Mad About Science: Medical experimentation

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

This one’s pretty heavy, dear reader — if you don’t want to feel bummed out, skip this page.

Humanity’s history with medical experimentation dates to our earliest days as a species. For as long as humans have walked the Earth, we’ve performed various forms of experiments on ourselves in an attempt to prolong our own lives, sometimes at the expense of others. 

This becomes politically murky territory, and everyone is allowed to have their own opinion on the matter. As it stands now, researchers test the effects of new drugs on animals for months and even years before moving on to human trials, where humans opt in to the experiment. As tragic as it is, the sacrifices made by the research animals frequently save the lives of the humans in the trials that follow them.

As ethically troublesome as this seems, a look through the historical record illuminates why humans perform medical experiments in the manner we do today.

Medicine throughout the bulk of human history has been messy business. Germ theory had its earliest origins with the thinking of Islamic scholars as early as the 11th century C.E. and was proposed in more or less its modern form in 1546 by Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro, but the concept wasn’t taken seriously for more than three centuries — primarily because scientists had no way to see bacteria until microscope technology developed. 

That means virtually every major surgery conducted until nearly 1900 was performed by individuals who either neglected to wash their hands, or did so with water that had not been sterilized, leading to rampant infection and high mortality rates.

A surge of nonconsensual medical experimentation occurred during World War II. Infamously, much of our modern understanding of human physiology comes from the atrocious work performed by Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, dubbed Todesengel, or Angel of Death by the very people he experimented on: Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp complex in occupied Poland. 

Mengele’s experiments were horrific and inhumane, and his victims had absolutely no say in them. After the Red Army liberated the camps in 1945, Mengele evaded capture by traveling to South America, where he eventually suffered a stroke while swimming. Ironically, his body was exhumed by Brazilian authorities and has been used as a subject for forensic medical studies ever since.

Mengele wasn’t the only one to experiment on humans during World War II. Shiro Ishii of the Imperial Japanese Army committed some of the most unspeakable atrocities in history while pursuing weapons development at the installation Unit 731 in the city of Harbin in northeast China (formerly known as Manchuria). 

The acts performed in this installation were too horrific for me to share in this article, and if you wish to know more about what happened at Unit 731, there are books about this period of history at the library, as well as online. Ishii, unlike Mengele, did not escape capture, yet Ishii was granted immunity by the U.S. tribunal in exchange for his research — at the expense of as many as 500,000 human lives.

After the second World War, human medical research continued in a different manner. Research windows were considerably shorter than they are today, while humans would opt in to experiments that could benefit their health. The basis of much of this pharmaceutical research originated from the documents taken from Mengele and Ishii, which provided a baseline understanding of human tolerances for certain chemicals, temperatures and atmospheric pressures. 

As horrific as it was, the horrors inflicted on so many hundreds of thousands of people allowed for the development of pharmaceuticals that would help untold millions. However, while this may have leapfrogged decades of research, it still presented myriad dangers, such as was the case with thalidomide.

West German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal GmbH developed the drug in the 1950s, intended as a sedative or tranquilizer and (notably) to treat nausea experienced by pregnant women. 

First tested on animals, it was discovered that overdose was virtually impossible. Due to this, experimentation on humans was hastened due to its perceived harmlessness. In addition to its original applications, thalidomide came to be used to treat myriad conditions, including the cold and flu. 

What no one realized, until it was tragically too late and the drug had been adopted by dozens of pharmaceutical companies across the globe, was that it caused nerve damage in the extremities and was absorbed through the placenta of pregnant women and into the fetuses they carried. Many of these fetuses were born limbless or stillborn — a trend that went on for five years before a connection was made to thalidomide. 

Chemie Grünenthal GmbH settled without admitting fault, and the drug was phased out, yet the damage was already done.

Today’s medical experimentation is influenced heavily by the actions of doctors like Mengele — but not in the way that it sounds. Established in the wake of WWII, the Nuremberg Code set up a framework for experimentation moving forward. After witnessing the atrocities performed by the Nazis and Imperial Japan, many of the countries involved in the war agreed that everyone needed to follow a better path toward medical research. This paved the way for informed consent, which means that test subjects need to be made aware of all risks and potential side-effects before they partake in medical experimentation.

Today’s clinical trials are carefully curated. Very specific criteria needs to be met with each trial to ensure minimal contamination of the results. This means that if a drug is being developed with the potential for curing skin cancer, the trial must occur only within special parameters, such as a certain stage of skin cancer. In these cases, groups are divided, with some given a placebo treatment and others given the full dose of the drug to measure the psychosomatic effect of being given treatment. The results of the treatment are carefully monitored by regulatory agencies before the drug can move on to the next stage of testing.

This article was kind of a bummer, but it’s important to know where our medicine comes from. Next week, I’ll write about something more cheerful.

Stay curious, 7B.