When Doctors Kill: Who, Why, and How
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Chemical Company paid Dr. Kligman $10,000 to learn how dioxin – a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange – and other herbicides affected human skin. Workers at the Dow chemical plants were developing an acne-like condition called chloracne and the company wanted to know whether the chemicals they were handling were to blame. As part of the study, Kligman applied dioxin to the skin of 60 prisoners but was disappointed when the prisoners showed no skin lesions.
A follow-up study involved 70 volunteers at the same prison. Without the company’s knowledge or consent, Kligman increased the dosage of dioxin he applied to ten prisoners’ skin to 7,500 mg, 468 times the dosage Dow official Gerald K. Rowe had authorized him to administer. As a result, the prisoners developed acne-like lesions that progressed into purulent boils. These skin lesions were not treated and remained for up to 7 months. None of the subjects were informed that they would later be studied for the development of cancer at these sites. Based on his vast experience, the U.S. Army paid Dr. Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to the faces and backs of the inmates to “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process.” The bottom line is that death row at Holmesburg Prison may have been safer than Kligman’s clinic in the 1960s.
Taking Advantage of the Weak and Innocent
America has not gone as far as the Nazis by recommending the extermination of the weak and infirm. Instead, they became unwitting subjects for a series of experiments that sound worse than euthanasia. In 1943 in order to “study the effect of frigid temperature on mental disorders,” researchers at University of Cincinnati Hospital kept 16 mentally disabled patients in refrigerated cabinets for 120 hours at 30°F. It should be intuitive that hypothermia affects both geniuses and the alternatively gifted.
Between 1956 and 1972, Dr. Saul Krugman of New York University, conducted a study funded by The Armed Forces Epidemiological Board which attempted to induce hepatitis into mentally disabled children at Willowbrook School on Staten Island by injecting serum into their veins or by feeding them an extract distilled from the feces of infected patients. Krugman had the parents sign an informed consent document which fraudulently suggested the children would be receiving a vaccine to prevent hepatitis without disclosing that they would need to be infected intentionally beforehand. In 1972, Krugman became President of the American Pediatric Society.
In 1963 Dr. Chester M. Southam, who had injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performed the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American women at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam told the patients that they are receiving “some cells” but left out the fact that they were the seeds of cancer.
He claimed he did not obtain informed consent from the patients because he did not want to frighten them by telling them what he was doing. Despite his good intentions he temporarily lost his medical license because of these experiments.
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Yet he still became the President of the American Cancer Society. Clearly, innovative experimentation looks good on a resume.
In 1950, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron published an article in the British Journal of Physical Medicine in which he described experiments that entailed forcing schizophrenic patients at Manitoba’s Brandon Mental Hospital to lie naked under 200-W
red lamps for up to 8 hours per day. His other experiments included placing mental patients in an electric cage that heated their internal body temperatures to 103°F.
His interest in physiological responses went beyond a study of hyperthermia. He also induced comas by giving patients large injections of insulin.
In our society, children hold a sacred place. They are dependent upon the care of adults and look to them for safety and security. Many parents have had to console a child when faced with a visit to a doctor. In some instances, their fear is justified.
In 1941, Dr. William C. Black infected a 12 month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, called it “an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science.” In 1962, researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center in Maryland tested experimental acne antibiotics on children and continued their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication. More recently, in 2002, 2 year-old Michael Daddio of Delaware died of congestive heart failure. After his death, his parents learned that doctors had performed experimental surgery on him when he was 5 months old rather than using the established surgical method for repairing his congenital heart defect. The established procedure had a 90–95% success rate. The inventor of the procedure performed on baby Daddio was fired from the hospital in 2004. In the BBC documentary
“Guinea Pig Kids” and the article of the same name, reporter Jamie Doran reported that children in the New York City foster care system had been unwitting human subjects in experimental AIDS drug trials starting in 1988. In response to the BBC
documentary and article, the New York City Administration of Children’s Services admitted in a press release that foster care children had been used in experimental drug trials, but claimed that the last trial took place in 2001 and thus the trials were not continuing. No wonder kids are scared of people in white coats with needles.
It Takes a Village
Occasionally, larger populations are needed to obtain scientific validity of experiments.
When a prison or hospital contains too few subjects, the government has turned to our cities for its subjects. Most people don’t know that Federal law authorizes the conduct of such experiments by the government:
“The use of human subjects will be allowed for the testing of chemical and biological agents by the U.S. Department of Defense, accounting to Congressional committees with respect to the experiments and studies,” and “The Secretary of Defense [may] conduct tests and experiments involving the use of chemical and biological [warfare] agents on civilian populations [within the United States].” (Public Law 95-79, Title VIII, Sec. 808, July 30, Willing to Die for Your Country?
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1977, 91 Stat. 334. In U.S. Statutes-at-Large, Vol. 91, page 334; Public Law 95-79. Public Law 97-375, title II, Sec. 203(a)(1), Dec. 21, 1982, 96 Stat. 1882. In U.S. Statutes-at-Large, Vol. 96, page 1882).
Here are a few examples of the application of this law.
In order to determine how susceptible an American city could be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprayed a cloud of Bacillus globigii bacteria from ships over the San Francisco shoreline. According to monitoring devices situated throughout the city to test the extent of infection, 8,000 residents of San Francisco inhaled 5,000 or more bacterial particles and many contracted a pneumonia-like illness. In 1950 the Army staged another mock attack on San Francisco this time covertly spraying the city with the microbe Serratia marscenses and other agents thought to be harmless. At least one patient died after a flu like illness caused by this germ.
The experiment, which involved blasting a bacterial fog over the entire 49-square-mile city from a Navy vessel offshore, was documented with clinical nonchalance:
“It was noted that a successful BW [biological warfare] attack on this area can be launched from the sea, and that effective dosages can be produced over relatively large areas,” the Army wrote in its 1951 classified report on the experiment. These experiments were made public in Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977. Obviously, earthquakes are not the only concern around the Golden Gate Bridge.
The rest of the country has not gotten off the hook. Between 1956 and 1957, U.S.
Army doctors and scientists released mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever and Dengue Fever over Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida to test the ins
ects’
ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents posed as public health officials to track the effects of the trial. These experiments resulted in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the residents of both cities as well as several deaths. As part of a test codenamed “Big Tom” the Department of Defense sprayed Oahu, Hawaii’s most heavily populated island, with Bacillus globigii in order to simulate an attack. Bacillus globigii causes infections in people with weakened immune systems but this was not known to scientists at the time. Or they simply didn’t care. In 1966, U.S. Army scientists dropped light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates into the New York City subway system exposing more than one million commuters to the bacteria.
The Army’s justification for the experiment was the fact that there are many subways in the (former) Soviet Union, Europe, and South America and we need to consider all possibilities in the event of war. There is no record of any fatalities associated with this military science project but the details of the experiment are still classified.
At least there is no way this kind of thing could happen today. Yeah, right.
Willing to Die for Your Country?
The government essentially owns the bodies of its military personnel. As such, they are vulnerable to experimentation if it will best serve the interests of our country.
Ironically, some of the worst tests performed on our own soldiers were designed to test the effects of poisons on our soldiers before our enemies had the chance to do so.
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In response to the Germans’ use of chemical weapons during World War I President Woodrow Wilson created the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) as a branch of the U.S. Army. Twenty-four years later the CWS was still performing mustard gas and lewisite experiments on over 4,000 members of the armed forces.
“The Manhattan Project” gave birth to the atomic bomb and led to an interest in the effects that radioactive materials had on people. The Project’s medical team led by Dr. Safford Warren injected 4.7 mg of plutonium into soldiers and several civilians at the Oak Ridge facility, 20 miles west of Knoxville. In 1977, the government issued an official apology to the families of the test subjects and paid $400,000 to Jeanne Connell, the sole survivor from these clinical trials.
Between 1954 and 1975 U.S. Air Force medical officers assigned to Fort Detrick’s Chemical Corps Biological Laboratory were involved in “Operation Whitecoat” – a study exposing human test subjects to a variety of dangerous biological agents including plague. The volunteers were 2,300 Seventh Day Adventist military members who chose to become human guinea pigs rather than potentially kill others in combat. Over the 20-year period, the Army used them to test vaccines against the various biological agents to which they were exposed.
Long-term follow up of about a quarter of all “White Coat” volunteers found an increased incidence of asthma and headaches but no well-documented deaths.
Some ripples of military experimentation still permeate our society and occasionally make headlines. In 1996, the Department of Defense admitted that American soldiers were exposed to chemical agents during Operation Desert Storm in 1990. More than 400,000 of these soldiers were ordered to take an experimental nerve agent antidote called pyridostigmine which some now believe to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome. The afflicted war veterans developed a variety of symptoms including skin disorders, neurological problems, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and vision problems. This disease is real and is not a figment of some shell-shocked veteran’s imagination.
A Piece of Your Mind
No doubt you have been wondering when the CIA was going to emerge in this chapter. Wait no longer. Between 1955 and 1960, the CIA conducted a mind control and brainwashing program with the code name “MKULTRA” using psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline at 80 institutions on hundreds of subjects.
MKULTRA was started on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953, largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives and possibly to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques.
The project was run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence under the direction of Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, a psychiatrist and chemist. Prior to MKULTRA a number of secret U.S. governmental studies had been conducted to study mind-control, A Piece of Your Mind
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interrogation, behavior modification and related topics including Project CHATTER
in 1947, and Project BLUEBIRD and Project ARTICHOKE in 1951. Because most MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then CIA Director Richard Helms, it is difficult if not impossible to have a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects sponsored by MKULTRA and related CIA programs. The Agency invested millions of dollars into studies probing dozens of methods of influencing and controlling the mind by chemical, biological and radiological means. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject’s knowledge and informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. had agreed to follow after WWII.
In 1965, the CIA and the Department of Defense began Project MKSEARCH, a program to refine the ability to manipulate human behavior through the use of mind-altering drugs. Some of these agents were later used in government-sponsored interrogations. As this would be considered a form of torture by inducing mental and psychological hardship, this could not be used by the CIA today. But demos of the technique can be seen on “24”.
On November 28, 1953, Army scientist and experimental subject Frank Olson died after falling 13 stories from the Pennsylvania Hotel in Manhattan. The CIA’s internal investigation claimed that Olson had prior knowledge of the details of the experiment, although, in fact, neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were told of the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after they ingested it. The investigative report suggested that the experimenter was somewhat at fault for the death and deserved a reprimand for failing to take into account suicidal tendencies Olson was known to have had. LSD and other mind-altering substances can aggravate suicidal ideation. While the government claimed Olson committed suicide, a forensic scientist determined in 1994 following an exhumation and autopsy that Olson had suffered head trauma from a blunt source prior to his death. Frank Olson’s family received $750,000 by a special act of Congress and both President Ford and CIA director William Colby met with Olson’s family to apologize.
In Operation “Midnight Climax” (very catchy and aptly named) the CIA set up several brothels to obtain subjects for an experiment on mind-altering drugs. The men were dosed surreptitiously with LSD and their sexual behavior under the influence of this hallucinogenic drug was filmed for later viewing and study via two-way mirrors.
These films were also used to keep the participants from talking about the experiment if they found out about it. A good fiction writer could not think this stuff up.
Between 1957 and 1964, MKULTRA experiments were exported to Canada where the CIA had recruited Scottish physician Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the “psychic driving” concept, which the CIA found particularly interesting.
Psychic driving was a theory of treating insanity by erasing existing memories and rebuilding the psyche completely. It was like deleting your hard drive and rein-stalling the software. After being recruited by the CIA, Cameron was paid $69,000 to conduct his work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University.
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The experiments were carried out primarily on thousands of
unsuspecting Canadian patients and on some US citizens. Often the patients entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and post-partum depression and were unwittingly subjected to Cameron’s experiments.
The “psychic driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into sensory deprivation rooms or drug-induced comas for weeks (up to 3 months in one case) and electroshocking them several times a day at higher voltages than usual. This resulted in incontinence, total amnesia, loss of speech, and an erasure of memory that left the patients thinking the doctors were their parents. The “blank slate”
deprogramming was followed by reprogramming in which the patients were subjected to hearing repetitive messages (both negative and positive) to direct their behavior and “reform” their minds. The CIA was obviously very interested in these
“brain washing” experiments. It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairperson of the World Psychiatric Association as well as President of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. Interestingly, Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal where he hypocritically villified Nazi medical experimentation merely a decade prior to his own unethical research. Cameron retired suddenly in 1964 and his successor organized a team to evaluate Cameron’s “psychic driving” theory of treatment. The team found it worthless. Cameron died in 1967 in a tragic mountain climbing accident. The American Journal of Psychiatry published a long and glowing obituary with a full-page picture.