The Ugly Human Experiments Behind the Medical Ethics Police

May 13, 2015

(Bloomberg) – The Nazis timed concentration camp inmates as they struggled in the snow to see how long humans could endure the cold. Not much later, in Macon County, Alabama, black men with syphilis were deprived of penicillin when it became available. The U.S. Public Health Service in collaboration with the Tuskegee Institute wished to keep studying the effect of the disease on their brains and bodies. In the “The Ethics Police? The Struggle to Make Human Research Safe,” Robert L. Klitzman describes how outrageous ethical violations of the past led to the creation of mysterious committees to oversee medical experiments on humans today.