Undue Risk: secret state experiments on humans
By Jonathan Moreno
Routledge, 2001
371 pages, $41 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
When Ebb Cade, a black 53-year-old cement worker, had a car accident in Tennessee in March 1945, he received more than he bargained for when he was taken to the nearby Manhattan Project Army Hospital for treatment. He was injected with plutonium to see what would be the effect on the human body of the new radioactive element created by, and essential to, the production of nuclear weapons.
Cade was not informed of the health risks nor was his consent sought as a test subject. Cabe's case, and those of the 17 other plutonium injectees in the experiment, exhibit all the elements that mark the history of state experiments on humans in the US: exploitation of vulnerable groups, exposure to health risks, official secrecy and decades of cover-up.
For Jonathan Moreno, who wrote this meticulously documented book, the parallels to the human experimentation of the Nazi doctors whom the US had prosecuted after the war, are too close for ethical comfort. Moreno, a member of a committee that investigated human radiation experiments and advised US President Bill Clinton, has compiled a damning record of government-sponsored nuclear, biological and chemical research on unsuspecting US citizens.
The research was justified by the political, military and medical establishments as essential to "national security". Patriotism was often invoked to elicit "volunteers" for the dangerous experiments. However, most "volunteers" were coerced, manipulated, misinformed, lied to or simply taken advantage of. Consent, if sought, was not fully informed.
The warm inner-glow felt by some boys with an intellectual disability who were institutionalised in Massachusetts in the 1940s and 1950s was not the glow of patriotism but a result of being fed breakfast cereals laced with radioactive tracers to study the passage of nutrients. They weren't so much assisting with the "national security" task of "facing down the Soviets" as helping Quaker Oats Company steal an advertising march on their rivals.
The boys, experimented on in radiation-nutrition studies sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and their parents were lied to about the risks of leukemia. They were pathetically grateful, in a harsh institution, for any rewards for participating in the experiments, like being taken out to a baseball game. They were easy to manipulate and exploit.
Whole populations were unwitting subjects in hundreds of test releases of radioactive substances from Utah to Alaska. "Innocuous" biological organisms were also released, from the countryside to urban subway systems, which were anything but innocuous to people with suppressed immune systems. There could be no "informed consent", even in theory, from whole populations.
Patients with terminal cancers were sitting ducks for radiation experiments, including total body irradiation, because they were desperate for a magic bullet, even though the experiments were not aimed at helping them at all. Premature death, nausea and vomiting were the only outcomes for the 263 patients experimented on by the US Air Force from 1951-56 to test exposure levels for their proposed nuclear-powered aircraft.
Prisoners were also susceptible "volunteer" material. With prison wages around 25 cents a day, the inducement of $25 for testicle irradiation in AEC-funded experiments was hard to resist for the inmates of Oregon and Washington state penitentiaries from 1963-73. The military experiments were to determine the effects of radiation on production of testosterone and muscle function. Prisoners who "volunteered" for gonorrhoea and malaria experiments in the 1940s were offered $100. Prisoners were led to believe that participation would count as "good time" towards parole. Life prisoners proved particularly attractive as subjects for radiation studies because they "remained in one place for observation", as a military-funded University of California professor enthused.
Military personnel were also a "captive" experimental population. Sixty-thousand service personnel were used in chemical experiments. More than 6000 soldiers were used in research on chemical agents designed to incapacitate. Thousands of sailors sat in gas chambers filled with mustard gas until they passed out. The US Army's Chemical Warfare Service also conducted field tests in 1944 on soldiers, sometimes without protective masks, who received a cocktail of mustard gas, tear gas and phosgene to test the effects of the chemicals on the soldiers' combat performance.
During nearly two decades of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada and at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, troops were placed as close as six kilometres from the blast. Aircrews flew through atomic clouds. If anyone showed reluctance, they were "gently" reminded of where they stood in the military hierarchy.
The Australian military behaved like their allied peers. In Cairns, more than 800 Australian soldiers with war disabilities which restricted them to home duties took part in malaria and other medical experiments, including blood loss, decompression and hypothermia. In a chilling irony, these soldiers included German Jewish refugees who had enlisted in the Australian army to fight fascism.
The Jewish refugee-soldiers might have expected better than to be subjects of experiments that were ethically similar to those of the Nazis.
The US military, having condemned the Nazi doctors as monsters at the post-war Nuremberg trials, promptly proceeded to import some of the worst offenders to contribute to their own programs. The top secret Operation Paper Clip, by-passing immigration clearances, brought to the US 1600 Nazi scientists compromised by their research activities.
Werner von Braun, rocket scientist and SS officer, was the most infamous but the other recruits included medical scientists who had experimented on concentration camp victims. Japanese army doctors with experience of biological warfare experiments on Chinese civilians and US and Australian POWs were given immunity from war crimes prosecution and brought to the US.
Despite the US military having an ethical code of conduct for human experimentation, few experimenters knew about it (because it was, conveniently, classified "Top Secret") or cared about it. The CIA did not even bother with the pretence of ethical protocols.
While two wags spiked a bar-room singer's cocktail with LSD in 1958 to observe the effect, the CIA's chemical division had even greater sport with its MKULTRA project to test LSD and other mind-control drugs (such as mescaline) through grants to psychiatrists for human experiments. The psychological and physical distress, and death, from heavy doses of hallucinogens was a small price to pay for "national security".
Prisoners, children, the sick, people with an intellectual disability and other "sub-humans" with lesser human rights were common victims in the Nazis' medical experiments. The parallels were a public relations worry for the US state and, with social attitudes rapidly changing in the 1960s and trust in the US government plummeting, military-medical human experimentation was caught up in the tide of reform.
It is now illegal to experiment on children. Widespread use of prisoners ended in the mid-1970s. Some compensation is being paid. The US Army claims it engages in testing only for defence purposes. However, as Moreno correctly points out, the line between defensive and offensive research is a fine one and is regularly crossed.
Less perceptively, Moreno sees the reduction in human experimentation abuses as a "tribute to the American system". The tribute, however, is to the victims, the investigative journalists, political activists and ordinary citizens who stood up against the state and created a social climate where Nazi-like abuses are not tolerated. A tribute to the capitalist "American system", it is not. If the US state had not been found out, the abuses would still be happening on the same scale.
Moreno also justifies human experimentation as legitimate if "genuinely" in the "national interest" to defend democracy (the US) against evil-doers (Iraq and other official enemies). Such a faulty premise opens a gigantic loophole for human testing for the new weapons, such as electro-magnetic radiation and "gene warfare", feared by Moreno.
Capitalism (what Moreno hails as "our democracy") is the problem. The aggressive quest for profits is the prime cause of military, and commercial, abuses of human subjects in medical experiments.