Undue
Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans
by Jonathan D. Moreno
Reviews
The New York Times Book Review,
Daniel J. Kevles
...the historical record he presents in
Undue
Risk strongly supports his contention that the rights of human subjects
deserve to be held paramount over any needs of national security.
From Kirkus Reviews
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. Morenos 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. Morenos
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. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates,
LP. All rights reserved.
Arthur L. Caplan, University of Pennsylvania's
Center for Bioethics, author of Am
I My Brother's Keeper?
"Written in a lively and informative way
that challenges the reader's own ethical thinking, Undue Risk will
shape debate about our past and our future with respect to human experimentation
for years to come."
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