You can still find stories that make your blood run cold. Like Panel Hears Grim Details of Venereal Disease Tests from Tuesday’s New York Times, which reported that in the late 1940s American scientists conducted Nazi-style experiments, with a Nazi-style coldness, on poor Guatemalans. (The experiments were discovered last year, but I missed the story then.)
The most offensive case, said John Arras, a bioethicist at the University of Virginia and a panelist, was that of a mental patient named Berta.
She was first deliberately infected with syphilis and, months later, given penicillin. After that, Dr. John C. Cutler of the Public Health Service, who led the experiments, described her as so unwell that she “appeared she was going to die.” Nonetheless, he inserted pus from a male gonorrhea victim into her eyes, urethra and rectum. Four days later, infected in both eyes and bleeding from the urethra, she died.
The story reports that having read an article noting that experiments conducted on rabbits could not be conducted on people, he “order[ed] stricter secrecy about his work.”
Cutler, who went on to oversee the notorious Tuskegee experiments, died in 2003, after a successful career ending with a professorship at the University of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a glowing obituary which included the grimly amusing remark of one of his colleagues that “”He was a pioneer who had firsthand experiences of living and working in the Third World.”
It is this kind of thing the psalmist laments (see 10:2, 8-10 and 92:7).
September 1st, 2011 | 12:56 pm
See also Proverbs 1: 10-14.
September 1st, 2011 | 3:01 pm
I take an odd sort of comfort in hearing that it was the same guy who did the Tuskegee experiments — and least there were not TWO people who were that twisted and were conducting experiments at the same time. It is amazing that he ever worked again after word got out about the Tuskegee stuff. I guess universities mean it when they say that academics are “free” to do what they want…
September 2nd, 2011 | 11:11 am
[...] PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN: “Cutler’s Experimental Ethics.” You can still find stories that make your blood run cold. Like Panel Hears Grim Details of [...]
September 2nd, 2011 | 2:53 pm
I take an odd sort of comfort in hearing that it was the same guy who did the Tuskegee experiments — and least there were not TWO people who were that twisted and were conducting experiments at the same time.
Yes, but check out the number of American departments that ok’d the experiments, and you will be less reassured.
Unfortunately, there are many underreported stories of American ethical failures, most of them either involving scientific testing, or the use of “social science” to harm and restrict people in the name of society. While it’s good that these stories are starting to get the attention they need, it isn’t recognized yet as the crisis it truly is.
September 8th, 2011 | 9:01 am
Supposedly, (and I don’t know the history that well, so someone can correct me on this) Nazi Germany modeled many of their eugenics programs on programs that various US states were carrying out in the 1920′s.
And in the Buck vs. Bell opinion, just before Holmes’s famous “three generations of imbeciles is enough” quote, he argues, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
Such reasoning was in the water and the air. The Nazis just horrified the world by taking the whole thing to its logical conclusion and making it state policy.
September 8th, 2011 | 11:52 am
And where were you in 1994 when this news broke:
http://pop.org/content/anti-fertility-drug-experiments-1709 (no crackpots here – Steven Mosher @ Population Research Institute and J.A. Miller @ Human Life International : http://educate-yourself.org/vcd/vcdvaccineslacedwithbirthcontrol.shtml
for the textual-challenged, here’s an audio visual instead (granted, this one’s tinged a little ‘crackpot-unhinged’ with its leading images of the illuminati monument, conspiracy theorists are easy to ignore UNTIL they add M.D. to their credentials, at c. 2 mins in) decribing the immunosuppression of fertility using
genetically-modified vaccines coded for antibodies to human chorionic gonadatropin (anti hCG) ie designed to destroy the hormone that sustains the uterine lining that protects and nurtures the baby in its mother’s womb during pregnancy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R005vkMmk1s
“blessed is the fruit of thy womb” not!
“cursed is the fruit of thy womb” if you got the shot…
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact