A thoughtful look into the unfortunate penchant of 20th-century
governments to test deadly weapons on their own citizens. In 1994,
Moreno, a professor of medical ethics at the University of
Virginia, was asked to join a presidential commission studying the
effects of government radiation research on human subjects. (These
experiments were first uncovered by journalist Eileen Welsome,
whose new book The Plutonium Files, p. 1041, describes them in
detail.) Here he recounts his experiences on the commission, but,
more, he lifts his eyes from bureaucratic paperwork to consider the
history of secret state testing of such horrors as anthrax, mustard
gas, Zyklon B, Agent Orange, and other toxic brews on unfortunate
subjects ranging from prisoners of war, garden-variety criminals,
and civil service employees to military personnel. Moreno's
approach is that of a medical ethicist, and throughout he examines
questions of disclosure and foreknowledge, claiming that "human
experiments . . . are probably unavoidable in the real world of
national security." Unavoidable, perhaps, but those experiments
have had a range of possible outcomes. With the Nazi doctors - a
huge class of medical personnel who, it seems, welcomed the chance
to conduct evil tests - the result was almost always death, "for if
the 'test persons' did not die in the experiment, they were usually
killed so that witnesses would be eliminated." For the technocrats
whose tinkerings with science may have resulted in illness among
thousands of US veterans of the Gulf War, the results were less
lethal - but no less sinister. Moreno's text is studded with
interesting sidelights, among them the evolution of a code of
medical ethics following the Nuremberg trials, and detours into
little-known facts - among them the curious case of the murderer
Nathan Leopold (of Leopold and Loeb infamy), who volunteered to be
a test subject for antimalarial drugs during WWII, wanting to do
his bit for the war effort. An always interesting - and often
troubling - foray into matters about which we know far too little.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Undue Risk is an unprecedented and chilling history of the use of human subjects in atomic, biological and chemical warfare experiments by the US Government from World War II to the present. Jonathan Moreno, a senior researcher on the President's special commission, goes where few researchers have gone before, exploring secret government documents which reveal a plethora of government experiments.
Now available in paperback, with a new afterword, this exciting read covers recent objections by US military personnel to required anthrax vaccinations and new developments in government policies on experiments involving vulnerable human subjects.
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