The name of Dr. Clemens Benda does not say much to many people. Benda emigrated from Germany during Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s and would become one of the most respected doctors in the United States. However, this respected physician was in fact a monster who was responsible for injecting radiation into children's bodies in order to see its effect on the very young. These experiments were conducted at the MIT with the help of other facilities and in this respect he was not alone. Some children aged between one and eleven years old, who were found at various institutions, were given other lethal doses of radioactive iodine, while this time the project was being coordinated by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Boston University School of Medicine. Some of these miserable children suffered from Down syndrome and other forms of mental retardation. All this happened during the forties when the Cold War was played out between the major powers. One of the sponsors of these experiments was the CIA. One of its physicians informed a class of recruits in the 1960,"Our guiding light is not the Hippocratic Oath but the victory of freedom". It was clear that the USA had fallen behind the Soviets with regard to its chemical warfare capability and the immediate need to come up to speed in preparation for some future enemy attack. It was also equally clear that research scientists "could not fulfill this mission by animal experiments alone. Human test subjects would be needed; fortunately, most experienced reserchears already knew where to look for volunteers". Nearly seven dozen institutions took CIA money 'many of them for the purpose of plying American citizens with hallucinogenic cocktails and more".
One American neurologist, Walter Freeman, would become a leading figure and a specialist in carrying out lobotomies on children. He was a disciple of Egas Moniz, a Portuguese physician who proselytized the attributes of lobotomy in the fight against a variety of psychological disorders. Freeman once performed lobotomies on 25 women in one day. Ergo, if lobotomies could produce improvements in adults with serious mental problems, it could do the same for children. Hundreds of lobotomies were performed on a vast array of patients including "11 individuals whose schizophrenia developed before the age of ten".
Other feebleminded children or idiots placed in American orphanages were also subject to various and hideous experiments-all conducted in the name of scientific progress. This was the extension of the eugenic movement ideology which ran wild during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
This book demonstrates the huge hypocrisy of the American scientific establishment. On the one hand, it criticized heavily the atrocious deeds committed by the Nazis, as has been shown by the Nazi trials after the war. On the other hand, the same critics perpetrated almost the same crimes, but this time their motivation was the Cold War ideology.
Some doctors wanted to conduct clinical trials and were motivated by noble causes, but others were motivated by greed and fame. By behaving in this way, they forgot or gave up their Hippocratic Oath and routinely trafficked in children to operationalize some bit of medical research. The guinea pigs were poor children who were given tests to see how vaccines worked; in what way radioactive foods had an influence on the body, and some were even injected with LSD. Others were subjected to lobotomies and electric shock treatments.
If you thought that at the beginning of the 21st century things like the ones described before stopped, you are wrong. As the authors point out, American institutions have been replaced by China, India, Tunisia and Nigeria as sites for Phase One drug studies. Drug firms now travel to "places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the FDA does not reach, and the mistakes can end up in pauper's graves".
To tell the truth, this book will make you sick. It becomes a burden on the reader and it shows to what extent the most noble and respected scientists and doctors became monsters. This book is about science gone absolutely mad and the authors have written an excellent book documenting for many years the horrible deeds committed in the name of scientific progress. This book can also serve as a severe warning of how a respected community of men and women can go mad when nobody controls them. It is about moral amnesia and ethical paralysis of those in the medical and psychological reaerch professions who became totally perverted. Highly recommended!
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