The Dark Ethics of Dr. N. Experiments on Humans

A doctor cannot be a good doctor until he has killed one or two patients.

An Indian saying

All modern medicines without exception are necessarily tested on volunteers.
But what to do when such a test is impossible?
How ethical are experiments on a person without the consent of the latter, and what does history say about this? The human body consists of 78% water. It’s an aphorism that everyone knows. This fact was established in the mid-1940s, the honor of its discovery belongs to Lieutenant Colonel Eguchi of the Japanese Imperial Army. The experiment was as follows: a living person was tied to a chair in a confined room and pumped, pumped, pumped dry hot wind. .

In 15 hours, the subject turned into a dried mummy. He usually died at the sixth or seventh hour, when most of the water was already evaporated from the body. 22% of the initial body weight is the average for several dozen victims. And now, in the first biology lesson in school, the teacher says that people are 80% water. "Seventy-eight!" I corrected one day. "Thank you," the teacher replied.

Modern ethics and numerous human rights laws prohibit experiments on living people, at least without their consent. For money, please. There is not a single pharmaceutical company that does not conduct experiments on humans, not a single one. And we are silent because we know that if a new drug is not tried on volunteers today, then tomorrow it will not be released to the market, and someone will die, because ethics has outweighed logic and common sense. In 2007, a friend of mine rented out his body to a German pharmaceutical laboratory. They paid 300 euros a day and were fed a new tranquilizer for two weeks, sometimes in combination with other medicines, sometimes on an empty stomach, sometimes after a hearty lunch. A week of forgetting, a week of discomfort, money in your pocket, medicine in the market. Everyone's happy. All pills without exception are tested on volunteers who receive money for participating in experiments. This is a legal and yet irreplaceable practice.



Jacques Ponto injected himself with serum, and then he was put under the bite of a rattlesnake - the result of experiments was the discovery of a working antidote.

But not every experiment will be a volunteer. For good money, many are ready to take some medicine, to serve science. How, for example, to determine the behavior of the Koch wand in the human body? Will you voluntarily become infected or weakly? Of course, heroic scientists carried out the lion’s share of such experiments on themselves. One last example. Thirty years ago, no one really knew what gastritis, ulcers and even more so stomach cancer were. They were treated, performed operations, created drugs, but no one understood why gastritis occurs at all. In 1982, the Australian professor Barry Marshall stated that gastritis is caused primarily by the breeding culture of the bacteria Helicobacter pylori (although, of course, it is not the only cause). The scientific community ridiculed the scientist. Marshall experimented on pigs and other laboratory animals, but this did not lead to anything. So Marshall did the experiment on himself, taking a dose of Helicobacter pylori culture and becoming infected. The results of the experiment were published and became one of the most famous medical papers of the 1980s.



Officers of Unit 731 in work clothes.



All that remains of ambitious and brutal projects are photocopies of documents, not all of them. The strictest secrecy could not disrupt even the criminal proceedings against the leaders of the experiment.

mind-manipulation

Thirty years ago, no one believed in the existence of Helicobacter pylori. Yet here it is, discovered by Barry Marshall through a self-directed experiment.

History has known many cases when the victims of experiments were mentally abnormal and, accordingly, not always understand what is happening, people. Widely covered in the press two similar American projects conducted under the auspices of the CIA - Bluebird (1951-1953, later renamed Artichoke) and MKULTRA (late 50s - early 60s). The goal of both projects was to gain control of the human mind. Patients of neurological clinics were involved as experimental subjects - some voluntarily, in the hope of being cured (they were informed that experiments were a new type of therapy), others - unconsciously, without the permission of relatives and with the tacit connivance of doctors. Experiments were conducted mainly under various psychotropic drugs, in particular, LSD and cocaine, as well as with the active use of electroshock therapy. Bluebird had the primary goal of creating an absolute truth serum; in the course of experiments, physicians learned to induce artificial amnesia in people for specified periods of time, as well as to “supplant” false memories by hypnotic means. For example, in the descriptions of the project, there is a case of artificial split personality in a 19-year-old girl. Another document describes a situation where a female volunteer (CIA employee) was planted with a false identity; the patient forgot everything about her past life and zealously defended a new, fictional one. After the reverse procedure, she did not remember anything about the second self. In most cases, the Bluebird subjects remained more or less healthy (or as sick as they were at the beginning of the experiments). Much more serious was the second project of the Office - MKULTRA.

Officially opened on April 3, 1953, renamed MKSEARCH in 1964, it was scandalously curtailed in 1972, with the lion's share of the documents secretly destroyed to prevent an investigation into the CIA's antisocial activities. The latter took place three years later, but came to nothing. The project was subdivided into 149 (!) subprojects, the budgets of many of them skyrocketed for several million dollars, which at that time was unheard of. For example, in one of the subprojects, more than 1,500 U.S. Army soldiers were given LSD in their daily diets to test their combat capability and consciousness under the influence of the drug. MCULTRA explored all possible ways to influence the mind – chemical, biological, hypnotic and even radiological. The scandal arose when data on numerous experiments on children were revealed, including the reproduction of undeveloped consciousness under the influence of psychotropic substances and radiation.

It should be noted that the experience gained during both projects is still used by special services and some medical organizations. In particular, a number of truth serums developed within the framework of Bluebird are in service with various countries of the world.

Today, in any clinic, a sample is taken for Helicobacter pylori and in the case of a positive analysis, treatment is directed to their destruction, since the fight against the cause allows you to eliminate the investigation. In 2005, Marshall won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research, not only because he is a brilliant scientist, but because he is a brave, very brave man. There were many people willing to sacrifice themselves for others. American Roger Smith studied the properties of curare poison, Frenchman Jacques Ponto tried serums against snake poisons, German Emmerich Ullman proved the efficacy of Pasteur's rabies vaccine, Frenchman Nikolaus Minovizzi studied the symptoms of asphyxia on himself. There are so many examples that I cannot list. And because of these people, medicine has moved and continues to move forward. There are some experiments you can’t do yourself. They can only be put on others. Is it possible for the sake of science, for the sake of progress, for the sake of saving thousands of people?
Andrey Vesalius

Vesalius' anatomical reference book was, among other things, perfectly illustrated.

Ethics did not always interfere with experiments on living patients. Often she banned things without which it was simply impossible to do. The great Andrei Vesalius, the founder of anatomy, in the XVI century violated all possible prohibitions of the church, buying buried corpses from the cemetery guards and opening them in his anatomical theater. In the course of experiments, he found more than 300 errors in the works of Galen, which were taught medicine for more than ten centuries before Vesalius. Galen only worked with animal corpses because his ethics prevented him from working with human corpses. And so he described the structure of many organs "in the image and likeness." Vesalius considered the real human body and created a voluminous work “On the structure of the human body” (1543), which formed the basis of anatomy as a science. The Inquisition didn’t forgive the great doctor, but that’s another story.




Ruins of a crematorium in Pingfan.

Devil's Kitchen

There once lived in Japan a man named Ishii Shiro. Ishii is a surname, but in Japanese it is written before the name. Born in 1892, he graduated from the Medical Faculty of the Imperial University of Kyoto and then graduated from serology, bacteriology, epidemiology and pathology. He chose the military path and by 1935 he had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel of the medical service. In 1936 he was appointed chief of the Water Supply and Prevention Department of the Kwantung Army. He left the post twice and returned again.


In the background - the legendary truck Unit 731, which "logs" were delivered from the city to the location of the unit. Under the decorative awning - all-metal body without windows.

About Detachment 731 and its commander "World of Fiction" wrote in #99 - that material was devoted to the development and experiments in the field of bacteriological weapons.

In the Department of Water Supply and Prevention of Kwantung Army units, there was one department, a third, which was directly involved in water supply and the manufacture of water filters in particular. The remaining three departments (Nos. 1, 2 and 4) had nothing to do with water supply. They had to do with medicine. In fact, in the history of the Agency is known as the "Detachment 731". After the release of Morimura Seiichi’s book “Devil’s Kitchen”, this name became a household name. The unit was based near the village of Pingfan (today - a suburb of Harbin, China), in the occupied territories, and during the years of its activity more than 3,000 people died as a result of monstrous experiments. The main task of the detachment was to create bacteriological weapons (in fact, by 1944 Japan was ready to use them against the United States, but did not dare). In parallel, purely scientific research was conducted, vaccines were created against rickettsia and typhoid viruses, Manchurian fever, epidemic hemorrhagic fever, tick-borne encephalitis, rabies, smallpox. Methods of treating frostbite and burns were studied, ceilings for pilots in various conditions were determined, and so on. The ethical question is, was it worth it? How many people do we need to kill to save others from the plague?




Anda landfill. Test subjects tied to a pole in anticipation of the explosion of a bomb with plague fleas.



Unit 731: rapid disinfection of the subject with a special solution during the break between experiments.



Unit 731: A security guard near a warehouse of bodies intended for disposal.

The commander of Unit 731, Ishii Shiro, surrendered immediately after the Japanese surrender. He bought his freedom and immunity by transferring to the United States all the results of the work of the detachment – both in biological weapons and in medicine. He died in 1959, secure and free. Only a handful of doctors from 731 were on trial - those captured by the Soviet authorities. More than 2,500 employees quietly lived their lives in honor, became professors, doctors of sciences, received many grants and awards.




Nazi experiments in hypothermia. On the right is Sigmund Rascher, on the left is Doctor of Physiology Holzlochner, "guest specialist."

One of the classic Devil's Kitchen experiences was autopsy alive. A person was brought to the laboratory, anesthetized, opened and divided into organs, masterfully so as not to damage anything. It was done for different purposes. For example, on an autopsy, but still alive person, it was possible to study how bacteria multiply inside a particular disease. One was simply inoculated with the plague, the other was inoculated with the plague and given serum, the third - another type of serum. And compared. This is how the effectiveness of vaccines is determined.



Famous picture of Sigmund Rascher: a kind doctor with an adopted son.

Surgeons trained in these kinds of jobs eventually became very, very good doctors. They saved many lives. But even more lives were saved by vaccines developed by the Japanese. The victory over cholera, the final massacre of plague and typhus – this is largely the merit of Unit 731. We still use their designs today. Aren't we ashamed?

The subjects were called logs. Convicted criminals, spies, Russian prisoners, they all served as material. Of course, the Chinese suffered the most. At a landfill near Anda station, bombs filled with plague fleas and gas gangrene pathogens were tested. Subjects were tied to pillars at a certain distance from the site of the planned discharge. Some are dressed, some with naked body parts. And measured the time in which the plague flea is able to overcome the distance from the point of explosion to the immobilized victim. . .

weekdays

Dr. Mengele, the most famous Nazi experimental beast. Characteristically, unlike Rascher’s experiments, Mengele’s experiments almost never pursued any specific goal.

There are things that are not spoken out loud. There are experiments that cannot be done in a democratic society. There is a contribution to science that cannot be denied. This is the contribution that the Nazis made.

Let’s be honest: the lion’s share of what we know about extreme medicine comes from experiments conducted during the war by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Dachau Camp and Dr. Yoshimura Hisato of Japan’s Unit 731. These experiments were conducted independently of each other and for different purposes. Rasher was tasked by the leadership to investigate the effects of hypothermia on the human body, so that this knowledge could be used to treat injured soldiers. Yoshimura conducted experiments to create a cold bomb filled with liquid nitrogen. A lot has been said about Unit 731; let us turn to Rascher’s experiments.

Unlike Japan, where all experiments were conducted in one place, in a specially equipped laboratory complex, the German experiments were somewhat chaotic. If it was possible to create laboratory conditions for experiments at the camp, they were created. Poisons were tested at Buchenwald, mustard gas at Sachsenhausen, hypothermia at Dachau, and so on. Sigmund Rascher was a very peculiar man. He repeatedly fell under the hot hand of his own leadership and was close to expulsion from the party and even shooting. Rascher’s well-known medical scam was the assertion that a woman is able to give birth to a very old age (up to 80 years); huge funds were allocated for research in this area, subsequently appropriated by a cunning doctor. In fact, in 1944, his career ended in the same Dachau camp, where, ironically, Nazi experiments were staged.

But since 1942, it was the disgraced Rascher who was engaged in experiments on frostbite. In the first series of experiments, prisoners were immersed in icy water - some on the chest, others on the neck, and others - down the back of the head. In different circumstances, death occurred at different times. Some were tried to resuscitate – in the final report, Rascher described in detail the methods of saving people who survived severe general hypothermia. In the second series of experiments, local frostbite and cold burns were investigated. People were poured with cold water and exposed to frost, brought limbs to frostbite of varying severity and tried to return them to normal. As mentioned, the same experiments were conducted in Japan. German and Japanese reports still serve as the basic material for the treatment of frostbite and resuscitation of people affected by hypothermia. Could such results have been achieved without human sacrifice? Unknown.

The same Rascher initiated a series of experiments to determine the practical ceiling for pilots by incarcerating test subjects in sealed cells and creating a rarefaction there. The pressure chamber simulated the conditions existing at different altitudes - up to 20 kilometers. Unit 731 conducted exactly the same experiments, only to make them absurd at times. The air from the chamber was pumped out to such an extent that the person inside simply burst.

One of the problems of Nazi research was, oddly enough, Himmler, their immediate superior. Being not very knowledgeable in this science man, he regularly interfered in the work of doctors, covered promising research and financed meaningless, for example, warming frostbitten female body (for these experiments was spent a lot of money).

It is worth noting that we deliberately do not focus on the infamous experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. We have not been able to find any basis for most of his experiments at Auschwitz and other death camps. Attempts at stitching twins, transplanting organs from one twin to another, changing eye color by injecting chemicals have done nothing for medicine. Everything suggests that Mengele was nothing more than a high-ranking madman.

What's going on today

The main document regulating the relationship between doctors and participants in medical experiments is the Helsinki Declaration, adopted in 1964 and since then has undergone many amendments and changes. The last edition came out in 2008. The declaration was based on the Nuremberg Code, adopted during the trial of Nazi criminals. The Code states that “... prior to the adoption of an affirmative decision, the subject of the experiment shall be informed of its nature, duration and purpose; the method and methods by which it will be carried out; all possible inconveniences and risks; and the consequences for his health or personality.” In addition, the code required “the right of the subject to refuse to participate in the study at any stage of its implementation”.

However, sometimes there are cases that do not fall under the law, but still go unpunished. The story of the girl Stephanie Faye Boclair, nicknamed “Baby Faye”, was widely publicized. Faye was born in California in 1984 with left heart hypoplasia syndrome, requiring an instant organ transplant. There was no suitable donor for the newborn, and surgeon Leonard Bailey transplanted the baby — for the first time in history! — a baboon heart. The girl died 21 days later from a kidney infection - and the heart was working. Is Bailey's action ethical? Is it legal? Discussions did not cease for ten years after the operation, but then faded. In principle, the same persecution once suffered the great surgeon Christian Barnard, who conducted the first successful heart transplant in history.

In Russia, there is a serious loophole in the legislation for human experiments: the federal law “On Medicines” includes the notorious article 40, which allows “testing of drugs intended for the treatment of mental illness on mentally ill people who are deprived of legal capacity.” That is, in fact, the article allows experiments on humans without consent.

Experiments with volunteers are conducted today, there is no legal or moral problem. What to do with studies that don’t have volunteers? How do you investigate something that carries real life risk or guaranteed injury? No answer. Ethics versus science is a perpetual conflict that humanity is unlikely to be able to resolve.



Christian Barnard is the first physician to successfully transplant a heart from person to person.



Aerial view of Dachau: a sample of German accuracy.

biomedicine

The most controversial medical “event” in U.S. history is not even the acceptance and acquittal of Japanese medical criminals from Unit 731, but American experiments aimed at studying the development of syphilis. Since 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service's Division of Venereal Diseases has been conducting research on syphilis in a black population in Tuskegee, Alabama. Why black? Because the ignorant and uneducated Negroes did not know that there were ways to cure this pernicious disease. Moreover, when penicillin began to be used for the treatment of syphilis (from about 1947), doctors deliberately concealed this fact from patients, continuing research. The attitude of doctors to the subjects was clearly expressed by Dr. John Heller. "They were subjects, not sick, clinical material, not patients," he said in one of the interviews given after the project ended.

The end of the experiments was put in 1972 by the press. Specialist in research of sexually transmitted diseases Peter Bakstun published a devastating article about the Alabama experiment. The article appeared on the front pages of major American newspapers, including the New York Times, and under public pressure, the experiment was discontinued, survivors were provided with medical care, and all medical participants were denied the right to practice medicine. It should be noted that much of the evidence about the development of syphilis, the transmission of it from mother to child and the possibility of infection is derived precisely from this unpleasant episode of American history.



1950s picture: A doctor injects a Tuskegee subject with a placebo under the guise of a real drug.



Dr. Bailey feeds baby Faye after a successful monkey heart transplant.

Source: cryua.livejournal

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