Unethical human experimentation in the United States

Numerous experiments which are performed on human test subjects in the United States are considered unethical, because they are performed without the knowledge or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have been performed throughout American history, but some of them are ongoing. The experiments include the exposure of humans to many chemical and biological weapons (including infections with deadly or debilitating diseases), human radiation experiments, injections of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and torture experiments, tests which involve mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of other experiments. Many of these tests are performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners.

Many of these experiments violated US law. Some others were sponsored by government agencies or rogue elements thereof, including the Centers for Disease Control, the United States military, and the Central Intelligence Agency, or they were sponsored by private corporations which were involved in military activities. The human research programs were usually highly secretive and performed without the knowledge or authorization of Congress, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.

The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975, and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.

Surgical experiments

Throughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is often referred to as "the father of gynecology," performed surgical experiments on enslaved African women, without anesthesia. The women— one of whom was operated on 30 times— suffered from infections and many failed surgeries before they were finally cured. The period during which Sims operated on female slaves, between 1845 and 1849, was one during which the new practice of anesthesia was not universally accepted as safe and effective. To test one of his theories about the causes of trismus in infants, Sims performed experiments where he used a shoemaker's awl to move around the skull bones of the babies of enslaved women.Washington, 2008
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/ref> It has been claimed that he addicted the women in his surgical experiments to morphine, only providing the drugs after surgery was already complete, to make them more compliant.Washington, 2008
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/ref> A contrary view is presented by the gynecologic surgeon and anthropologist L.L. Wall: "Sims' use of postoperative opium appears to have been well supported by the therapeutic practices of his day, and the regimen that he used was enthusiastically supported by many contemporary surgeons."

In 1874, Mary Rafferty, an Irish servant woman, came to Dr. Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio for treatment of a lesion on her head. The lesion was diagnosed as a cancerous ulcer and surgical treatments were attempted. Bartholow saw Rafferty's condition as terminal but felt there was a research opportunity. He inserted electrode needles into her exposed brain matter to gauge her responses. This was done with no intention of treating her. Although Rafferty came out of the coma caused by the experiment three days later, she died from a massive seizure the following day. Bartholow described his experiment as follows:

In the subsequent autopsy, Bartholow noted that some brain damage had occurred due to the electrodes but that she had died due to the cancer. Bartholow was criticized by fellow physicians and the American Medical Association formally condemned his experiments as he had caused direct harm to the patient, not in an attempt to treat her, but solely to gain knowledge. Additional issues were raised with the consent obtained. Although she gave "cheerful assent" to the procedure, she was described as "feeble-minded" (which may have been in part due to effects of the tumor on her brain) and likely did not fully understand. Bartholow apologized for his actions and expressed regret that some knowledge had been gained "at the expense of some injury to the patient."Lederer, 1997
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In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents, at Children's Hospital Boston (now Boston Children's Hospital) in Boston, Massachusetts to discover whether doing so would be harmful.Grodin & Glantz, 1994
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From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take the testicles out of executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams