On Useful Bodies

The always provocative and interesting Aubrey Blumsohn has an outstanding series of posts up at Scientific Misconduct documenting the CIA's role in performing LSD experiments on human participants after WWII, with the active participation of the pharmaceutical industry.  The series is divided into five parts and  was prompted by the recent death of Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD.

Blumsohn notes in the introduction to the first entry in the series:

The invention of LSD is of considerable importance to any discussion about the corruption of science in medicine. The seeds for many of the current problems of medicine lie in the story of LSD and a mysterious organization called MK-ULTRA.

Hofmann's invention was the stimulus underlying a program of research which involved murder and the torture of tens of thousands of unwitting human participants. MK-ULTRA set the standard for later industrial-university collaboration. It set the most important precedent for the collusion of academic leadership and civilized government with scientific misconduct. It was the most flagrant violation of the just-signed Nuremberg code of ethics. These events of 50 years ago provide a key to understanding the problems we face in 2008.

Although there are some conspiracy theories surrounding these research programs, the basic facts are well documented. In the next few posts I will discuss some aspects of MK-ULTRA research, the documentation, how Universities were co-opted, and some of what we know of similar programs in the UK and Canada. Our current crises flow directly from the choices we made in the past.

MK-ULTRA research was carried out with the quiet acquiescence of official medical bodies and with the active collusion of many individual academics. It involved at least 30 Universities. It is not hard to conclude that many of the experimenters were frankly evil. Many were awarded high honours, and no physicians were ever punished for the gross ethical violations which occurred. It has taken more than 40 years for the facts to emerge. There was not a single "whistleblower".

Here are the links:

For Part I see Part I: Invention and the beginnings of MK-ULTRA
For Part II see Part II: The entanglement of academia
For Part III see Part III: Naming Names
For Part IV see Part IV: Pfizer and memory

For Part V see Part V: LSD and the Corruption of Medicine (The UK Connection)

The series is worth reading in full, in no small part because Blumsohn meticulously documents most of his claims.  Many of the citations are to declassified primary source documents, and to reports of government panels citing and quoting declassified primary source documents (these are secondary sources, but are often reasonably reliable, given their extremely public nature and enhanced accessibility to government documents).

I do not have the time to source-check each and every one of Blumsohn's citations, so I cannot vouch for their accuracy, but there are several reasons I am favorably disposed to the bulk of his claims.  First, the history of government and military involvement in unethical research in the U.S. makes The X-Files seem humdrum.  Sadly, many persons' knowledge about this issue begins and ends with the Tuskegee Syphillis Study.  This is "sad" not because Tuskegee is insignificant, of course, but because inasmuch as Tuskegee stands as a placeholder in people's collective minds for "unethical government research on marginalized communities," it may facilitate the erroneous belief that Tuskegee exhausts the set of these unethical practices.

In truth, Tuskegee is just the tip of the iceberg.  And as heinous as Tuskegee was -- and it was pernicious indeed -- it is difficult to contest the notion that qualitatively more horrible deeds were performed on the bodies of marginalized populations than the failure to treat syphillis with penicillin.  In the Willowbrook study, for example, the researchers mixed fecal matter infected with hepatitis into chocolate milk, which was then fed to the mentally challenged inmates of the institution.

In the Cincinnati radiation studies, (sponsored by the U.S. military), investigators administered total body radiation to terminally ill cancer patients, knowing full well that such radiation was both nontherapeutic for the particular cancers affecting the patients, and was likely to be extremely toxic in the quantities used.  The vast majority of these patients were poor African-Americans using the city hospital in Cincinnati.

In his landmark 1966 article (*PDF) documenting myriad instances of unethical research at major academic medical centers, Henry Beecher noted one protocol in which skin cells were taken from a child dying of metastatic disease resulting from melanoma, and injected into the child's mother.  The state of the art in 1966 did not support any reasonable basis for imagining that this could produce a therapy for the child.  In any case, the child died the day after the procedure.   451 days after receiving the skin transplant, the child's mother died from metastatic melanoma.

Margaret Humphreys has meticulously documented the U.S. military's malaria experiments during World War I, performed on the bodies of U.S. soldiers.  Many of the U.S. military's LSD experiments were performed on the bodies of mostly black prisoners in the notorious Holmesburg Prison.

And on, and on, and on . . .

While a definitive history of human participants research in the U.S. remains to be written, one of the better treatments of unethical research is Goodman, McElligott, and Marks's Useful Bodies.  In this anthology, the editors advance a provocative and novel claim about biomedical research in the 20th century: the history of such research is primarily a history of the ways in which unuseful bodies are made useful to the state.  My initial response to this thesis was to doubt that state involvement is really either necessary or sufficient for unethical research to occur.  But the further one delves into the history of unethical research, the more and more plausible this claim begins to seem.

Blumsohn's well-documented posts are certainly consistent with this claim.  Finally, one should observe Blumsohn's point that the history of LSD experiments demonstrates the dangers arising from the entanglement of the public sector with private interests.  These structural entanglements are in part what makes institutional conflicts of interest so difficult to resolve.

Thoughts?    

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

I've yet to read the material you've linked to here but the historical irony of course is that even before the CIA gave up on LSD, researchers like Dr. Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), Andrew Weil (cf. his book, The Natural Mind, 1972), Timothy Leary, and even Albert Hoffman himself, used it to explore different states of consciousness (engaging in self-experiments) and that, in time, psychedelics like LSD and Pscylocibin helped spark the counter-cultural (and, yes, social protest) movements that began in the late 1950s and blossomed in the 1960s, eventually giving rise to the exploration of "alternative" religions like Zen Buddhism. The spiritual part of the journey was inspired in part by the "godfather" of the Beat Generation, the polymathic poet Kenneth Rexroth, and led by (among others) such folks as the poets Gary Snyder and (the late) Allen Ginsberg.