When:
Thursday, April 2, 2015
12:00 PM - 12:45 PM CT
Where: Robert H Lurie Medical Research Center, Searle Seminar Room, 303 E. Superior, Chicago, IL 60611 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Bryan Morrison
(312) 503-1927
Group: Medical Humanities & Bioethics Lunchtime Montgomery Lectures
Category: Academic
Dangerous Medicine: Militarized Science And America’s Experiments With Hepatitis, Part I
Sydney A. Halpern, PhD
Lecturer, Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
For over thirty years, 1942 through 1974, American researchers conducted experiments that deliberately infected people with unmodified hepatitis viruses. The aim was to discover basic features of the pathogens, information necessary for developing preventive and therapeutic measures. The human subjects included mental patients, persons with cognitive impairments, conscientious objectors to the military draft, and inmates of prisons and reformatories. This talk presents major finding from a forthcoming book based on extensive archival research. It retells the story of human-subjects abuses in the U.S.
This talk, the first in a two-part series, locates the roots of the hepatitis studies—and other hazardous mid-century human experiments—with the rise of federal support of biomedicine for purposes of national defense. Scientists and their military sponsors invoked national security to justify dangerous medical research and secure the cooperation of those managing institutions housing potential subjects.