| This is an examination of the origin, rise, and fall of a tradition in twentieth-century American medical research: the use of prisoners in medical experiments. Joseph Goldberger established the practice in 1915, employing prisoners in a famous experiment establishing pellagra as a dietary disease. In this and other experiments on prisoners, researchers obtained some form of consent, without sustained consideration of exploitation or coercion. Public objections in this early period (and even to the 1960s) were rare. When criticism did occur, it usually centered on the possibility that criminals might be rewarded excessively for serving science.;Experimentation on prisoners became firmly established during World War II. In this emergency, researchers continued to seek consent (even if flawed) from thousands of prisoners who participated in experiments. Following the war, German medical defendants at the Nuremberg Medical Trial attempted to defend their experimental atrocities by arguing that their actions did not differ significantly from those of American researchers who had carried out wartime experiments on prisoners. The American prosecutors, and especially medical consultant Andrew Ivy, responded by defending American-style prison research as ethically "ideal." This endorsement, which grew out of Nuremberg in a previously unrecognized (and irregular) fashion, served to reinforce the moral rectitude of the practice. In the postwar period, medical research on prisoners continued to expand in this country. The expansion was boosted in the early 1960s by new federal drug-testing regulations, requiring trials of pharmaceutical products on healthy populations.;In the early 1970s, activists, who in the wake of Attica and Tuskegee increasingly came to see both prisoners and research subjects as victims, began to object vehemently to the use of prisoners as research subjects. The principal objection concerned the perception of prisons as inherently coercive environments where consent was impossible. Some (including many prisoners) responded to this argument by claiming that such a position represented disrespect for prisoners. The end of prison experimentation came before this debate was resolved, when researchers and drug companies found--to their surprise--that free-world subjects could be recruited for even lengthy nontherapeutic experiments if paid sufficiently. |
