History Forum / General / General Topics / July 2008

Postwar experimentation

One individual who contributed greatly to the postwar acceptance of prisoners as
appropriate subjects for research was Andrew C Ivy, an eminent researcher and vice
president of the University of Illinois Medical School. Asked by the American Medical
Association to be its representative at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial and the prosecution's
key witness on American medical ethics, Ivy testified to the high ethical standards of
American researchers during the war, including those working in penal institutions. No
American prisoner, Ivy reiterated, had ever been experimented on against his will. Defence
counsel strongly objected to Ivy's sanitised portrayal of American prison research and
peppered him with questions about numerous penal experiments both before and during the
war.22 Dr Ivy remained intransigent; he did not believe that official coercion was
necessarily inherent in a prison environment and restated his belief that prisoners in the
United States had a choice as to whether they should participate in clinical experiments.
Ivy articulated three "principles" for establishing ethical prison research: if "the
consent of the subject was obtained"; if the experiment was based on "animal
experimentation"; and if it was directed by "scientifically qualified persons" the medical
procedure was acceptable.22 For American researchers anxious to utilise the thousands of
potential subjects behind bars, Ivy's emphasis on acquiring voluntary consent from
experimental subjects represented a seal of approval. In fact, the seal of approval came
less than a year after the Doctors' Trial, when the journal of the American Medical
Association published a "special article" that endorsed the "ideal" medical practice used
in the Stateville malaria experiments, where Ivy claimed his principles had been
implemented.23

Although the Doctors' Trial culminated in the establishment of the Nuremberg Code—whose
first principle emphasised that the human subject "should have legal capacity to give
consent ... exercise free power of choice, without the element of force ... constraint or
coercion"—the American medical community either claimed ignorance of the document or
ignored it.24 The first principle of the code seemed to preclude the use of prisoners, but
Ivy, America's star witness on medical ethics, extolled the virtues of just such
scientific practices. The muddy ethical waters that resulted from the dual codes allowed
American medical researchers to follow their own moral guidelines or utilitarian interests.

The result was tremendous expansion in prison experimentation in postwar America. Federal
prisoners, for example, were enlisted in a broad range of clinical studies that included
athlete's foot, histoplasmosis, infectious hepatitis, syphilis, and amoebic dysentery, and
in additional malaria experiments.25 State prisoners were considered to be equally
valuable and were soon utilised for studies of syphilis, malaria, influenza, viral
hepatitis, and flash burns "which might result from atomic bomb attacks."26 27 28 29 30
Some of these postwar medical initiatives were scientifically unsound and placed prisoners
at great risk. Louis Boy, for example, a prisoner in Sing Sing (New York), volunteered to
become a human blood cleaning agent for a young "girl dying of cancer."31 For 24 hours the
prisoner and the 8 year old girl were laid side by side, "their circulatory systems linked
together with rubber tubing," in the hope that her cancerous "poisoned blood" would be
cleansed as it proceeded through his body. Unfortunately, the risky experiment proved
unsuccessful and the girl died. However, public interest in the human drama resulted in
the prisoner, a lifer, receiving a Christmas gift from the governor—his freedom.32

In the 1950s, American prisons hosted an increasing variety of non-therapeutic medical
experiments, some of which captured national headlines because of the perceived dangers of
the tests. The Ohio state prison system, for example, allowed researchers from the
Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research to inject over 100 inmates with live cancer
cells. The study was designed to examine "the natural killing off process of the human
body"; inmates were informed they faced "no grave danger. Any cancer that took would
spread slowly ... and could be removed surgically."33 One physician intimate with the
study four decades ago recently said that prisoners were a "stable group of people" that
contributed to the "assurance of continuity." Researchers, he argued, clearly found it
"more difficult to work with unrestrained, unrestricted" test subjects (C Southam,
personal communication).

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