"First animals, then orphans, then the mentally retarded . . ." (David Rothman, in "Strangers at the Bedside")
Experimental testing on humans has been going on for hundreds of years: at its simplest it took the form of food tasting for an autocrat by slave or servant; this may have been done with or without the freely given consent of the food-taster, depending upon the circumstances. The Romans sporadically practised experimental testing on gladiators and slaves. However, experimental testing on humans had never been done on the industrial scale that began in the 19th century, and which continues in all scientifically ‘advanced' countries to this day.
As soon as animal experimentation became standard practice, the question arose about experimental research on human beings. Human beings have been test subjects for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in countries around the world. Millions of people have been tested with drugs over decades, without them ever being told anything, or not the whole truth, about the dangers - there are many instances: drugs tested on servicemen, prisoners, children in orphanages, people in mental institutions and old people in hospitals or homes. Their lives meant nothing to the ‘researchers'. The end justified the means. Information about some experiments leak out and so we know about them; some we don't know about. Yet.
It is important to remember that we are talking about experiments which are conducted on victims who have not freely given their intelligent informed consent. But even when such consent is given, the tests these volunteers undergo may be lethal and useless and may only be carried out for commercial purposes.
Dr H M Pappworth, London physician and internationally known teacher of clinical medicine, wrote a book on the subject, entitled ‘Human Guinea Pigs ‘(Pelican Books, London, 1969), in which he revealed hundreds of cases involving thousands of patients, which he had uncovered simply by perusing British and American medical journals. He pointed out that the worst experiments and all those that have caused damage or death, are never reported by the ‘researchers'.
On the evening of May 29, 1973, the writer, producer and narrator of the hour-long TV program ‘NBC Reports' said, "Human experimentation has become a major industry in America." Columnist Bob Cromie wrote in the Chicago Tribune of January 19, 1974: "My personal opinion is that many of the experiments being conducted are supervised by sadists, idiots, or those greedy for the federal grants involved . . ."
So far as is known, no single agency regulates medical research on humans, thus putting millions of volunteers at risk.
The tiny number of examples below are just the tip of the iceberg.
BABIES
In "Slaughter of the Innocent" Hans Ruesch wrote:
"An American book called ‘Behaviourism' (Norton, 1925, and The People's Institute Publishing Company, New York, 1930) written by a Dr John B Watson, one-time director of the psychological laboratory of John Hopkins University, describes dropping new-born children just when they were falling asleep - to test ‘loss of support'; robbing them of their toys; letting them be bullied; placing acid in their mouths; and noting the amazing revolutionary fact that burning/pricking/cutting these babes produced crying, screaming, attempts to withdraw the body from pain, and so on.
Dr John B Watson said ‘ . . . the need of study was so great that we decided to build up fears in the infant and then later to study practical methods for removing them . . . We chose as our first subject Albert B, an infant weighing 21 pounds at 11 months of age . . . had lived his whole life in hospital . . . In the months we worked with him we never saw him cry until our experiments were made . . .'
As reported in the American Journal of Pediatrics in 1939 (Vol 15, No 4), infants ranging from 11 days to two and a half years of age were repeatedly immersed in water. The report says, “When submerged, the movement of the extremities are of the struggling order . . . Often the ingestion of fluid is considerable, and the infant would cough or otherwise show respiratory disturbances when taken out of the water. At no time did any baby show himself capable of raising his head above the water for the purpose of breathing”.
In Ruesch's second book, "Naked Empress", he wrote:
"Researchers in the US and Great Britain bought just-aborted foetuses from hospitals to get living, human experimental material. As reported in the Globe, of Greenwich, Connecticut, August 19, 1980, Charles Lachman wrote: ‘A hospital in Finland has been conducting gruesome experiments on live human fetuses - with cash aid from the US government. Globe has learned that the shocking experiments involve decapitating the babies and slicing open their stomachs - without even administering an anesthetic . . .' A Finnish researcher Dr Marti Kekomaki said ‘An aborted baby is just garbage.' A nurse said : ‘They took the fetus and cut its belly open. They said they wanted its liver. They carried the baby out of the incubator and it was still alive. It was a boy. It had a complete body, with hands, feet, mouth and ears. It was even secreting urine.'"
In the National Enquirer, August 1978, in an article written by Chris Pritchard, under the title "Drug Firms Trick Patients Into Becoming Human Guinea Pigs" there is this:
"One of the cases involved a researcher who lied to a group of expectant mothers, revealed Dr Michael Hensley, medical officer in the FDA's division of scientific investigations. Dr Hensley said the researcher got the women to try an analgesic without telling them that the drug could cause respiratory problems in their newborn babies. In fact, Dr Hensley said, the specific purpose of this study was ‘to induce a mild respiratory depression in the infants', and then see whether another drug was effective in treating that . . ."
In 1977 the Japanese newspaper ‘Asahi Shimbun' exposed a trade in fetuses between South Korea and the USA, the price only $25 per fetus.
And from Professor Croce's "Vivisection or Science" (1st ed): "Two journalists, pretending they wanted to buy fetuses, interviewed an English gynecologist, who said: ‘ . . . One morning four of them were born, one after another. They cried but I didn't have time to kill them at once because I had too much to do . . .I am not a hard man but a realist. You need to be a MAN OF SCIENCE and unemotional . . .'
"The greatest demand for fetuses comes from the beauty industry, which apparently only uses dead fetuses. Soon after birth they are immersed in liquid nitrogen at 150 degree C below zero . . . deep-frozen - - -The tissues are then expertly mixed with vaseline, glycerine, lanolin . . . finishing up in fancy packaging as skin creams ‘to be massaged gently into the face on retiring for the night.'" (Some parts of human fetuses - the head, hands, etc - may be embedded in clear plastic and used as paperweights.)
CHILDREN
A BBC2 television program "Undercover World" (late 2004) exposed experiments carried out on children in New York, where 23,000 children are placed in foster/children's homes. Over 98% of these children are from poor backgrounds and black or Latin. In New York, no Court order is required to take a child from its parents. One person interviewed described the children as being treated "like a bunch of lab rats". Remember that a child's immune system is not fully developed until it reaches its teens.
Documents showed they had undergone trials for herpes; had been given double doses of a measles vaccine; had received cocktails of drugs with side effects admitted by the manufacturers to include muscle wastage, severe stomach pain, and organ failure. Drugs included in the trials were: nevirapine, zidovudine and didanosine, the last of which can be dangerous even when taken on its own.
Companies sponsoring these experiments were shown to be: Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Pfizer and Glaxo-Wellcome. The National Institutes for Health (USA) claimed that all participation is voluntary. How can a child given ‘voluntary' informed consent? Well, federal rules state that a parent or guardian must consent to drug trials on behalf of a child, but for many of these children the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) is their guardian, and they facilitate the trials. The FDA say they are investigating.
(to be continued)
Click Here to Read Part 2: THE SICK
Click Here to Read Part 3: SO WHAT'S SORT OF NEW?
