Bioethics Commission To Probe Medical “Research”

"Dr. Robert" of the National Health practiced dentistry on The Beatles when he slipped LSD into their drinks at a dinner party, thus turning them on. It was at the time an experimental drug, tested on mental patients at VA hospitals, penitentiaries, and psychiatric institutions. Thus, the entire psychedelic craze, the "Summer of Love" of 1967, was nothing but a medical experiment gone global, viral. - The Legendary

Washington - Medical researchers operating during the period of the 1940's to 60's gave no regard to the medical concept of “First, do no harm.” They often made healthy people sick – without telling the test subjects what was going on and why they became so severely ill.

Research projects included squirting pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland; giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut; and such experiments as injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

When the world learned last fall that U.S. Public Healh Service doctors infected healthy prisoners and mental patients with syphilis incarcerated by the brutal military dictatorship in Guatemala, the government was forced to apologize. At the time, it was also learned that many times the government participated in similar studies that involved making healthy people sick.

This resulted in at least one very public and quite embarrassing repercussion.

A Presidential Bioethics Commission will convene in Washington this coming week to study and give vent to the truth of what happened over a 40 year period beginning 80 years in the past and reportedly continuing until the 1960's.

The public has long known of the long-term syphilis study of 400 black men at Tuskegee Institute.

These cases are much different, however.

In the Tuskegee study, the subjects were first identified as having been infected with the disease and determining with which of the three well-known stages of its progression they suffered.

Over a period of many decades, they were not given adequate treatment for the disease – only palliative procedures were employed – even after the development of penicillin, a “wonder drug” that would have either cured them or mitigated the symptoms of their disease to a point where they could have lived in comfort.

The men who were studied were never informed of their medical condition so they could seek medical treatment elsewhere. It was only when a researcher came across records of the 40-year study that the truth became known about what happened during the Tuskegee Study.

In the cases that will be scrutinized starting Monday, otherwise healthy people were often given a disease for the purpose of research, even when the results clearly show that the experiment was done merely to satisfy the morbid curiosity of someone with the authority to violate the rights of a vulnerable person such as a convicted prisoner or a mentally ill person who had been locked up for his protection and the protection of society.

Similarly, the notorious Chicago gangster, bootlegger, pimp and tax evader Al Capone suffered from syphilis during his term of incarceration at the hell hole Federal Penitentiary at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Mr. Capone was often infected with the micro-organisms that cause the chronic disease of malaria. When these organisms became active in the suspension fluid of his brainstem, the expected side effect was to raise his body temperature to dangerously high levels in an experiment to see if the infection could be killed or controlled through that torturous means.


This caused him permanent brain damage, resulting in severe dementia, the kind that made him think during the last few years of his life after his release that it was reasonable to sit beside his Florida swimming pool and fish with an unbaited hook, whiling away the hours dressed in a bathrobe and chomping on an unlit cigar.

An old associate, the book keeper known as the “Greasy Thumb,” Jake Gusik, went to see him after his release at his Florida residence. When he left, he told newsmen waiting outside the gate, “Al's nuttier than a fruitcake.”

"When you give somebody a disease — even by the standards of their time — you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Though in rare cases the media mentioned some of the experiments, the copy was couched in the semantics of ceramics in the dialect of high glaze and focused on the wondrous prospect of conquering a dread disease through the altruistic volunteerism of test subjects who were laying down their health and their lives to assist in the medical research it would take to set the world right for a chance at a healthy future.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. These test subjects had no idea what was going on.

This type of unethical experimentation is a human rights violation that has resulted in the execution or long-term imprisonment of war criminals such as certain M.D.'s who served the Third Reich as members of the medical corps of the SS, the “death's head” squads of fanatical henchmen who carried out the “final solution” against Jews, Gypsies, Freemasons, persons who suffered from Downs Syndrome, mentally handicapped persons, convicted criminals, Communists, Socialists, and those adjudicated as insane.