When science goes over the edge

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Let's talk about four experiments in which a person was perceived as a guinea pig. But be warned - this text may seem unpleasant.

Pressure chambers in a concentration camp, from which space medicine "grew"

Aviation doctor Siegfried Ruffwas one of those who appeared as the main defendant at the Nuremberg trials of doctors. He was charged with conducting experiments on humans in the Dachau concentration camp.

In particular, on the instructions of the Luftwaffe in the concentration camp, they studied what happens to the pilot of a downed plane when he catapults from a great height and falls into the icy sea water. For this, a camera was mounted in the concentration camp, in which it was possible to simulate a free fall from a height of 21 thousand meters. The prisoners were also immersed in ice water. As a result, 70-80 of the 200 test subjects died.

As director of the Institute for Aviation Medicine at the German Research Center for Aviation Medicine, Ruff assessed the results of the experiment and possibly planned them personally. However, the court failed to prove the doctor's involvement in these experiments, because officially he only worked with data.

So he was acquitted, and he continued to work at the institute, until in 1965 the Bonn student newspaper published an article entitled “Experiments in a pressure chamber. On the criticism of Professor Ruff. " Five months later, Ruff stepped down from his post "in the interests of the university."

Since Ruff was not convicted, he was not (at least officially) among those recruited during Operation Paperclip (a program of the US Strategic Services Administration to recruit scientists from the Third Reich to work in the United States after World War II.). But here is his colleague at the institute, Hubertus Straghold(Hubertus Strughold), was flown to the States in 1947 and began his working career at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine near San Antonio, Texas.

As an American scientist, Straghold introduced the terms "space medicine" and "astrobiology" in 1948. The following year, he was appointed the first and only professor of space medicine at the newly formed US Air Force School of Aviation Medicine (SAM), where research was conducted on issues such as atmospheric control, the physical effects of weightlessness, and disruption of normal timing.

Also from 1952 to 1954, Straghold oversaw the creation of a space cabin simulator and a pressurized chamber where subjects were placed for extended periods of time to see the potential physical, astrobiological and psychological effects of flight out of the atmosphere.

Straghold received US citizenship in 1956 and was appointed Chief Scientist of NASA's Aerospace Medicine Division in 1962. In this capacity, he played a central role in the development of the spacesuit and onboard life support systems. The scientist also supervised special training for flight surgeons and medical personnel of the Apollo program in advance of the planned mission to the moon. A library was even named in his honor in 1977.

Straghold retired from his post at NASA in 1968 and died in 1986. However, in the 90s, American intelligence documents surfaced, where the name of Straghold was indicated among other wanted war criminals. So in 1993, at the request of the World Jewish Congress, the portrait of the scientist was removed from the stand of prominent doctors at Ohio State University, and in 1995 the already mentioned library was renamed.

In 2004, an investigation was presented by the Historical Committee of the German Society for Air and Space Medicine. In its course, evidence was found of experiments on oxygen deprivation carried out by the institute, where Straghold had worked since 1935.

According to the data, six children with epilepsy, between the ages of 11 and 13, were transported from the Nazi "euthanasia" center in Brandenburg to the Berlin laboratory of Straghold and placed in vacuum chambers to induce epileptic seizures and simulate the effects of high-altitude illnesses such as hypoxia.

Although, unlike the Dachau experiments, all of the test subjects survived the research, this discovery led the Society for Air and Space Medicine to cancel a major Straghold award. It is still unknown whether the scientist supervised the planning of the experiments or whether he worked exclusively with the information received.

Detachment 731 and the development of bacteriological weapons

If you have heard earlier about Unit 731 in Manchuria, then you know that truly inhuman experiments were carried out there. According to testimony at the post-war trial in Khabarovsk, this detachment of the Japanese armed forces was organized to prepare for bacteriological warfare, mainly against the Soviet Union, but also against the Mongolian People's Republic, China and other states.

However, not only "bacteriological weapons" were tested on living people, whom the Japanese called among themselves "maruta" or "logs". They also underwent cruel and torturous experiments that were supposed to provide doctors with an "unprecedented experience."

Among the experiments were vivisection of a living person, frostbite, experiments in pressure chambers, the introduction of toxic substances and gases into the body of the experimental (to study their toxic effects), as well as infection with various diseases, among which were measles, syphilis, tsutsugamushi (a tick-borne disease, " Japanese river fever "), plague and anthrax.

In addition, the detachment had a special air unit, which conducted "field tests" in the early 1940s and subjected 11 county cities in China to bacteriological attacks. In 1952, Chinese historians estimated the death toll from an artificially induced plague at approximately 700 from 1940 to 1944.

At the end of the war, a number of servicemen of the Kwantung Army involved in the creation and work of the detachment were convicted during the Khabarovsk trial at the local House of Officers of the Soviet Army. However, later, some of the employees of this literally hell on earth received academic degrees and public recognition. For example, the former chiefs of the detachment Masaji Kitano and Shiro Ishii.

Especially indicative here is the example of Ishii, who at the end of the war fled to Japan, having previously tried to cover up his tracks and destroy the camp. There he was arrested by the Americans, but in 1946, at the request of General MacArthur, the US authorities granted Ishii immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on biological weapons research based on those very experiments on humans.

Shiro Ishii was never brought before a Tokyo court or punished for war crimes. He opened his own clinic in Japan and died at the age of 67 from cancer. In the book "Devil's Kitchen" by Morimura Seiichi, it is stated that the former squad leader visited the United States and even continued his research there.

Experiments with sarin on the military

Sarin was discovered in 1938 by two German scientists trying to make more potent pesticides. It is the third most toxic G-series poisonous substance created in Germany after soman and cyclosarine.

After the war, British intelligence began to study the influence of sarin on humans. Since 1951, British scientists have recruited military volunteers. In exchange for several days of being fired, they were allowed to breathe in vapors of sarin, or the liquid was dripped onto their skin.

Moreover, the dose was determined "by eye", without medications that stop the physiological signs of poisoning. In particular, one in six volunteers, a man named Kelly, is known to have been exposed to 300 mg of sarin and fell into a coma, but subsequently recovered. This led to a decrease in the dose used in the experiments to 200 mg.

Sooner or later it had to end badly. And the victim was a 20 year old Ronald Maddison, engineer of the British Air Force. In 1953, he died while testing sarin at the Porton Down Science and Technology Laboratory in Wiltshire. Moreover, the poor man did not even know what he was doing, he was told that he was participating in an experiment to treat a cold. Apparently, he began to suspect something only when he was given a respirator, two layers of cloth used in military uniforms were glued to his forearm, and 20 drops of sarin, 10 mg each, were applied to it.

For ten days after his death, the investigation was conducted in secret, after which the verdict "accident" was pronounced. In 2004, the investigation was reopened, and after a 64-day hearing, the court ruled that Maddison had been unlawfully killed "by exposure to nerve poison in an inhuman experiment." His relatives received monetary compensation.

A radioactive person who knew nothing about the experiment on himself

This experiment was carried out in 1945 and one person was killed. But all the same, the cynicism of the experience is overwhelming. Albert Stevens was an ordinary painter, but went down in history as the CAL-1 patient who survived the highest known cumulative radiation dose of any person.

How did it come about? Stephens fell victim to a government experiment. The Manhattan Nuclear Weapons Project was in full swing at the time, and the X-10 graphite reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was producing significant quantities of newly discovered plutonium. Unfortunately, simultaneously with the growth of production, the problem of air pollution with radioactive elements arose, which caused an increase in the number of industrial injuries: laboratory workers accidentally inhaled and swallowed a hazardous substance.

Unlike radium, plutonium-238 and plutonium-239 are extremely difficult to detect inside the body. While a person is alive, the easiest way is to analyze his urine and feces, however, this method also has its limitations.

So the scientists decided that they needed to develop a program as soon as possible for a reliable way to detect this metal in the human body. They started with animals in 1944 and approved three human trials in 1945. Albert Stevens became one of the participants.

He went to the hospital for stomach pains, where he was diagnosed with a terrible diagnosis of stomach cancer. Having decided that Stevens was not a tenant anyway, he was accepted into the program and, according to some information, they took consent to the introduction of plutonium.

True, most likely, in the papers this substance was called differently, for example, "product" or "49" (such names were given to plutonium within the framework of the "Manhattan Project"). There is no evidence that Stevens had any idea that he was the subject of a secret government experiment in which he was exposed to a hazardous substance.

The man was injected with a mixture of isotopes of plutonium, which was supposed to be lethal: modern research shows that Stevens, who weighed 58 kilograms, was injected with 3.5 μCi of plutonium-238 and 0.046 μCi of plutonium-239. But, nevertheless, he continued to live.

It is known that once during an operation to remove "cancer" Stevens was taken samples of urine and feces for radiological testing. But when the hospital's pathologist analyzed the material removed from the patient during the operation, it turned out that the surgeons had eliminated "a benign stomach ulcer with chronic inflammation." The patient did not have cancer.

When Stevens' condition improved and his medical bills increased, he was sent home. In order not to lose a valuable patient, Manhattan County decided to pay for his urine and feces samples under the pretext that his "cancer" surgery and remarkable recovery were being studied.

Stevens' son recalled that Albert kept the samples in a shed behind the house, and once a week the trainee and nurse took them away. Whenever a man had health problems, he would return to the hospital and receive "free" radiological assistance.

No one ever informed Stevens that he did not have cancer, or that he was part of an experiment. The man received approximately 6,400 rem 20 years after the first injection, or about 300 rem per year. For comparison, now the annual dose for radiation workers in the United States is no more than 5 rem. That is, Stephen's annual dose was about 60 times that amount. It's like standing for 10 minutes next to the just exploded Chernobyl reactor.

But thanks to the fact that Stevens received doses of plutonium gradually, and not all at once, he died only in 1966 at the age of 79 (although his bones began to deform due to radiation). His cremated remains were sent to a laboratory for study in 1975 and were never returned to the chapel, where they had been until then.

Stevens' story was detailed by Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen Wells in the 90s. So, in 1993, she published a series of articles in which she described in detail the stories of CAL-1 (Albert Stevens), CAL-2 (four-year-old Simeon Shaw) and CAL-3 (Elmer Allen) and others who were experimental in experiments with plutonium.

After that, then US President Bill Clinton ordered the formation of an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to conduct an investigation. All victims or their families were to be compensated.