Human Experimentation: Rethinking The 'Bad Old Days'

Princeton University’s decision to keep Woodrow Wilson’s name on a series of buildings and programs is the latest development in the recent debates over controversial historical figures. While this topic has focused primarily on Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun and other politicians who espoused racist beliefs, there is a parallel debate in the world of bioethics.

In this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine, Arthur Caplan and I look back at a series of odious experiments done by medical researchers on disadvantaged populations. Although these investigators have rightly been excoriated for their actions, we argue that it is crucial to ask why these individuals—sometimes very progressive in their thinking—nevertheless behaved so badly when it came to medical research.

What are the kind of experiments that require more than condemnation? One occurred at Brooklyn’s Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in 1963, when Memorial Sloan Kettering physician Chester Southam injected cancer cells without informed consent into debilitated non-cancer patients. When the media found out about the experiments, a scandal erupted. Southam is routinely listed in the pantheon of unethical...