HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

Those of us who lived through World War II are familiar with the brutal Nazi experiments on human beings. We know that some German citizens, American soldiers and soldiers from other countries were treated like guinea pigs. Thousands and thousands of human beings died horrible deaths because medical doctors and other German scientists conducted all kinds of experiments on them. I was a child during the war and did not know of those cruel experiments until many years after the war. But Nazi Germany is not the only nation that has treated human beings as subjects of experimentation. I think none of us would be surprised to learn that some of the major drug manufacturers have conducted experiments on human beings. But it may come as a shock for some of us to learn that the United States government has been guilty of experimenting on human beings. Our lesson today is: "Human Experimentation."

I shall begin our discussion with what has occurred in our great nation - not in Nazi Germany. In their very enlightening and challenging book, Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007), Dr. Bill Cosby, the famous comedian, and Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a Harvard psychiatrist, report: "In Texas from 1956 to 1962 ... esteemed white professors at a medical school took black babies who were wards of the state and withheld an essential fatty acid from their baby formula to see what effect it would have on their health." The babies developed skin lesions and other health problems. Some of the babies died, but their deaths were attributed to other causes. Cosby and Poussaint also report that "involuntary sterilization by tubal ligation or hysterectomy" has been performed on black women without their knowledge (p. 165).

Cosby and Poussaint mention the infamous experiment on blacks at Tuskegee, Alabama. James H. Jones, associate professor of history at the University of Houston, has written the definitive study of that brutal and ungodly experiment. Dr. Jones' book has the title, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: The Free Press, 1993). On the front of the dust cover are these words: "The modern classic of race and medicine updated with an additional chapter on the Tuskegee Experiment's legacy in the age of AIDS." Benjamin L. Hooks, Executive Director of the National Association of Colored People, says concerning Dr. Jones' book: "Bad Blood is a shocking and bold report of scientific cruelty and moral idiocy.... The moral and ethical questions this book raises come into sharp focus and are compelling."

Dr. Jones learned of the experiment on blacks when Jean Heller of Associated Press broke the story in 1972. For forty years the United Public Health Service had been studying the effects of untreated syphilis on black men in Macon County, Alabama. There were 399 men who were infected with syphilis and 201 who were free from the disease. The latter group of 201 men would serve as controls (p. 1). The Tuskegee study began in 1932, but had nothing to do with treatment. A black public health nurse knew what was transpiring, but did not report it. Oddly enough, one of the physicians involved protested: "There was nothing in the experiment that was unethical or unscientific" (pp. 6, 8).

You probably remember that penicillin was new and untested in the 1940s. But when its effectiveness for treating syphilis was learned, it was not used on the 399 black men in Tuskegee. ABC's Harry Reasoner was absolutely amazed that our government "used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone" (p. 10). The Atlanta Constitution called the Tuskegee study "a moral astigmatism that saw these black sufferers simply as 'subjects' in a study, not as human beings" (p. 14). Oddly enough, one of the doctors involved in the study was a black doctor who was eventually nominated for Surgeon General of the United States.

In the mid-1970s Fred Gray, a civil rights attorney and a faithful gospel preacher, "brought a class action suit on behalf of the men in the Tuskegee study." My heart breaks for the families in Macon County, Alabama, that suffered because of the unnecessary loss of a loved one. There is no excuse for such stupid behavior.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, distinguished professor of psychiatry and Psychology at John Jay College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has produced one of the most disturbing books ever written on Nazi Germany. Dr. Lifton's book has the title, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1986). It is almost impossible to read Dr. Lifton's book without shedding tears for the way the Nazis treated human beings, including many of their own citizens. In my book, Books, Books and More Books (Fayetteville: The International Gospel Hour, 2006), I urge people not to read Dr. Lifton's book just before retiring at night. It almost certainly would keep them awake. Dr. Lifton dedicated his book "to the victims of the Nazis. To those who survived. And to those who continue to struggle against the forces of mass murder and genocide. "

Dr. Lifton accused Soviet doctors of "diagnosing dissenters as mentally ill and incarcerating them in mental hospitals." He says that medical doctors in Chile tortured men and women. Some of the Japanese doctors performed vivisection on prisoners during the Second World War. White South African doctors falsified medical records of blacks who were tortured and killed in prison. Dr. Lifton says a young physician-member of the People's Temple cult in Guyana prepared the poison that killed almost a thousand people (p. xii of the Foreword). Dr. Lifton says that SS dentists supervised the removal of gold fillings from the teeth of the "Jews who were killed in the gas chambers." Dr. Lifton wonders how physicians could participate in the mass murder that occurred in Nazi Germany (p. 3) and so do I.

Dr. Lifton traveled to Germany to interview some of the psychiatrists and psychologists who participated in the medical experiments and in the medical killing. He, Lifton, interviewed twenty-nine men who were prominent in Nazi medicine. Twenty-eight of them were physicians and one was a pharmacist. Five of the men had worked in concentration camps, including three who had worked in Auschwitz. Six were directly involved in the euthanasia program. Some of the German psychiatrists and psychologists were among the world's most influential men in those professions. In fact, some of them were still practicing when Dr. Lifton visited Germany in the 1970s.

I do not have the time in this study to discuss in depth the German euthanasia program, but I do want to say a few words about it. Two distinguished German scholars-Karl Binding, a jurist, and Alfred Hoche, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Leipzig-wrote the book, The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. Those unworthy of life were the incurably ill, the mentally ill, the feebleminded and retarded and deformed children. They referred to their killing as "purely healing treatment" and a "healing work" (p. 46). Dr. Hoche argued: "A new age will come which, from the standpoint of higher morality, will no longer heed the demands of an inflated concept of humanity and an overestimation of the value of life as such" (p. 47). There were some physicians who opposed the medical killing, but not many. They almost certainly were afraid for their own lives.

Dr. Lifton lists some of the experiments that were conducted under the supervision of German doctors: "Artificially inflicted bums with phosphorous incendiary bombs; experiments on the effects of drinking sea water; experiments with various forms of poison, by ingesting as well as in bullets or arrows, widespread experiments on artificially induced typhus, as well as epidemic hepatitis and with malaria; experiments in cold immersion ('in freezing water') to determine the body's susceptibilities; experiments with mustard gas in order to study the kinds of wounds it could cause," and many others (pp. 301-302).

I must mention one more book about the German experimentation with human subjects before I draw some conclusions from this abominably evil practice. Vivien Spitz was the youngest court reporter at the famous Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals. Her book has the title, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans (Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications, 2005). Vivien Spitz says German "physicians were not permitted to use dogs to increase their surgical skill, but using human beings for such purposes was allowed" (p. 62).

The German hierarchy wanted to know how pilots would be affected by extremely high altitudes without oxygen. They selected two hundred subjects from Russians, Russian prisoners of war, Poles, Jews from various nations and German political prisoners. "These experiments were carried out by locking the victim in an airtight, low-pressure chamber provided by the German Air Force, then stimulating high-pressure atmospheric conditions and pressures up to sixty-eight thousand feet." These barbaric experiments killed seventy-eight of the two hundred men selected (pp. 65-66). I shall not take the time to list and discuss other brutal experiments the Nazis conducted on human beings, but you should investigate on your own to learn of "man's inhumanity to man."

Lest you misunderstand what I have emphasized today, let me make it as plain as I know how: I do not oppose experiments on my fellow human beings - provided: the subject is adequately informed of the dangers and the possible benefits of the treatment. When my dear Molly was dying of lung cancer, her oncologist came into her hospital room and informed her of an experimental drug that had been approved for treatment. He told her the treatment would be extremely difficult on her. He gave her the choice of accepting or rejecting the treatment. She told him she would take the drug. For three days, she could not say a word. So far as her oncologist was able to discover the drug did no good. But he did not treat her without informing her of the dangers of the drug. The choice was hers and hers alone.

Many advances in medicine have been made because certain individuals gave their consent for experimentation on their bodies. All of us should be grateful for the generosity of those people. But under no circumstances - no circumstances -, should physicians and other scientists conduct experiments on human beings without their full knowledge and consent. Human beings are not guinea pigs or other animals. Doctors who experiment on human beings without their consent should be punished to the full extent of the law. The Nazis could not have cared less for the consent of the people on whom they experimented, but American scientists must never stoop that low.

The leaders in Nazi Germany were evolutionists. Like Charles Darwin, they believed that all men were descendants from the lower animals. Jews, Blacks and other non-Aryans were lower on the scale of human development than "the master race." If the Germans could learn from experimentation on non-Aryans, it was legitimate to use them as experimental subjects, like using rats, monkeys and rabbits. While I am not arguing that all evolutionists have so little respect for their fellow human beings, I am saying that no evolutionist has an absolute basis for not experimenting on other people. In my judgment, most evolutionists would not imitate the Nazis, but they cannot give a valid reason for not doing so - not if their lives depended on it.

Tragically, there have been American scientists who were involved in the eugenics movement. In the Foreword to Vivien Spitz's book, Doctors from Hell, Dr. Frederick Abrams summarizes some of the experiments American physicians performed on slaves. "Dr. Thomas Hamilton of Georgia placed a slave in a pit oven in order to study heat stroke. Dr. Walter Jones and several colleagues poured scalding water over sick slaves in an experiment to cure typhoid fever.... Dr. Crawford Long of Georgia conducted a controlled demonstration of anesthesia by amputating two fingers from a slave boy - one with ether and one without" (pp. xvi-xvii of the Foreward). One of the United States Supreme Court's most famous associate justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, approved the involuntary sterilization of a feeble-minded mother. Holmes pretended not to see any difference between a grain of sand and a human being. Dr. Abrams says, "the Nazis based much of their master race ideology upon American foundations" (p. xx of the Foreword). Dr. Abrams also reports: "In 1966 New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Henry Beecher cited twenty-two unethical post-Nuremberg experiments in America, conducted in university, Veteran's Administration, military, and private hospitals" (p. xxiii of the Foreword). Did you know that "each belt buckle that German soldiers wore had embossed upon it Gott Mit Uns (God Is with Us)?

If you believe in the Bible as the word of God, you know how utterly immoral it is to treat human beings as objects. All human life is sacred in God's eyes and should be in the eyes of all who love God and want to live by his will. When God had created the entire universe, including all the animals, he said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen. 1:26-27).

The apostle Paul asked the Roman Christians: "Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God who shall justify the circumcision by faith, and the uncircumcision through faith" (Rom. 3:29-30). May I paraphrase what Paul wrote to the Romans? Is he the God of healthy, intelligent and Aryan people only? Is he not also the God of the sick, the mentally challenged, the physically handicapped, people of color and of all other human beings? Yes, he is the God who cares for all people.

The Psalmist helps us to appreciate the sacredness of all human life, including unborn life. "Thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knows right well. My substance was not hidden from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my unformed substance yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them" (Psa. 139:13-16). How can there be any doubt in your mind that God loves all people, regardless of color or national origin or physical condition or mental ability?

I urge you to consider some questions. Do you believe Jesus Christ would approve of experimenting on a child because he was the offspring of slaves? Would our Lord endorse using the poor or the disenfranchised or prisoners as experimental subjects? Can you imagine Christ's saying that "three generations of imbeciles are enough," as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said in approving the sterilization of Carrie Buck, a feeble-minded woman from Virginia? What criteria do we use in deciding which persons may be used in medical experiments without their informed consent? Could the tragedies in Nazi Germany be repeated in other countries, including the United States of America?

You need to know, if you do not already know, that Holland has already legalized euthanasia (mercy killing). Only recently has Holland officially legalized mercy killing, but it has been practiced for many years. Some patients entering hospitals in Holland wear a sign on their chests that reads: "Do not kill me." How would you like to live in a country where physicians can decide to kill you if they think you may not recover or might not have quality of life if you survive? Have the Dutch forgotten how the Nazis treated them?

The State of Oregon has also legalized euthanasia. In the near future, the State of Washington will be voting on legalizing euthanasia. Do the people of those states know about the German euthanasia program? Most Americans know about the Holocaust, but do they know how many of the German citizens the Nazis killed? They murdered 275,000 of their own old and sick people.

What were the preachers and priests in Germany doing during the Nazi regime? Generally speaking, they were not doing much against Hitler and his henchmen. Martin Niemoller, a leader in the so-called "confessing church," wrote these disturbing words: "In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't' speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up."

Do you believe God will hold us accountable for failure to speak up against evil - all evil?

Winford Claiborne

The International Gospel Hour

P.O. Box 118

Fayetteville, TN 37334