U.S. experiments on Blacks served as groundwork for Nazis

By Anna Pratt (March 5, 2008)

Originally published in The Spokesman-Recorder

Bioethicist Harriet Washington speaks on Medical Apartheid

Journalist and bioethicist Harriet Washington outlined an astonishing era in U.S. history, which has seldom been studied or written about: a long line of abusive medical experimentation on Black people, which she talked about during a well-attended lecture at the University of Minnesota on Thursday, February 28.

Washington, who is based in New York, has chronicled these events in detail in her best-selling book that was published last year, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, a not-so-quick read that runs 500 pages.

The lecture is part of a series accompanying the exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” which traveled here from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the U of M’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The exhibit runs through May 4 (check out smm.org for more information). Deadly Medicine is an unsettling yet enlightening display that combines artifacts, images, documents, films and other materials to show how science has been used as a means for confirming racist attitudes.

Washington, who has plenty of credentials, including a stint as a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, has been a writer and editor on all kinds of health-related topics for nationally known publications.

She and other scholars point out that although Americans shunned the Nazis for their horrifying acts to Jews in Germany in and around World War II, much of the Third Reich’s rationale was borrowed from science that originated in the U.S. Scientists working in this country in the early 1900s laid the groundwork for eugenics, an effort to “cleanse” the German population of anyone or anything that detracted from its superiority, the exhibit explains.

In the U.S., African Americans were victimized for the sake of research since their arrival as slaves and all the way through 2006, Washington points out.

Joanne Jones Rizzi, a spokesperson for the Science Museum, said the museum’s curators wanted to bring Washington to town to help explain that link. “We were very interested in engaging the museum audience with the issue of eugenics, but we wanted to expand it so people wouldn’t think it was just relevant to the Nazis. Harriet’s book deals with a whole other generation and time period,” she said.

It is easy to distance oneself from the exhibit as something that happened elsewhere a long time ago, but “her book and research is based on what happened in the U.S….she’s talking about a past that is part of our collective past,” Jones Rizzi said.

During her two-and-a-half-hour lecture at the U of M, Washington made a case for how this “shamefully neglected aspect of U.S. medical history” has legitimately led to the widespread fears in the African American community about doctors, clinics and medicine, called “iatrophobia.”

To go a step further, “The much bewailed healthcare gap between African Americans and Whites is partly to do with historic patterns of thought,” she said. “There are lessons for us today…to achieve progress, we have to look at what are those kinds of patterns.”

Looking at patterns of thought

In Medical Apartheid, Washington describes how Black people have been scrutinized in the U.S. as inferior, animalistic and sexually unrestrained, among other myths.

As slaves, African Americans were subject to all kinds of abuse.

For one thing, slaves didn’t receive medical care, but doctors occasionally examined them to determine whether or not they were a good bargain for potential masters — would they be brawny enough to sustain lots of manual labor, for instance.

Additionally, countless slave women who were in poor health were forced into pregnancy so as to raise their value in the eyes of their owners, and underwent dangerous and painful surgeries that stripped them of their dignity, physically and emotionally, after developing conditions that led to difficulties in childbirth, Washington explained.

In other instances, Black people have been cruelly taken advantage of within some private institutions, some divisions of the armed forces, and in a number of prisons. During the Civil War, surgeons who wanted to find out what made some Black people violent acquired a grant to perform lobotomies to see if some brains were different than others, Washington said.

Disconcertingly, in 2006, a government panel declared that prisons should once again open their doors to research, as if it were an alternative to medical care that is already “very sporadic and poor in prison,” she noted.

But one of the most notable examples of medical apartheid, Washington pointed out, is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which started in 1932 and lasted a record 40 years in Tuskegee, Alabama. In this case, treatment for the disease was withheld from hundreds of Black people who unknowingly participated in the study, having been told they would get free medical care, among other perks.

Despite the longtime suffering of its participants, many who were infected with syphilis, and the fact that oversight agencies were established to prevent anything like it from happening again, the doctors who performed this experiment have been lionized as public health heroes, Washington said.

The passé notion that Black people don’t feel pain has residual effects today. For example, African Americans are less likely than Caucasians to receive adequate pain medication. In many predominantly minority-populated neighborhoods, some pain medications are difficult to come by, according to studies that are as recent as 2000, Washington cited.

Even though the dramatic abuses of yesteryear have mostly come to an end in the U.S., “much of that has been imported to the developing world, where people are seduced into research that is illegal here,” she said.

To the question of whether or not Black people should sign up for research, given such a history, she responded, “Yes, they’ll be left behind if not. But they have to make sure it’s safe and that they have control — that they feel protected and valued. I believe the government must take responsibility for educating everyone.”

That touches on the issue of the “overarching erosion of informed consent,” as she put it. In general, “We need to revamp attitudes about research and who owns research. Everyday people need to own research,” she said.

Colin Campbell, an associate professor of pharmacology at the U of M, who does research on molecular genetics, seeking effective cancer treatment, agreed that some scientific advances seem to foreshadow a return to an emphasis on race as distinguished by biological traits.

DNA tests can reveal a person’s race, for example. “It’s starting to be codified,” he remarked. “But it doesn’t mean anything,” he said, attributing racial differences as mainly the result of environment and evolution over time.

The way he sees it is, who you are can’t be defined wholly by your DNA. “It’s complicated. When you reduce everything to DNA, that brings out well-founded fears of persecution and maltreatment,” he said.

The importance of informed consent

Saundra Crump, a bioethicist who lives in North Minneapolis, and who attended Washington’s U of M talk on Thursday, said Washington’s talk is timely. As a Black woman, bioethicist and once a researcher charged with recruiting African Americans to participate in an innocuous clinical study some years ago (she’s also a member of an institutional review board [IRB]), Crump said she can see both the hazards and the benefits of medical studies involving Black people.

People in her neighborhood are grappling with this issue right now, she says, with a University of Minnesota plan underway to transform a shopping center at Penn and Plymouth avenues in North Minneapolis. The U of M facility will be dedicated to child development and healthy families, according to university information.

A major part of the development will be dedicated to a children- and family-focused clinic to be spearheaded by internationally known developmental psychopathologist Dante Cicchetti. His efforts at the clinic he founded, Mt. Hope Family Center, in New York, has been credited for helping “thousands of children and families who otherwise would have suffered from the adverse impacts of violence, abuse and poverty,” according to university information.

Some residents are skeptical of the research for what seems to be the reasons Washington touched on, said Crump. The university’s resources “will leverage the capacity of these programs by focusing their efforts on high-priority needs identified by the community,” according to university information. She said the development highlights the need for informed consent agreements to be in place when the research begins, as well as cultural awareness on behalf of U of M staff.

Trica Keaton, an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies & Institute for Global Studies at the U of M, who heard Washington’s keynote speech at St. Paul’s Macalester College on Friday, February 29, isn’t all that familiar with the debate surrounding the university development, but she spoke to the complexity of these racially charged issues.

“Current science tells us that there is no biological reality to ‘race,’ but because we have attributed tremendous, life-altering meaning to superficial differences that we call ‘race,’ there is a social reality to it. In short, ‘race’ has been made to matter, which is what also makes it socially ‘real,’” she said via email.

This is the first of a series of stories relating to the University of Minnesota’s North Minneapolis children and family-focused facility that will appear in upcoming issues of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.