In the name of science : a history of secret programs, medical research, and human experimentation
معرفی کتاب «In the name of science : a history of secret programs, medical research, and human experimentation» نوشتهٔ Goliszek, Andrew، منتشرشده توسط نشر Macmillan;St. Martin's Press در سال 2011. این کتاب در فرمت mobi، زبان انگلیسی ارائه شده است.
Science, as Andrew Goliszek proves in this compendious, chilling, and eye-opening book, has always had its dark side. Behind the bright promise of life-saving vaccines and life-enhancing technologies lies the true cost of the efforts to develop them. Knowledge has a price; often that price has been human suffering. The ethical limits governing use of the human body in experimentation have been breached, redefined, and breached again---from the moment the first plague-ridden corpse was heaved over the fortifications of a besieged medieval city to the use of cutting-edge gene therapy today. Those limits are in constant need of redefinition, for the goals and the techniques have become both more refined and more secretive. The German and Japanese human experiments of the 1930s and 1940s horrified the world when they came to light. These barbaric exercises in pseudoscience grew out of assumptions of racial superiority. The subjects were deemed subhuman; ordinary guidelines could therefore be suspended. What has happened in the decades since World War II has differed only in degree. Explicitly or implicitly, any organization or government that undertakes or sponsors scientific research applies some measure of human worth. Experimentation rests upon an equation that balances suffering against gain, the good of the collective against the rights of the individual, and the risk of unknown consequences against the rewards of scientific discovery. Everything depends upon who makes that equation. The sobering and gripping accumulation of evidence in this book proves exactly what has been justified in the name of science. The science of "eugenics" justified enforced sterilization. The need to gain an upper hand in the Cold War justified CIA experiments involving mind control and drugs. The desperate race to control nuclear proliferation was used to justify radiation experiments whose effects are still being felt today. Chemical warfare, gene therapy, molecular medicine: These subjects dominate headlines and even direct our government's foreign policy, yet the whole truth about the experimentation behind them has never been made public. Though not a cheering book, In the Name of Science is a crucially important one, and it deserves a wide audience. A biologist by training, Goliszek presents each topic clearly and explains fully its significance and implications. Connecting the history of scientific experimentation through time with the topics that are likely to dominate the future, he has performed an invaluable service. No other book on the market provides the research included here, or presents it with such persuasive force. In the Name of Science
1THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION: BRINGING BAD THINGS TO LIFENathan Schnurman, a seventeen-year-old sailor recruited to test U.S. Navy summer clothing in exchange for a three-day pass, never thought he would be gasping for air inside a gas chamber instead. The instructions he received were simple, and he didn’t think much of it at the time when he was ordered to put on a mask and some special clothing. During the experiment, the mustard gas and lewisite he was exposed to seeped through his mask, making him first nauseous and then violently ill. He demanded to be released, but was refused because the scientists conducting the experiment told him that it was not yet completed. Shortly after his second demand, he passed out. When he regained consciousness, he found himself lying outside the gas chamber and thinking how lucky he was to be alive.“I called to the corpsman via an intercom and informed him of my condition and what was happening, and requested I be released from the chamber, now,” Schnurman testified before a judiciary committee. “The reply was ‘no,’ as they had not completed the experiment. I became very nauseous. Again I requested to be released from the chamber. Again permission was denied. Within seconds, I passed out in the chamber. What happened after that, I don’t know. I may only assume that when I was removed from the chamber, I was presumed dead.”Another serviceman, Lloyd B. Gamble, had dedicated more than seven years of his life to the U.S. Air Force. When he volunteered for a special program to test new military protective gear, he was offered various incentives, including a liberal leave policy, family visitations, superior living and recreational facilities, and letters of commendation to be made part of his permanent record. During the first three weeks of testing. Gamble was given two or three water-sized glasses of a liquid to drink. He soon developed erratic behavior and even attempted suicide, but what he didn’t learn until eighteen years later was that what he’d received as a human subject was LSD. Even after he found out, the Department of Defense (DOD) denied that he’d participated in the experiments, although an official publicity photo shows him as one of the servicemen volunteering for a “special program that was in the highest national security interest.”Both Schnurman and Gamble were victims of a massive organized program that used both the military and civilians to carry out human experiments involving chemicals and chemical agents. All participants had been sworn to secrecy, like eighteen-year old Rudolph Mills, who discovered forty-six years after his own gas chamber experiments that four thousand other servicemen were essentially human guinea pigs for the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). Though his health began to deteriorate while still in the navy, Mills did not learn that his lifelong physical health problems were likely related to mustard gas exposure until more than forty years later. According to a September 28, 1994 General Accounting Office report, the DOD and other national security agencies used hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous and often deadly substances.This kind of duplicity doesn’t begin or end with the military, however. For decades, scientists working for corporations have been hiding research results, relying on flawed or fraudulent studies, or disregarding the health effects of chemical products in order to ensure a steady stream of profits. Because even a small change in data can often have a major effect on the findings of a study, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether or not researchers have acted ethically. Take the case of two scientists who had published a mortality study comparing cancer rates of workers exposed to a hazardous substance with those who were not and then later placed four exposed workers in the unexposed group. This simple switch increased the death rate in the control group while significantly decreasing the death rate in the exposed group. While the researchers contended that the reclassification was done in good faith, the incident triggered a dispute within the FDA as to whether an ethics investigation should or should not have been conducted.In some cases, there was widespread use of toxic chemicals on humans simply because no one knew how dangerous the chemicals were. After DDT (the potent insecticide that replaced lead arsenate) was developed, the U.S. government dusted millions of soldiers to prevent malaria and typhus. This miracle chemical that killed hundreds of different pest species was made famous in a 1948 Life Magazine photograph of a teenaged girl eating a hot dog surrounded by a cloud of DDT. What DuPont scientists did not realize until decades later was the extent to which their altered molecules and synthetic chemicals would accumulate in the environment and continue to show up in the blood of virtually every American twenty-five years after its ban.By just taking a look at the world around us, we quickly realize the impact chemicals have had on virtually every aspect of our lives. We’re literally surrounded by a sea of organic and inorganic compounds. Our bodies are composed of thousands of chemicals, each made from billions of molecules that react with one another and assemble into complex forms to make life possible. We eat chemicals, drink chemicals, breathe chemicals, put chemicals on and in our bodies, and take chemicals whenever we’re sick. From the moment we’re born to the day we die, we are so dependent on chemicals that we wouldn’t know what to do without them.Over the last hundred years, that dependence has become an addiction. Natural recipes handed down for centuries have been replaced by products promising everything from clean kitchen counters to cancer cures. Along comes the chemical industry, and we now have more than fifty thousand synthetic compounds—many of them unregulated, some of them miracles of humanity, and others more deadly than anything nature could come up with. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that natural products can often be deadly. When man gets into the act, they can become even deadlier.
Chemical Warfare AgentsIn 1978 London, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian exile, stood patiently on a street corner and watched the stop-and-go of traffic while awaiting the next bus. The sky was overcast, and the steady stream of commuters made him less likely to think that anything out of the ordinary was about to take place. Perhaps he was thinking of his family back home or about what he had to do that day. But as he looked at the passing cars, he suddenly felt dizzy, lost consciousness, and collapsed. Within a few days he stopped breathing and died. His mysterious death remained a mystery until the autopsy was done, when investigators discovered a tiny pellet beneath his skin containing ricin, a chemical six thousand times more toxic than cyanide. The Bulgarian, they eventually learned, was a former agent murdered by the communist Bulgarian government with an umbrella gun supplied by the KGB and fired unnoticed in a crowd of passersby who never suspected that chemical warfare had been waged so easily.The use of natural chemicals has been reported for more than two millennia. As far back as 600 B.C., when the Athenians poisoned with helleborus root a river used by its enemy as drinking water, chemicals have been used as a means of waging war. In 200 B.C., Carthage defeated one of its enemies in a battle by leaving behind casks of wine tainted with mandragora, a root that produces a narcotic-like sleep. After enemy soldiers drank the wine, the Carthaginians returned and killed them. In one of the more bizarre examples, Hannibal, in a naval battle against Eumenes II of Pergamum, lobbed venomous snakes onto the decks of enemy ships to defeat the Pergamum sailors. In addition, as we know from historical records, arrows tipped with poison chemicals have been used for nearly as long as there have been bows to shoot them.Limiting the use of chemicals as weapons was suggested as far back as 1675, when a French-German agreement was signed in Strasbourg prohibiting the use of poison bullets. But within two centuries, large-scale development of chemical weapons had begun. In 1874, to stem the fear of chemical warfare, the Brussels Convention was adapted prohibiting the use of poison weapons. Twenty-five years later, an international peace conference held in The Hague led to a worldwide agreement outlawing the use of projectiles filled with poison gases. These agreements, it was hoped, would put an end to the development of weapons thought too horrible to be used against human beings. It didn’t.Modern chemical warfare actually started in the nineteenth century with incendiary arsenic bombs that sent plumes of poison smoke across enemy battle lines. Soldiers exposed to the smoke died a grisly death. Muscle spasms and severe vomiting were followed by cardiovascular collapse and death within a few hours of inhalation. The twentieth century proved no less civilized. After rumors of a new and deadly weapon invented by the Germans early during the First World War, the German Army bombed British forces in Neuve-Chapelle with dianisidine chlorsulfonate. A few months later, they attacked Russian forces with xylyl bromide. Both incidents were merely learning experiences and a prelude to what was to be the first large-scale chemical attack on April 22, 1915.That day, two hours before sunset, the Germans covered themselves head to foot in protective suits and released nearly two hundred tons of chlorine gas from canisters toward the French troops. The greenish mist was taken by a light wind, and within minutes began sinking into the four miles of trench lines where the soldiers experienced something for which they were not prepared. Panic ensued as the men began choking and gasping desperately for breath. When the battle had ended, more than five thousand soldiers had died from asphyxiation. It didn’t take long before both sides recognized the impact of chemical warfare and began using chlorine gas on each other while developing even more efficient and practical means of waging war.Phosgene, a choking gas like chlorine but ten times as toxic, was the next agent to be used. Blister agents were introduced in 1917 and have been used ever since, notably in 1980 to 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War. By the end of 1918, more than one-fourth of all artillery shells fired contained chemical weapons that killed about one hundred thousand people and injured more than a million. In the late 1930s, Germany first developed the G-series nerve agents, such as sarin. In 1936, mustard gas was used by Italy against the Abyssinians. Spanish troops used it in North Africa between the world wars. The Japanese killed large numbers of Chinese from 1937 to 1943 with lewisite, mustard gas, and various biological agents. In the 1950s, England developed even more lethal nerve agents, the V series, which includes the best-known nerve agent, VX.One of the most secret chemical weapons facilities of all was located near the Russian town of Podosinki. Code named “Tomka,” its mission was to develop poison gases to be delivered by artillery, aviation, and special gas projectors. Another Soviet poison facility called “Lab X” was operational as far back as 1937. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of foreign intelligence (precursor of the KGB), the lab was used to develop poisons for assassinating enemies both inside the country and abroad. It’s not known how much of the research was shared with rogue nations such as Iraq, but evidence gathered during the Gulf War suggests that there was a good deal of cooperation between the former Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein, who had no fewer than five chemical and biological weapons factories when the United Nations (UN) inspected Iraq after the Gulf War.According to investigations by the Weekly Mail and Guardian, in the 1980s a company called Protechnik in South Africa was allegedly the largest chemical, biological, and nuclear laboratory in Africa and carried out secret bizarre experiments to test special bullets and heat-resistant clothing. According to a 1989 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report, scientists at the facility worked closely with Israel in the 1980s to develop a chemical warfare capability. (The company has since come under new ownership and is no longer said to be engaged in such research.)Overall, more than three thousand chemicals have been tested for possible use as toxic weapons. In many cases, the agents were first developed as pesticides composed of organic molecules known as organophosphates and then adapted for use on human beings. According to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), ratified on April 29, 1997, there are now five recognized classes of chemical warfare agents:
Nerve agents: After contact with the skin and lungs, these highly toxic organophosphorous chemicals kill by disrupting metabolism and blocking nerve transmission. The first nerve agent, tabun, was developed in 1936 as a pesticide. VX is so toxic that a single drop the size of a pinhead on bare skin may cause death. Symptoms include seizures, vomiting, convulsions, muscle paralysis (including the heart and diaphragm), loss of consciousness, and coma. Death may occur in one to ten minutes. Examples include sarin (GB), soman (GD), tabun (GA), and VX.
Blister agents and lewisite: Also called vesicants, blister agents are absorbed through the lungs and the skin, burning lung tissue, skin, mucous membranes, the windpipe, and the eyes. There are few deaths from blister agents, but a large number of casualties. They damage the respiratory tract and cause severe vomiting and diarrhea. Examples include nine sulfur mustards (HD), three nitrogen mustards (HN), phosgene oximine (CX), and three lewisites.
Blood agents: Distributed by the blood to various tissues and body parts, these agents destroy blood tissue, thereby disrupting oxygen flow to the heart and causing suffocation. Examples include hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride.
Choking agents: Absorbed through the lungs, choking agents cause fluid buildup in lung tissue, preventing the victim from breathing. Essentially, these chemicals cause drowning by inducing alveoli within the lungs to secrete a steady flow of fluid. Examples include phosgene (CG), diphosgene (DP), chlorine (Cl), and chloropicrin (PS).
Toxins: These chemicals are extracted from living organisms. Ricin, a protein extracted from the castor oil plant, is ounce for ounce more toxic than nerve agents. It acts by blocking the body’s synthesis of proteins. Saxitoxin, an organic chemical produced by blue-green algae and accumulated in the mussels that feed on it, acts on the nervous system.
More recently, and despite a series of treaties and agreements, chemicals and toxins have been used widely as both offensive and defense weapons. After World War II, the fear that some countries would actually use these weapons of mass destruction initiated secret research programs and prompted a series of open-air tests involving human subjects. Some of the chemicals and biological agents tested, referred to as “simulants” by the military, were released over populated areas and cities. Accounts of these tests are detailed in the next chapter.Neither international conventions nor worldwide outrage has mitigated the growing research and development thought critical in maintaining an advantage over rogue nations. Buttressing the argument is evidence that chemical weapons have been used during the past two decades in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Southeast Asia, Mozambique, and Azerbaijan. Today, with state-sponsored terrorism and experts willing to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder, it’s hard to know exactly who is sitting on large stockpiles of poisons, plagues, and lethal gases. According to the CIA, more than twenty countries are either developing or already have chemical weapons.The list is a “who’s who” of enemies, rogue states, and nations simply trying to keep up with threats by its neighbors. Besides the thirty thousand tons in the United States and at least forty thousand tons in Russia, stockpiles around the world are growing. Egypt was the first Middle Eastern country to use chemical weapons when it employed phosgene, mustard, and nerve agents against Yemeni Royalist forces in the mid-1960s. Israel began its program in the 1970s in response to the Arab chemical threat. Syria developed its own weapons in response to Israel. Iran’s program was started after Iraq’s use of chemical agents during the 1980–1988 war. Libya, which received its first chemical weapons from Iran, used them against Chad in 1987. Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia got into the chemical weapons business and is now suspected of having its own arsenal. In response to regional tensions, China, India, Pakistan, Burma, North and South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan have also developed programs they claim are strictly defensive.Unfortunately, at the height of what had been world paranoia about chemical agents, experts agreed that the only way to know the physiological effects of these agents was to use human subjects. A recent U.S. Senate staff report prepared for the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs acknowledged that in the 1940s alone approximately sixty thousand military personnel were used as human subjects to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite. Most of the subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments, never received medical follow-up after their participation in the research, and were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed the research with anyone, including their wives and parents. In fact, not only were discharged personnel forbidden to talk about their experiences, they could not even describe their exposures to family doctors who tried to determine the cause of severe respiratory illnesses.Rudolph Mills, the eighteen-year-old navy seaman mentioned earlier, was one of many such individuals who testified about his experience before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “I had on an experimental mask and the navy was trying to determine if people wearing these masks could communicate with each other,” he recounted. “I was enticed to sing over the intercom ... . No one ever told me that the mask became less and less effective against the gas with each use ... . We were sworn to secrecy ... . At the age of 43, I underwent a long series of radiation and later surgery to remove part of my voice box and larynx ... . It didn’t occur to me that my exposure to mustard gas was responsible for my physical problems until June 1991, when I read an article in my hometown newspaper.”The harrowing tales had one theme in common: All told of veterans convinced that they had been lied to about the nature and dangers of the experiments. Testimony by fellow subject John William Allen was also chilling. Exposed to sulfur mustard several times in clothes that had become impregnated with toxic chemicals from previous experiments, he was removed from further exposure after passing out in the gas chamber and receiving many wounds as a result of the chemical. In a written testimony, he states, “The government has lied to us for fifty years over and over again. If I would have been shot on the front lines at least I would have had it on my record and would have received medical treatment.”The 1953 Wilson Memorandum (Appendix II), which adopted rules from the Nuremberg Code (Appendix I), was supposed to protect individuals from such harm and inform them of risks before they were to provide consent. But again, between 1958 and 1975, thousands of volunteers were recruited and experiments carried out as if those rules did not exist. Take the case of Ken Lamb, an airborne soldier who volunteered for an experiment under the new rules because all he wanted to do was collect on the promise of a three-day pass to see his fiancée in New York.Lamb recalls the day his commanding officer made the offer and his enthusiasm when he arrived at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He remembers sitting in a sterile, hospital-like room and watching as a researcher in medical garb placed a drop of liquid on his forearm. He immediately became nauseous and dizzy, and it took a while for him to recover from the numbness that spread through his arm and into his body. Before returning to his unit, he was ordered not to discuss the experiments with anyone and was never told what the liquid was. Not until he developed inoperable cancer thirty years later did he learn that army scientists had exposed him to VX. Recently, the Office of Veterans Affairs rejected Lamb’s claim for disability, citing no evidence of a link between his cancer and the experiments.A decade later, from 1962 to 1971, U.S. servicemen would be purposely subjected to a chemical that experts knew at the time to be one of the most toxic known to man. Agent Orange was an herbicidal 50:50 mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which contained dioxin, a contaminant that does not occur naturally. Unlike the dioxin used by civilians, the military version was undiluted and sprayed at a rate of three gallons per acre in concentrations up to twenty-five times the manufacturers’ suggested rate. According to the Veterans Administration, as many as 4.2 million U.S. soldiers could have made contact with Agent Orange as a result of “Operation Ranch Hand.”Reaching a peak in the mid-1960s, the bulk of Agent Orange was sprayed from fixed-wing aircraft to defoliate the dense jungles where enemy soldiers could hide. Smaller amounts were released from helicopters, trucks, riverboats, and even by hand. Dr. James Clary, a former government scientist with the Chemical Weapons Branch of the Air Force Armament Development Laboratory, said, “When we [military scientists] initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the ‘civilian’ version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture.” In all, nineteen million gallons of undiluted Agent Orange were dumped on Indochina, with an impact on the environment and human health that is felt to this day.Soon after Operation Ranch Hand began, reports surfaced of health problems and significant increases in human birth defects. It wasn’t until April 15, 1970 that the U.S. surgeon general warned that use of 2,4,5-T “might” be hazardous to our health. But despite concerns by scientists, health officials, politicians, and the military itself about the toxicity of Agent Orange, the spraying program continued unabated until 1971. Recent studies by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have proven that there are no safe exposure levels to dioxin and that exposed humans have a 60 percent greater risk of dying from cancer.Today a major Agent Orange scandal is brewing in Thailand. According to Thailand’s science, technology, and environmental minister, documents released by the U.S. ambassador reveal that the U.S. and Thai militaries secretly tested chemical weapons, including Agent Orange, from 1964 to 1965, then dumped the toxic remains in an area that was subsequently unearthed during construction of an airport runway. Soil samples sent to U.S. and Canadian laboratories found high levels of both 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T present. Because dioxins can spread so easily throughout the food chain, there’s now fear that the land, which has since been used for farming, may also end up being a toxic killing field.The United States was not alone in its use of soldiers for human experiments. A recent search of British documents has found that as many as twenty thousand soldiers might have been used as guinea pigs at England’s Porton Down testing station from 1939 to 1989 to test chemical agents. According to Alan Care, a lawyer representing a group of former servicemen, unwitting volunteers were tricked into participating as test subjects and were exposed to nerve gas, mustard gas, and LSD. “Most of the men,” said Care, “believed they were going to Porton Down for the purpose of common cold research and were in fact gassed with sarin.” Sarin, recall, is the same gas that killed twelve people and contaminated three thousand in the Japanese subway system, and was used by Saddam Hussein against his Kurdish population.During World War II, Porton Down, a top secret chemical weapons center in Wiltshire, geared up to counter the top priority menace of chemical warfare. Patrick Mercer, who had gone through the facility as an army officer, said, “There were a series of bunkers to which you were thrust from time to time to be gassed and to go through ghastly exercises underground wearing a gas mask.” Another soldier, Ronald Maddison, died after exposure to sarin. The whole time he was being gassed, he thought he was taking part in a program to find a cure for the common cold.Although British subjects were being gassed, researchers had known since the 1920s that mustard gas was absorbed through the skin and affected every organ in the body. However, they played that down so the military experiments could proceed. Professor David Sinclair, a Porton medical officer, described one experiment as follows: “When the grenade exploded or the armor piercing shot was fired (I always hoped it was properly aimed), shrapnel used to bounce angrily off the furniture, and after it had subsided I would push down the metal plate and the crew would take up their positions and attempt to drive off. I was the lucky one who had a respirator on, and I had to observe the reactions of the unfortunates who had not. The immediate effects included a feeling of grit in the eyes, followed by severe pain, lacrimation, and spasm of the eyelids.”The latest evidence linking exposure to chemical agents and health effects has shown up in Gulf War veterans, many of whom experienced unexplained neurological symptoms after coming home. As many as four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were ordered to take the investigational nerve agent medication pyridostigmine bromide every eight hours for days, weeks, or months. A study by researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas found that even low levels of exposure to nerve gas and pesticides, when combined with pyridostigmine, may cause irreversible brain damage. Pyridostigmine also happens to be a nerve agent. The results confirm an earlier 1993 study by Dr. James Moss, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who found that the medication given to Gulf War soldiers caused the common insect repellent deet (diethyltoluamide) to become seven times more toxic than when used alone. Coincidentally, deet and other repellents were widely used during the Gulf War as protection against sand flies, scorpions, and other pests.Even more troubling is the fact that researchers had evidence as early as 1978 that neostigmine, a close molecular relative of pyridostigmine, causes profound physiological, electrophysiological, and microscopic disruption of nerve endings and muscles. Based on the published reports, some of these changes increase in severity over time with continued treatment. It was because of this concern that the Human Subjects Committee reviewing the studies considered the possibility of mentioning the possibility of death in the informed consent form. After some deliberation, it was decided that such a warning was unnecessary because death, they said, was not likely.That didn’t seem to matter a great deal to military officers, who forced personnel under their command to take pyridostigmine, whether they became intensely sick or not. For example, Carol Picou was a nurse who had been stationed in the Gulf for five months when she started taking the drug. By the third day, she developed incontinence, blurry vision, and uncontrollable drooling. The side effects became worse one hour after she took a pill but stopped after she refused to continue taking them. Her commanding officer ordered her to resume taking the pills for fifteen days, even watching to make sure she swallowed them. Currently, Carol Picou has permanent medical problems, including incontinence, muscle weakness, and memory loss.Similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Neil Tetzlaff had immediate side effects when he started taking pyridostigmine bromide on the plane ride to Saudi Arabia. His nausea and vomiting became so severe that he needed emergency surgery to repair a hole in his stomach. When he became ill, the military doctor told him to continue taking the pills because the doctor had no idea that nausea and vomiting were known side effects. According to Tetzlaff’s sworn testimony, the doctor acted as if the pyridostigmine was as safe as a cough drop. Other soldiers and pilots experienced respiratory arrest, loss of consciousness, abnormal liver function, irregular electrocardiograms, joint pain, sensitivity to chemicals, and anemia.Nurse Picou’s case was especially troubling because virtually every pyridostigmine study done up to th Science, as Andrew Goliszek proves in this compendious, chilling, and eye-opening book, has always had its dark side. Behind the bright promise of life-saving vaccines and life-enhancing technologies lies the true cost of the efforts to develop them. Knowledge has a price; often that price has been human suffering. The ethical limits governing use of the human body in experimentation have been breached, redefined, and breached again---from the moment the first plague-ridden corpse was heaved over the fortifications of a besieged medieval city to the use of cutting-edge gene therapy today. Those limits are in constant need of redefinition, for the goals and the techniques have become both more refined and more secretive. The German and Japanese human experiments of the 1930s and 1940s horrified the world when they came to light. These barbaric exercises in pseudoscience grew out of assumptions of racial superiority. The subjects were deemed subhuman; ordinary guidelines could therefore be suspended. What has happened in the decades since World War II has differed only in degree. Explicitly or implicitly, any organization or government that undertakes or sponsors scientific research applies some measure of human worth. Experimentation rests upon an equation that balances suffering against gain, the good of the collective against the rights of the individual, and the risk of unknown consequences against the rewards of scientific discovery. Everything depends upon who makes that equation. The sobering and gripping accumulation of evidence in this book proves exactly what has been justified in the name of science. The science of "eugenics" justified enforced sterilization. The need to gain an upper hand in the Cold War justified CIA experiments involving mind control and drugs. The desperate race to control nuclear proliferation was used to justify radiation experiments whose effects are still being felt today. Chemical warfare, gene therapy, molecular These subjects dominate headlines and even direct our government's foreign policy, yet the whole truth about the experimentation behind them has never been made public. Though not a cheering book, In the Name of Science is a crucially important one, and it deserves a wide audience. A biologist by training, Goliszek presents each topic clearly and explains fully its significance and implications. Connecting the history of scientific experimentation through time with the topics that are likely to dominate the future, he has performed an invaluable service. No other book on the market provides the research included here, or presents it with such persuasive force.
دانلود کتاب In the name of science : a history of secret programs, medical research, and human experimentation
1THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION: BRINGING BAD THINGS TO LIFENathan Schnurman, a seventeen-year-old sailor recruited to test U.S. Navy summer clothing in exchange for a three-day pass, never thought he would be gasping for air inside a gas chamber instead. The instructions he received were simple, and he didn’t think much of it at the time when he was ordered to put on a mask and some special clothing. During the experiment, the mustard gas and lewisite he was exposed to seeped through his mask, making him first nauseous and then violently ill. He demanded to be released, but was refused because the scientists conducting the experiment told him that it was not yet completed. Shortly after his second demand, he passed out. When he regained consciousness, he found himself lying outside the gas chamber and thinking how lucky he was to be alive.“I called to the corpsman via an intercom and informed him of my condition and what was happening, and requested I be released from the chamber, now,” Schnurman testified before a judiciary committee. “The reply was ‘no,’ as they had not completed the experiment. I became very nauseous. Again I requested to be released from the chamber. Again permission was denied. Within seconds, I passed out in the chamber. What happened after that, I don’t know. I may only assume that when I was removed from the chamber, I was presumed dead.”Another serviceman, Lloyd B. Gamble, had dedicated more than seven years of his life to the U.S. Air Force. When he volunteered for a special program to test new military protective gear, he was offered various incentives, including a liberal leave policy, family visitations, superior living and recreational facilities, and letters of commendation to be made part of his permanent record. During the first three weeks of testing. Gamble was given two or three water-sized glasses of a liquid to drink. He soon developed erratic behavior and even attempted suicide, but what he didn’t learn until eighteen years later was that what he’d received as a human subject was LSD. Even after he found out, the Department of Defense (DOD) denied that he’d participated in the experiments, although an official publicity photo shows him as one of the servicemen volunteering for a “special program that was in the highest national security interest.”Both Schnurman and Gamble were victims of a massive organized program that used both the military and civilians to carry out human experiments involving chemicals and chemical agents. All participants had been sworn to secrecy, like eighteen-year old Rudolph Mills, who discovered forty-six years after his own gas chamber experiments that four thousand other servicemen were essentially human guinea pigs for the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). Though his health began to deteriorate while still in the navy, Mills did not learn that his lifelong physical health problems were likely related to mustard gas exposure until more than forty years later. According to a September 28, 1994 General Accounting Office report, the DOD and other national security agencies used hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous and often deadly substances.This kind of duplicity doesn’t begin or end with the military, however. For decades, scientists working for corporations have been hiding research results, relying on flawed or fraudulent studies, or disregarding the health effects of chemical products in order to ensure a steady stream of profits. Because even a small change in data can often have a major effect on the findings of a study, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether or not researchers have acted ethically. Take the case of two scientists who had published a mortality study comparing cancer rates of workers exposed to a hazardous substance with those who were not and then later placed four exposed workers in the unexposed group. This simple switch increased the death rate in the control group while significantly decreasing the death rate in the exposed group. While the researchers contended that the reclassification was done in good faith, the incident triggered a dispute within the FDA as to whether an ethics investigation should or should not have been conducted.In some cases, there was widespread use of toxic chemicals on humans simply because no one knew how dangerous the chemicals were. After DDT (the potent insecticide that replaced lead arsenate) was developed, the U.S. government dusted millions of soldiers to prevent malaria and typhus. This miracle chemical that killed hundreds of different pest species was made famous in a 1948 Life Magazine photograph of a teenaged girl eating a hot dog surrounded by a cloud of DDT. What DuPont scientists did not realize until decades later was the extent to which their altered molecules and synthetic chemicals would accumulate in the environment and continue to show up in the blood of virtually every American twenty-five years after its ban.By just taking a look at the world around us, we quickly realize the impact chemicals have had on virtually every aspect of our lives. We’re literally surrounded by a sea of organic and inorganic compounds. Our bodies are composed of thousands of chemicals, each made from billions of molecules that react with one another and assemble into complex forms to make life possible. We eat chemicals, drink chemicals, breathe chemicals, put chemicals on and in our bodies, and take chemicals whenever we’re sick. From the moment we’re born to the day we die, we are so dependent on chemicals that we wouldn’t know what to do without them.Over the last hundred years, that dependence has become an addiction. Natural recipes handed down for centuries have been replaced by products promising everything from clean kitchen counters to cancer cures. Along comes the chemical industry, and we now have more than fifty thousand synthetic compounds—many of them unregulated, some of them miracles of humanity, and others more deadly than anything nature could come up with. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that natural products can often be deadly. When man gets into the act, they can become even deadlier.
Chemical Warfare AgentsIn 1978 London, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian exile, stood patiently on a street corner and watched the stop-and-go of traffic while awaiting the next bus. The sky was overcast, and the steady stream of commuters made him less likely to think that anything out of the ordinary was about to take place. Perhaps he was thinking of his family back home or about what he had to do that day. But as he looked at the passing cars, he suddenly felt dizzy, lost consciousness, and collapsed. Within a few days he stopped breathing and died. His mysterious death remained a mystery until the autopsy was done, when investigators discovered a tiny pellet beneath his skin containing ricin, a chemical six thousand times more toxic than cyanide. The Bulgarian, they eventually learned, was a former agent murdered by the communist Bulgarian government with an umbrella gun supplied by the KGB and fired unnoticed in a crowd of passersby who never suspected that chemical warfare had been waged so easily.The use of natural chemicals has been reported for more than two millennia. As far back as 600 B.C., when the Athenians poisoned with helleborus root a river used by its enemy as drinking water, chemicals have been used as a means of waging war. In 200 B.C., Carthage defeated one of its enemies in a battle by leaving behind casks of wine tainted with mandragora, a root that produces a narcotic-like sleep. After enemy soldiers drank the wine, the Carthaginians returned and killed them. In one of the more bizarre examples, Hannibal, in a naval battle against Eumenes II of Pergamum, lobbed venomous snakes onto the decks of enemy ships to defeat the Pergamum sailors. In addition, as we know from historical records, arrows tipped with poison chemicals have been used for nearly as long as there have been bows to shoot them.Limiting the use of chemicals as weapons was suggested as far back as 1675, when a French-German agreement was signed in Strasbourg prohibiting the use of poison bullets. But within two centuries, large-scale development of chemical weapons had begun. In 1874, to stem the fear of chemical warfare, the Brussels Convention was adapted prohibiting the use of poison weapons. Twenty-five years later, an international peace conference held in The Hague led to a worldwide agreement outlawing the use of projectiles filled with poison gases. These agreements, it was hoped, would put an end to the development of weapons thought too horrible to be used against human beings. It didn’t.Modern chemical warfare actually started in the nineteenth century with incendiary arsenic bombs that sent plumes of poison smoke across enemy battle lines. Soldiers exposed to the smoke died a grisly death. Muscle spasms and severe vomiting were followed by cardiovascular collapse and death within a few hours of inhalation. The twentieth century proved no less civilized. After rumors of a new and deadly weapon invented by the Germans early during the First World War, the German Army bombed British forces in Neuve-Chapelle with dianisidine chlorsulfonate. A few months later, they attacked Russian forces with xylyl bromide. Both incidents were merely learning experiences and a prelude to what was to be the first large-scale chemical attack on April 22, 1915.That day, two hours before sunset, the Germans covered themselves head to foot in protective suits and released nearly two hundred tons of chlorine gas from canisters toward the French troops. The greenish mist was taken by a light wind, and within minutes began sinking into the four miles of trench lines where the soldiers experienced something for which they were not prepared. Panic ensued as the men began choking and gasping desperately for breath. When the battle had ended, more than five thousand soldiers had died from asphyxiation. It didn’t take long before both sides recognized the impact of chemical warfare and began using chlorine gas on each other while developing even more efficient and practical means of waging war.Phosgene, a choking gas like chlorine but ten times as toxic, was the next agent to be used. Blister agents were introduced in 1917 and have been used ever since, notably in 1980 to 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War. By the end of 1918, more than one-fourth of all artillery shells fired contained chemical weapons that killed about one hundred thousand people and injured more than a million. In the late 1930s, Germany first developed the G-series nerve agents, such as sarin. In 1936, mustard gas was used by Italy against the Abyssinians. Spanish troops used it in North Africa between the world wars. The Japanese killed large numbers of Chinese from 1937 to 1943 with lewisite, mustard gas, and various biological agents. In the 1950s, England developed even more lethal nerve agents, the V series, which includes the best-known nerve agent, VX.One of the most secret chemical weapons facilities of all was located near the Russian town of Podosinki. Code named “Tomka,” its mission was to develop poison gases to be delivered by artillery, aviation, and special gas projectors. Another Soviet poison facility called “Lab X” was operational as far back as 1937. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of foreign intelligence (precursor of the KGB), the lab was used to develop poisons for assassinating enemies both inside the country and abroad. It’s not known how much of the research was shared with rogue nations such as Iraq, but evidence gathered during the Gulf War suggests that there was a good deal of cooperation between the former Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein, who had no fewer than five chemical and biological weapons factories when the United Nations (UN) inspected Iraq after the Gulf War.According to investigations by the Weekly Mail and Guardian, in the 1980s a company called Protechnik in South Africa was allegedly the largest chemical, biological, and nuclear laboratory in Africa and carried out secret bizarre experiments to test special bullets and heat-resistant clothing. According to a 1989 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report, scientists at the facility worked closely with Israel in the 1980s to develop a chemical warfare capability. (The company has since come under new ownership and is no longer said to be engaged in such research.)Overall, more than three thousand chemicals have been tested for possible use as toxic weapons. In many cases, the agents were first developed as pesticides composed of organic molecules known as organophosphates and then adapted for use on human beings. According to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), ratified on April 29, 1997, there are now five recognized classes of chemical warfare agents:
Nerve agents: After contact with the skin and lungs, these highly toxic organophosphorous chemicals kill by disrupting metabolism and blocking nerve transmission. The first nerve agent, tabun, was developed in 1936 as a pesticide. VX is so toxic that a single drop the size of a pinhead on bare skin may cause death. Symptoms include seizures, vomiting, convulsions, muscle paralysis (including the heart and diaphragm), loss of consciousness, and coma. Death may occur in one to ten minutes. Examples include sarin (GB), soman (GD), tabun (GA), and VX.
Blister agents and lewisite: Also called vesicants, blister agents are absorbed through the lungs and the skin, burning lung tissue, skin, mucous membranes, the windpipe, and the eyes. There are few deaths from blister agents, but a large number of casualties. They damage the respiratory tract and cause severe vomiting and diarrhea. Examples include nine sulfur mustards (HD), three nitrogen mustards (HN), phosgene oximine (CX), and three lewisites.
Blood agents: Distributed by the blood to various tissues and body parts, these agents destroy blood tissue, thereby disrupting oxygen flow to the heart and causing suffocation. Examples include hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride.
Choking agents: Absorbed through the lungs, choking agents cause fluid buildup in lung tissue, preventing the victim from breathing. Essentially, these chemicals cause drowning by inducing alveoli within the lungs to secrete a steady flow of fluid. Examples include phosgene (CG), diphosgene (DP), chlorine (Cl), and chloropicrin (PS).
Toxins: These chemicals are extracted from living organisms. Ricin, a protein extracted from the castor oil plant, is ounce for ounce more toxic than nerve agents. It acts by blocking the body’s synthesis of proteins. Saxitoxin, an organic chemical produced by blue-green algae and accumulated in the mussels that feed on it, acts on the nervous system.
More recently, and despite a series of treaties and agreements, chemicals and toxins have been used widely as both offensive and defense weapons. After World War II, the fear that some countries would actually use these weapons of mass destruction initiated secret research programs and prompted a series of open-air tests involving human subjects. Some of the chemicals and biological agents tested, referred to as “simulants” by the military, were released over populated areas and cities. Accounts of these tests are detailed in the next chapter.Neither international conventions nor worldwide outrage has mitigated the growing research and development thought critical in maintaining an advantage over rogue nations. Buttressing the argument is evidence that chemical weapons have been used during the past two decades in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Southeast Asia, Mozambique, and Azerbaijan. Today, with state-sponsored terrorism and experts willing to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder, it’s hard to know exactly who is sitting on large stockpiles of poisons, plagues, and lethal gases. According to the CIA, more than twenty countries are either developing or already have chemical weapons.The list is a “who’s who” of enemies, rogue states, and nations simply trying to keep up with threats by its neighbors. Besides the thirty thousand tons in the United States and at least forty thousand tons in Russia, stockpiles around the world are growing. Egypt was the first Middle Eastern country to use chemical weapons when it employed phosgene, mustard, and nerve agents against Yemeni Royalist forces in the mid-1960s. Israel began its program in the 1970s in response to the Arab chemical threat. Syria developed its own weapons in response to Israel. Iran’s program was started after Iraq’s use of chemical agents during the 1980–1988 war. Libya, which received its first chemical weapons from Iran, used them against Chad in 1987. Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia got into the chemical weapons business and is now suspected of having its own arsenal. In response to regional tensions, China, India, Pakistan, Burma, North and South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan have also developed programs they claim are strictly defensive.Unfortunately, at the height of what had been world paranoia about chemical agents, experts agreed that the only way to know the physiological effects of these agents was to use human subjects. A recent U.S. Senate staff report prepared for the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs acknowledged that in the 1940s alone approximately sixty thousand military personnel were used as human subjects to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite. Most of the subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments, never received medical follow-up after their participation in the research, and were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed the research with anyone, including their wives and parents. In fact, not only were discharged personnel forbidden to talk about their experiences, they could not even describe their exposures to family doctors who tried to determine the cause of severe respiratory illnesses.Rudolph Mills, the eighteen-year-old navy seaman mentioned earlier, was one of many such individuals who testified about his experience before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “I had on an experimental mask and the navy was trying to determine if people wearing these masks could communicate with each other,” he recounted. “I was enticed to sing over the intercom ... . No one ever told me that the mask became less and less effective against the gas with each use ... . We were sworn to secrecy ... . At the age of 43, I underwent a long series of radiation and later surgery to remove part of my voice box and larynx ... . It didn’t occur to me that my exposure to mustard gas was responsible for my physical problems until June 1991, when I read an article in my hometown newspaper.”The harrowing tales had one theme in common: All told of veterans convinced that they had been lied to about the nature and dangers of the experiments. Testimony by fellow subject John William Allen was also chilling. Exposed to sulfur mustard several times in clothes that had become impregnated with toxic chemicals from previous experiments, he was removed from further exposure after passing out in the gas chamber and receiving many wounds as a result of the chemical. In a written testimony, he states, “The government has lied to us for fifty years over and over again. If I would have been shot on the front lines at least I would have had it on my record and would have received medical treatment.”The 1953 Wilson Memorandum (Appendix II), which adopted rules from the Nuremberg Code (Appendix I), was supposed to protect individuals from such harm and inform them of risks before they were to provide consent. But again, between 1958 and 1975, thousands of volunteers were recruited and experiments carried out as if those rules did not exist. Take the case of Ken Lamb, an airborne soldier who volunteered for an experiment under the new rules because all he wanted to do was collect on the promise of a three-day pass to see his fiancée in New York.Lamb recalls the day his commanding officer made the offer and his enthusiasm when he arrived at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He remembers sitting in a sterile, hospital-like room and watching as a researcher in medical garb placed a drop of liquid on his forearm. He immediately became nauseous and dizzy, and it took a while for him to recover from the numbness that spread through his arm and into his body. Before returning to his unit, he was ordered not to discuss the experiments with anyone and was never told what the liquid was. Not until he developed inoperable cancer thirty years later did he learn that army scientists had exposed him to VX. Recently, the Office of Veterans Affairs rejected Lamb’s claim for disability, citing no evidence of a link between his cancer and the experiments.A decade later, from 1962 to 1971, U.S. servicemen would be purposely subjected to a chemical that experts knew at the time to be one of the most toxic known to man. Agent Orange was an herbicidal 50:50 mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which contained dioxin, a contaminant that does not occur naturally. Unlike the dioxin used by civilians, the military version was undiluted and sprayed at a rate of three gallons per acre in concentrations up to twenty-five times the manufacturers’ suggested rate. According to the Veterans Administration, as many as 4.2 million U.S. soldiers could have made contact with Agent Orange as a result of “Operation Ranch Hand.”Reaching a peak in the mid-1960s, the bulk of Agent Orange was sprayed from fixed-wing aircraft to defoliate the dense jungles where enemy soldiers could hide. Smaller amounts were released from helicopters, trucks, riverboats, and even by hand. Dr. James Clary, a former government scientist with the Chemical Weapons Branch of the Air Force Armament Development Laboratory, said, “When we [military scientists] initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the ‘civilian’ version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture.” In all, nineteen million gallons of undiluted Agent Orange were dumped on Indochina, with an impact on the environment and human health that is felt to this day.Soon after Operation Ranch Hand began, reports surfaced of health problems and significant increases in human birth defects. It wasn’t until April 15, 1970 that the U.S. surgeon general warned that use of 2,4,5-T “might” be hazardous to our health. But despite concerns by scientists, health officials, politicians, and the military itself about the toxicity of Agent Orange, the spraying program continued unabated until 1971. Recent studies by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have proven that there are no safe exposure levels to dioxin and that exposed humans have a 60 percent greater risk of dying from cancer.Today a major Agent Orange scandal is brewing in Thailand. According to Thailand’s science, technology, and environmental minister, documents released by the U.S. ambassador reveal that the U.S. and Thai militaries secretly tested chemical weapons, including Agent Orange, from 1964 to 1965, then dumped the toxic remains in an area that was subsequently unearthed during construction of an airport runway. Soil samples sent to U.S. and Canadian laboratories found high levels of both 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T present. Because dioxins can spread so easily throughout the food chain, there’s now fear that the land, which has since been used for farming, may also end up being a toxic killing field.The United States was not alone in its use of soldiers for human experiments. A recent search of British documents has found that as many as twenty thousand soldiers might have been used as guinea pigs at England’s Porton Down testing station from 1939 to 1989 to test chemical agents. According to Alan Care, a lawyer representing a group of former servicemen, unwitting volunteers were tricked into participating as test subjects and were exposed to nerve gas, mustard gas, and LSD. “Most of the men,” said Care, “believed they were going to Porton Down for the purpose of common cold research and were in fact gassed with sarin.” Sarin, recall, is the same gas that killed twelve people and contaminated three thousand in the Japanese subway system, and was used by Saddam Hussein against his Kurdish population.During World War II, Porton Down, a top secret chemical weapons center in Wiltshire, geared up to counter the top priority menace of chemical warfare. Patrick Mercer, who had gone through the facility as an army officer, said, “There were a series of bunkers to which you were thrust from time to time to be gassed and to go through ghastly exercises underground wearing a gas mask.” Another soldier, Ronald Maddison, died after exposure to sarin. The whole time he was being gassed, he thought he was taking part in a program to find a cure for the common cold.Although British subjects were being gassed, researchers had known since the 1920s that mustard gas was absorbed through the skin and affected every organ in the body. However, they played that down so the military experiments could proceed. Professor David Sinclair, a Porton medical officer, described one experiment as follows: “When the grenade exploded or the armor piercing shot was fired (I always hoped it was properly aimed), shrapnel used to bounce angrily off the furniture, and after it had subsided I would push down the metal plate and the crew would take up their positions and attempt to drive off. I was the lucky one who had a respirator on, and I had to observe the reactions of the unfortunates who had not. The immediate effects included a feeling of grit in the eyes, followed by severe pain, lacrimation, and spasm of the eyelids.”The latest evidence linking exposure to chemical agents and health effects has shown up in Gulf War veterans, many of whom experienced unexplained neurological symptoms after coming home. As many as four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were ordered to take the investigational nerve agent medication pyridostigmine bromide every eight hours for days, weeks, or months. A study by researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas found that even low levels of exposure to nerve gas and pesticides, when combined with pyridostigmine, may cause irreversible brain damage. Pyridostigmine also happens to be a nerve agent. The results confirm an earlier 1993 study by Dr. James Moss, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who found that the medication given to Gulf War soldiers caused the common insect repellent deet (diethyltoluamide) to become seven times more toxic than when used alone. Coincidentally, deet and other repellents were widely used during the Gulf War as protection against sand flies, scorpions, and other pests.Even more troubling is the fact that researchers had evidence as early as 1978 that neostigmine, a close molecular relative of pyridostigmine, causes profound physiological, electrophysiological, and microscopic disruption of nerve endings and muscles. Based on the published reports, some of these changes increase in severity over time with continued treatment. It was because of this concern that the Human Subjects Committee reviewing the studies considered the possibility of mentioning the possibility of death in the informed consent form. After some deliberation, it was decided that such a warning was unnecessary because death, they said, was not likely.That didn’t seem to matter a great deal to military officers, who forced personnel under their command to take pyridostigmine, whether they became intensely sick or not. For example, Carol Picou was a nurse who had been stationed in the Gulf for five months when she started taking the drug. By the third day, she developed incontinence, blurry vision, and uncontrollable drooling. The side effects became worse one hour after she took a pill but stopped after she refused to continue taking them. Her commanding officer ordered her to resume taking the pills for fifteen days, even watching to make sure she swallowed them. Currently, Carol Picou has permanent medical problems, including incontinence, muscle weakness, and memory loss.Similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Neil Tetzlaff had immediate side effects when he started taking pyridostigmine bromide on the plane ride to Saudi Arabia. His nausea and vomiting became so severe that he needed emergency surgery to repair a hole in his stomach. When he became ill, the military doctor told him to continue taking the pills because the doctor had no idea that nausea and vomiting were known side effects. According to Tetzlaff’s sworn testimony, the doctor acted as if the pyridostigmine was as safe as a cough drop. Other soldiers and pilots experienced respiratory arrest, loss of consciousness, abnormal liver function, irregular electrocardiograms, joint pain, sensitivity to chemicals, and anemia.Nurse Picou’s case was especially troubling because virtually every pyridostigmine study done up to th Science, as Andrew Goliszek proves in this compendious, chilling, and eye-opening book, has always had its dark side. Behind the bright promise of life-saving vaccines and life-enhancing technologies lies the true cost of the efforts to develop them. Knowledge has a price; often that price has been human suffering. The ethical limits governing use of the human body in experimentation have been breached, redefined, and breached again---from the moment the first plague-ridden corpse was heaved over the fortifications of a besieged medieval city to the use of cutting-edge gene therapy today. Those limits are in constant need of redefinition, for the goals and the techniques have become both more refined and more secretive. The German and Japanese human experiments of the 1930s and 1940s horrified the world when they came to light. These barbaric exercises in pseudoscience grew out of assumptions of racial superiority. The subjects were deemed subhuman; ordinary guidelines could therefore be suspended. What has happened in the decades since World War II has differed only in degree. Explicitly or implicitly, any organization or government that undertakes or sponsors scientific research applies some measure of human worth. Experimentation rests upon an equation that balances suffering against gain, the good of the collective against the rights of the individual, and the risk of unknown consequences against the rewards of scientific discovery. Everything depends upon who makes that equation. The sobering and gripping accumulation of evidence in this book proves exactly what has been justified in the name of science. The science of "eugenics" justified enforced sterilization. The need to gain an upper hand in the Cold War justified CIA experiments involving mind control and drugs. The desperate race to control nuclear proliferation was used to justify radiation experiments whose effects are still being felt today. Chemical warfare, gene therapy, molecular These subjects dominate headlines and even direct our government's foreign policy, yet the whole truth about the experimentation behind them has never been made public. Though not a cheering book, In the Name of Science is a crucially important one, and it deserves a wide audience. A biologist by training, Goliszek presents each topic clearly and explains fully its significance and implications. Connecting the history of scientific experimentation through time with the topics that are likely to dominate the future, he has performed an invaluable service. No other book on the market provides the research included here, or presents it with such persuasive force.