DANGEROUS MEDICINE:
THE STORY BEHIND HUMAN EXPERIMENTS WITH HEPATITIS
Between 1942 and 1972, biomedical scientists sponsored by the U.S. government deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Their aims were to discover basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it and then to develop immunizing agents. Over the course of thirty years, ten groups of researchers involving upwards of sixty investigators enrolled more than 3,700 people in virus-transmission studies. The subjects included conscientious objectors to the military draft, prison inmates, mental patients, adults with intellectual impairments, and hundreds of developmentally disabled children. Researchers infected some participants with hepatitis A; others received inoculations with hepatitis B and, unbeknownst to scientists, hepatitis C.
DANGEROUS MEDICINE draws on in-person interviews and a huge volume of archival records to illuminate the political and moral frameworks that allowed these and other problematic human experiments to flourish during World War II and the early Cold War. It details how researchers invoked cultural imagery about patriotism, national defense, and the greater good to win sympathetic press coverage for the hepatitis program. It elaborates on the scientists’ strategies for persuading the overseers of custodial facilities to open their doors to medical researchers. It documents objections to the experiments that, for a quarter century, remained outside of public view. It disentangles the tumultuous events of the late 1960s and 1970s that ultimately brought the hepatitis program to an end. The book’s highly readable narrative gives voice to the diverse actors who made the experiments possible: scientists, government officials, institutional managers, and as much as available sources allow, the studies’ human subjects.
America’s hepatitis program left a toll of causalities—deaths during the experiments and harms long after the studies had ended. Its troubling history has implications for the public’s current mistrust of science. And it raises questions about the pursuit of hazardous human experiments aimed at controlling today’s epidemic diseases.
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REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS
“Dangerous Medicine . . . offers a thorough exploration of the social, military, and scientific context that nurtured what would now be considered repugnant and unethical medical conduct . . . Avoiding a simple story of a single rogue investigator or team” the book focuses instead “on the system that gave rise to abuse . . . Halpern has created a haunting narrative that forces the reader to confront our modern social and scientific frame of reference. Long after the book is finished, the question remains: what research abuses are we justifying to ourselves today?”
Heidi Ledford, Nature, November 29, 2021. Read full review.
“Halpern’s story is chilling, told with clarity and commendable brevity and, most importantly, is of crucial relevance today. The emergence of Covid-19 galvanised calls for the creation of experiments in which volunteers would be infected with SARS-CoV-2 to help understand how the disease spreads and behaves. Some of these studies continue.
But as she warns, the long-term consequences of infection are unknown and are not likely to be fully understood for years. ‘It is therefore vitally important to understand human experiments with dangerous viruses during a previous emergency.’ America’s hepatitis programme has a lot to tell us from that perspective.”
Robin McKie, The Guardian, February 20, 2022. Read full review.
“This is a terrific book on a terrible subject, prodigiously and impressively researched. It will be a clear and well‑argued addition to our thinking on bioethics and medical history.”
Susan M. Reverby, author of Examining Tuskegee and Co‑Conspirator for Justice
“Sydney Halpern has written a compelling, if unsettling, history of hepatitis research during World War II and the Cold War. It will become a must‑read for anyone interested in bioethics and medical history.”
Susan E. Lederer, author of Subjected to Science and Flesh and Blood
“Sydney Halpern’s Dangerous Medicine, a scandal‑strewn history of hepatitis research, provides a frighteningly timely reminder of the dangers vulnerable patients face when medical research attacks disease in time of war.”
Paul A. Lombardo, author of Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
“An immensely important account of decades of human experiments that raised serious moral questions, not only in hindsight as is often claimed, but also at the time they were conducted.”
Jonathan D. Moreno, co‑author, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Healthcare in America