3.6: Unethical Experiments

There is a history of government entities performing unethical and harmful studies on its own citizens to avoid the difficulties encountered with observational studies. One of the most famous is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was a study of medication for syphilis that was jointly administered by the United States Public Health Services and Tuskegee University (Reverby 2012). Amid growing concern over medication options and effectiveness for syphilis in the late stages of the disease, this study was set up to see what happened when men with this condition were left untreated and if there were differences in the disease by race. The participants were all African American men, of whom some had syphilis. Some subjects in the study who had the disease were left untreated to serve as a comparison group. Additionally, the sex partners of the men were not traced, and few were treated. Even after penicillin proved effective for syphilis, the men in the comparison group were left untreated. Many articles that appeared in the medical literature reporting on the results of the study referred to the men as volunteers.

After the public was made aware of the study in 1972, there was a federal investigation, Senate hearings, and a lawsuit. Eventually medical and health care for the survivors and their syphilis-positive wives and children were provided with compensation. Additionally, federal rules on informed consent and human subject protections were enacted. President Bill Clinton offered a formal apology in 1997. While the researchers involved with the study did not control the sexual habits of the men, nor did they infect any of the men with syphilis, they did control whether the men received treatment for the disease—so this study is not completely an observational study. That this study was conducted under these conditions is a stark example of systemic racism in the United States (Park 2017). Some authors have even connected the design of the experiment to the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century in the United States (Lombardo and Dorr 2006). The long-term damage of this experiment extends beyond those who were participants in the study. Efforts to aid many African American communities is met with distrust because of this experiment (Gamble 1997; McCallum et al. 2006; Corbie-Smith 1999).

Another astounding example of an outright violation of human rights in an empirical study was perpetrated by American psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurosurgeons throughout the second half of the twentieth century in a series of studies housed at leading medical schools with funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. military. These experiments involved the use of brain electrodes, LSD, hypnosis, the development of biological, chemical, and nonlethal weapons, the implantation of false memories, and creation of amnesia. Many of these experiments were conducted on individuals without documented consent (Ross 2007).

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was first synthesized in 1938, and its psychoactive properties were discovered in 1943. Such psychedelic substances were thought to have potential therapeutic uses (Carhart-Harris and Goodwin 2017). Shortly after these developments the CIA began sponsoring research into the use of LSD based on fears that it could be used as a biological weapon during the cold war with the potential of using the drug for mind control, “brainwashing,”, and in interrogation (Dyck 2008).

After World War II, the CIA recruited German scientists to help develop technologies for use against the Soviet Union in the cold war, including individuals who had been accused of human rights violations. One of these scientists brought LSD to the attention of the CIA in 1948, and its use was soon tested as an enhanced interrogation technique against Soviet spies. In 1953 the CIA project MKUltra was established using some of these same scientists. Public and private research institutions, including many universities, hospitals, and prisons, were provided with funding from the CIA under this program to conduct human experimental research with LSD on civilians, prisoners, and patients (Dyck 2008). While many of the records of this project were destroyed, some remained and were brought to light during hearings before the U.S. Senate in 1975 (Disbennett 2014).

It is notable that at the time of these experiments, the United States had enacted and agreed to the Nuremberg Code, which forbade such practices (Shuster 1997). During the same time as some of these experiments, the Declaration of Helsinki was adopted by the World Medical Association, which set out ethical principles for physician researchers to follow when conducting human medical trials (Carlson et al. 2004; Rickham 1964). It specified that the goal of producing new medical findings should never take precedence over the well-being of research participants and that researchers are responsible for the protection of participants (Rickham 1964).

Hence, these early research studies were found to have clearly disregarded ethical guidelines agreed on by the government of the United States. There is also evidence that these studies have a disturbing racial element to them. An examination of archival documents, public testimony, interviews, and oral histories from participants of the early LSD studies at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health’s Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky and the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland details the conditions under which the experiments took place. At the Addiction Research Center in particular, African American prisoners with substance abuse problems were routinely harmfully exploited in these LSD studies (Campbell and Stark 2017; Strauss et al. 2021).

A recent review found that participants in these studies were mainly recruited from either prisons or hospitals and that in each case individuals of color were over-represented when compared to the corresponding state demographics (Strauss et al. 2021). These studies often used high, frequent, and prolonged dosing without any informed consent. When race was reported, the incarcerated participants were usually African American. The severity of the treatment in the study was also sometimes based on race. In one study, African American participants were given more than double the dose of LSD compared with white participants. Moreover, white participants endured only eight days of LSD administration, less than one -tenth of the African American participants. Astoundingly, some participants were even given drugs like heroin in exchange for their participation in the study. Other studies exploited, dehumanized, and outright tortured female, African American, schizophrenic, and cognitively disabled subjects. Even with the incredible risks that the participants were exposed to, the design of many of the studies was so poor and inconsistent that no meaningful scientific conclusions could be reached (Strauss et al. 2021).

It should be noted that instances of unethical experimentation are not isolated to the past nor to medical experimentation. Modern examples of unethical studies include what are known as social pressure manipulations, which include political studies that explicitly have the intent to change outcomes, generate feelings of group conflict, or pursue activist and partisan goals (McDermott and Hatemi 2020). One study targeted approximately half of the registered African American voters in a southern state with a history of racial inequality. This study included subjecting some of this population to a racially charged message. The study resulted in a reduction in minority turnout in a real election (Nickerson and White 2013). These types of studies fail to inform the individuals in the population that they are part of a study, and hence the participants have not consented to participation.

Social media has provided a platform for low-cost, rapid, and targeted social experimentation. A recent emotional -contagion study considered how emotional states can be transferred between individuals, leading others to experience the same emotions without their awareness. This study was conducted on hundreds of thousands of people without any informed consent on a popular social media platform by researchers at Cornell University. The experiment manipulated almost 700,000 individuals who were exposed to emotional expressions on the social media platform. The researchers tracked how this manipulation led to changes in the posting behaviors of the participants. That is, the emotions of individuals were purposely manipulated to observe how they would respond. These researchers did not obtain any ethics approval for the study (Kramer et al. 2014; McDermott and Hatemi 2020).

Other examples include resource allocation studies where some subjects are given large allocations of financial resources so that their behavior can be compared with those not given such resources. In many cases the gains are short term, and no thought is given to how the subjects will respond when the additional resources ended or what secondary effects such arbitrary financial windfalls for some in a society may have when others are denied help. In other studies, people are subjected to violent stimuli to study societal polarization and sectarianism. There is often no follow- up on what the long-term consequences are to the subjects in the study or for society. Other examples include studies where researchers manipulate dating site algorithms to create intentional mismatches. The researchers then observing what happens to the corresponding paired individuals.

All these studies go against some of the most basic concepts of ethical research practices. First, study participants should be able to give informed consent before they are used for research purposes, and secondly, participants should not be harmed by participation in the study.

The studies considered in this section were from the United States. Of course, unethical studies have been, and continue to be performed worldwide.