Unethical human experimentation is human experimentation that violates the principles of medical ethics. Such practices have included denying patients the right to informed consent, using pseudoscientific frameworks such as race science, and torturing people under the guise of research. Around World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany carried out brutal experiments on prisoners and civilians through groups like Unit 731 or individuals like Josef Mengele; the Nuremberg Code was developed after the war in response to the Nazi experiments. Countries have carried out brutal experiments on marginalized populations. Examples include American abuses during Project MKUltra and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and the mistreatment of indigenous populations in Canada and Australia. The Declaration of Helsinki, developed by the World Medical Association, is widely regarded as the cornerstone document on human research ethics.
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany performed human experimentation on large numbers of prisoners (including children), largely Jews from across Europe, but also Romani, Sinti, ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and disabled Germans, in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Prisoners were forced into participating; they did not willingly volunteer and no consent was given for the procedures. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, trauma, illness, shortening of life, disfigurement, or permanent disability, and as such are considered as examples of medical torture since the participants had to endure mass amounts of pain.
At Auschwitz and other German camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various hazardous experiments that were designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel who had been injured, and to advance the racial ideology backed by the Third Reich. Aribert Heim conducted similar medical experiments at Mauthausen. At Buchenwald, Carl Værnet conducted experiments on homosexual prisoners in an attempt to "cure" homosexuality.
After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics. During the Nuremberg Trials, 23 Nazi doctors and scientists were tried for the unethical treatment of concentration camp inmates, who were often used as research subjects with fatal consequences. Of those 23, 16 were convicted (15 were convicted for the unethical treatment, while one of them was only convicted of SS membership), 7 were condemned to death, 9 received prison sentences from 10 years to life, and 7 were acquitted.
Before World War II The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Defective Progeny, passed on 14 July 1933, legalized the involuntary sterilization of persons with diseases claimed to be hereditary: weak-mindedness, schizophrenia, alcohol abuse, insanity, blindness, deafness, and physical deformities. The law was used to encourage growth of the Aryan race through the sterilization of persons who fell under the quota of being genetically defective. 1% of citizens between the age of 17 to 24 had been sterilized within two years of the law passing. Within four years, 300,000 patients had been sterilized.Dahl M. [Selection and destruction-treatment of "unworthy-to-live" children in the Third Reich and the role of child and adolescent psychiatry], Prax Kinderpsychol Kinderpsychiatr 2001;50:170-91. From about March 1941 to about January 1945, sterilization experiments were conducted at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and other places by Carl Clauberg. The purpose of these experiments was to develop a method of sterilization which would be suitable for sterilizing millions of people with a minimum of time and effort. These experiments were conducted by means of X-ray, surgery and various drugs. Thousands of victims were sterilized. Aside from its experimentation, the Nazi government sterilized around 400,000 people as part of its compulsory sterilization program. Intravenous injections of solutions speculated to contain iodine and silver nitrate were successful, but had unwanted side effects, such as vaginal bleeding, severe abdominal pain, and cervical cancer. Therefore, radiation treatment became the favored choice of sterilization. Specific amounts of exposure to radiation destroyed a person's ability to produce ova or sperm. The radiation was administered through deception. Prisoners were brought into a room and asked to complete forms, which took two to three minutes. In this time, the radiation treatment was administered and, unknown to the prisoners, they were rendered completely sterile. Many suffered severe radiation burns.
Eugen Fischer began sterilization experimentation in German-occupied South West Africa during World War I. A supporter of forced sterilization as a means to prevent the growth of inferior populations and a member of the Nazi Party, Fischer focused his experimentation on mixed-race children in order to justify the Nazi Party's ban on interracial marriage. As a result of Fischer's research in Namibia, Germany prohibited marriages between people of different races in its colonies.Friedlander, Henry. 1997. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press
During World War II
The Luftwaffe performed a series of 360 to 400 experiments at Dachau and Auschwitz, in which hypothermia was induced in 280 to 300 victims. These were conducted for the Nazi high command to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the cold weather they encountered. Many experiments were conducted on captured Russian troops; the Nazis wondered whether their genetics gave them superior resistance to cold. Approximately 100 people are reported to have died as a result of these experiments.Neurnberg Military Tribunal, Volume I · Page 200
In early 1942, prisoners at Dachau concentration camp were used by Sigmund Rascher in experiments to aid German pilots who had to eject at high altitudes. A low-pressure chamber containing these prisoners was used to simulate conditions at altitudes of up to 20,000 m (66,000 ft). Of the 200 subjects, 80 died outright, and the others were executed.
Other experiments included: an experiment in repeated head injury which drove a boy insane,Small, Martin; Vic Shayne. "Remember Us: My Journey from the Shtetl through the Holocaust", Page 135, 2009. experiments at Buchenwald where poisons were secretly administered in food, experiments to test the effect of various pharmaceutical preparations on phosphorus burns induced with material from incendiary bombs, experiments at Ravensbrück to investigate the effectiveness of sulfonamide after infection with bacteria such as Clostridium perfringens (the causative agent in gas gangrene) and Clostridium tetani (the causative agent in tetanus),Schaefer, Naomi. The Legacy of Nazi Medicine , The New Atlantis, Number 5, Spring 2004, pp. 54–60. experiments conducted to attempt treatments of chemical burns induced by mustard gas and similar compounds, and experiments at Dachau to study various methods of making sea water drinkable.
Many of the subjects died as a result of the experiments, while many others were executed after the tests were completed to study the effects post mortem. Those who survived were often left mutilated, which resulted in permanent disability, weakened bodies, and mental distress.
The results of the Dachau freezing experiments have been used in some modern research into the treatment of hypothermia, with at least 45 publications having referenced the experiments since the Second World War. This, together with the recent use of data from Nazi research into the effects of phosgene gas, has proven controversial and presents an ethical dilemma for modern physicians who do not agree with the methods used to obtain this data. Some object on an ethical basis, and others have rejected Nazi research purely on scientific grounds, pointing out methodological inconsistencies. In an often-cited review of the Dachau hypothermia experiments, Berger states that the study has "all the ingredients of a scientific fraud" and that the data "cannot advance science or save human lives."
Several Nazi experimenters were after the war employed by the United States government in Operation Paperclip and later similar efforts.
Japan Empire of Japan
Human subject research in Japan began in World War II. It continued for some years after. Unit 731, a department of the Imperial Japanese Army located near Harbin (then in the puppet state of Manchukuo, in northeast China), experimented on prisoners by conducting vivisections, dismemberments, and bacterial inoculations. It induced epidemics on a very large scale from 1932 onward through the Second Sino-Japanese War. It also conducted biological and chemical weapons tests on prisoners and captured POWs. With the expansion of the empire during World War II, similar units were set up in conquered cities such as Nanjing (Unit 1644), Beijing (Unit 1855), Guangzhou (Unit 8604) and Singapore (Unit 9420). After the war, Supreme Commander of the Occupation Douglas MacArthur gave immunity in the name of the United States to Shirō Ishii and all members of the units in exchange for all of the results of their experiments. The US blocked Soviet access to this information. The Soviets prosecuted some of the Unit 731 members during its Khabarovsk War Crime Trials.
In November 2006, Doctor Akira Makino confessed to Kyodo News that he had performed surgery and amputations on condemned prisoners, including women and children, in 1944 and 1945 while he was stationed on Mindanao. Most of Makino's victims were Moro Muslims.AFP Japanese veteran haunted by WWII surgical killings 2007. In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to The Japan Times and said that he believes that at least 1,000 persons working for the Shōwa regime, including surgeons, conducted surgical research in mainland China.
State of Japan In incidents throughout the 1950s, former Unit 731 members infected prisoners and mental health patients with deadly diseases. In 1958, a large number of infants were brought to Kobe Medical School and forcibly administered sugar by having needles inserted through their noses and into their stomachs. A tube was inserted into their anuses to determine how the sugar was processed by their digestive systems. Many of the infants experienced diarrhea and anal bleeding. The parents were never informed that their children were being used as test subjects.清水昭美『増補・生体実験』三一新書、1979年；日比逸郎「臨床研究と生体実験」『ジュリスト臨時増刊・医療と人権』(No.548)、有斐閣、1973年11月、pp.18-23
The US army and Japanese government they installed refused to help Japanese atomic bomb victims (Hibakusha) and instead collected data on them and took samples of their organs after they died. The US military paid Japanese members of Unit 731 to conduct experiments on Japanese people in Japan in 1952, with a Japanese girl dying after multiple Japanese babies were deliberately infected with E. coli bacteria at Nagoya City University Hospital by Jiro Ogawa. Japanese patients at a mental hospital were infected with scrub typhus in 1953–1956, with one killing himself to escape the torture and another nine patients dying of the typhus itself.
Indigenous Australians