian residential schools in Kenora, Ontario participated in the nutritional experimentation on the aboriginal children in their care between 1942 and 1952. The researchers wanted to study the comparative affects of vitamin content in flour on human health.  At Cecilia Jeffery, the students were given whole wheat bread and were taught about whole wheat in class, so that researchers could study the affects of education on nutritional choices. At St. Mary`s Indian Residential School, the flour used to bake their bread wasn`t made from whole wheat so that school`s students were suffering to some degree from a lack of nutrition.   Six years later, I was hired by the Cecelia Jeffry Indian residential school as the senior supervisor of the boys in that school. By then, there was no sign of malnutrition seen in the children because they had been fed properly.

The experimenters used native children from Canadian residential schools as involuntary test subjects, under agreements with the Catholic, Anglican and United churches. One is forced to ask what religious upbringing did these leaders of those churches have when they were children? Where they brought up by former Nazi torturers?

Torture is what those Aboriginal children had to undergo during those experiments. One school deliberately held milk rations for two years to less than half the recommended amount to get a ‘baseline’ reading for when the allowance was increased. At another, children were divided into one group that received vitamin, iron and iodine supplements and one that didn’t.  Another school depressed levels of vitamin B1 to create another ‘baseline’ reading before levels were boosted. A special enriched flour that couldn’t legally be sold elsewhere in Canada under food adulteration laws was used on children at a third school and not available to other schools. The federal government denied preventive dental treatment and experimented with diets to study the effects of Vitamin C and fluoride. Those controlled experiments took place in the 1940's and '50's in at least four native residential schools. Gum health was an important measuring tool for scientists and they didn't want treatments on children's teeth distorting the results they were looking for.

It is readily acknowledged that the Indian children lost their natural resistance to illnesses in these schools, and that they died at a much higher rate than when they were living in their villages. Malnutrition was the basic cause of those illnesses after those stupid experiments began. The last of those Indian residential schools was finally closed in 1984. Cecelia Jeffery`s Indian residential school was closed down in 1966.  

Not much of any medical value was learned at the expense of those hungry mistreated little native children.

The experiments, repugnant today, would probably have been considered ethically dubious even at the time they were conducted but members of the general public and the parents of those unfortunate children didn’t know of those experiments. A spokeswoman for Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said the current federal government is shocked by the findings.

What follows is the ultimate insult of all. Hugh Pett, the son of Dr. Lionel L. Pett who supervised the experiments in the native residential schools said this about his father. “I don’t believe that the aboriginal children were starved in the name of science. My father’s efforts were aimed at keeping Canadians healthy at home and abroad on limited food supplies during the war.” unquote                                                                                                 

Was he admitting that the students were starved to some degree?  If so, then he is denying that the starvation was done in the name of science.  Does this twit who is the apologist for his father really believe that cutting down the amount of the milk given to the children, suppressing levels of B1 and denying dental treatment to those native children was done for the purpose of keeping them healthy? They too were Canadians.

I am not prepared to compare Dr. Pett with that infamous war criminal, Dr. Mengele who conducted medical experiments on children in Nazi concentration camps but Mengele’s name cropped up in my mind when I read about Dr. Pett’s idiotic and outrageous medical experiments done in the name of research on those native children in the native residential schools. 

Canadian physician William Osler (1849-1919) who condemned the use of poor patients as research objects said while he expressed his concern  over medical research being conducted on young children in an orphanage in the United States; “To use patients entrusted to our care is wrong unless direct benefit to the individual is likely to follow.”

Dr. Pett’s medical research offered no direct benefit to those little Indian children he experimented on. Unlike that of Dr. Osler, Dr. L.B. Pett’s legacy is one of shame.