Medical Research on Human Test Subjects The Science

Medical Research on Human Test Subjects

The Science of Medicine • For centuries the craft or art of medicine relied on trial-and-error • It was not until the Enlightenment that the art of medicine became the science of medicine • Experimentation became part and parcel of the science of medicine • “Gentleman” physicians and scientists played with different hypothesis

Edward Jenner (1749 - 1823)

Edward Jenner & Smallpox • Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids did not generally get smallpox and theorized that the pus in the blisters which milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but much less virulent) protected the milkmaids from smallpox. • Jenner tested his theory by inoculating a young boy named James Phipps with pus from cowpox blisters of the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow named Blossom. • No disease followed. So Jenner inoculated him again and found the boy showed no signs of infection. • Sadly, Jenner also inoculated his son, who, in a subsequent outbreak, tragically died from smallpox.

The Odd Case of Dr. Willaim Beaumont & Alexis St. Martin

The Odd Case of Dr. William Beaumont & Alexis St. martin • Alexis St. Martin (1794 -1880) was a 28 - yearold Canadian fur trapper who was accidentally shot with a musket at close range. • Dr. Beaumont who was stationed at the nearby Mackinac Army Hospital treated Alexis St. Martin • He noticed that everything the young man ate came out through the hole in his stomach • Eventually the wound healed to form a gastric fistula and Dr. Beaumont convinced Alexis St. Martin to stay on at his home as a servant where he studied him • Alexis tried to leave Beaumont over the years but Beaumont always found him. Their collaboration provided us the first work on the science of digestion, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion

Medical Experimentation WWII

Japan Unit 731 • Unit 731 was a covert biological warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937– 1945) and World War II. • Test subjects were political prisoners who were injected with live cultures of over a dozen diseases and monitored to chart the diseases natural progressions, vivisected to study anatomy and used in weapons development • Most participants in these studies went on to have successful careers in politics, medicine, etc. . . • The United Nations has declared the activities at Unit 731 to be War Crimes

Nazi Germany Buchenwald • From 1943 to 1945 experimental vaccines against typhus were given to prisoners on ward 46 of the camp • Homosexuals, convicts, Russian officers, Polish dissidents, Jews and Gypsies were used in the experiments • Additionally, homosexuality cures were tested, prisoners were shot to study the wounds, subjects were infected with malaria and staph strains to chart the disease’s course

Nazi Germany RavensbrÜck • Captain Sigmund Rascher studied the effects of rapid changes in altitude and freezing on the human body • The results were to be used to help German Luftwaffe pilots survive plane crashes over the North Sea • Experiments were developed such as the “Sky Ride Wagon” which simulated the altitude changes up to 70, 000 feet • Also, prisoners were submerged in freezing water and left outside in the snow to test hypothermia

Nazi Germany Aushwitz • Dr. Josef Mengele, a. k. a. “The Angel of Death” participated in the death of 400, 00 test subjects • His interest was in racial morphology (physical differences between ethnic groups) as well as preventing disease using genetic manipulation • He would used twins in his experiments calling them “natural controls” for environmental differences

The United States • In 1941 American researchers experimented on orphans at the Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Orphanage • Mentally retarded patients at the New Jersey State Colony for the Feeble-Minded were infected with Shigella to test for a vaccine • Thousands of US GIs were exposed to various forms of chemical warfare to test the effects • Many of these soldiers never received treatment because the government denied ever conducting the experiments

The Nuremburg Code

The Tuskegee Study

The Tuskegee Study • The Tuskegee Study began around 1930 and lasted for 42 years • It was devised as a study in nature, as opposed to an experiment where a variable is manipulated • At the time it began only one syphilis study had been conducted

Current Medical Experimentation

Aids Research in Africa • In 1994 a federally funded study discovered that the drug AZT (zivodine) taken during pregnancy cut the risk of transmission of HIV from mother to child by two thirds • In the fall of 1997 The New England Journal of Medicine likened the research to Tuskegee citing that the women in the test were: (1) black, (2) female, (3) poor, (4) mostly illiterate , (5) victims of STD’s and (6) without access to other medical treatment • In 1998 the CDC suspended the study after much criticism.