A Danish Radio documentary series,\u00a0The Search for Myself<\/em><\/a>, did not hold back in\u00a0levelling claims<\/a>\u00a0against the US Central Intelligence Agency that it had financially aided experiments on 311 Danish children in the early 1960s.\u00a0 A good number of them were orphans or adopted.<\/p>\n One such victim was the documentary maker Per Wennick, who claims that he was subjected to tests with no knowledge of their background in the basement of the Municipal Hospital in Copenhagen.\u00a0 These were supposedly designed to investigate links between heredity and environmental factors in engendering schizophrenia, work inspired by the psychologist Sarnoff A. Mednick.<\/p>\n Of particular interest in the experiment in question were the children of schizophrenic mothers.\u00a0 Of the 311 children in question, 207 had such mothers, while the rest, who constituted the control group, did not.\u00a0 Wennick was of the latter group.<\/p>\n As with previous experiments of such ilk, Wennick received shallow enticements without information.\u00a0 It was not difficult: he was 11, having grown up in the Godth\u00e5b orphanage with,\u00a0he quipped<\/a>, God and flogging.\u00a0 He was promised something exciting at the Municipal Hospital.\u00a0 For the pleasure of it all, he would also get 16 kroner.\u00a0 He sat in a chair, had headphones placed upon him, and was subjected to statements, screams and noises designed to frighten.\u00a0 Electrodes were placed upon his body, his heart rate, body temperature and sweat level measured.<\/p>\n Interest from US authorities was piqued given the attractiveness of Denmark\u2019s central population register, something lacking in the US.\u00a0 The register enabled a tracking of individuals through the course of their lives, and led to a lengthy collaboration between Mednick and the Danish professor based at the Municipal Hospital, Fini Schulsinger.<\/p>\n The latter would make much use of the project in his 1977 doctoral dissertation.\u00a0 Unusually, Schulsinger\u2019s thesis\u00a0was not subject<\/a>\u00a0to the usual public defence, with the Ministry of Justice permitting it to be held behind closed doors.\u00a0 The reasons were both disingenuous and dishonourable: preserving the anonymity of the children being used and ensuring their ignorance as to why they were being used as participants.<\/p>\n Till now, Schulsinger\u2019s contributions as founder and director of the Psykologisk Institut at that hospital\u00a0 have been acknowledged with some admiration, with one author\u00a0claiming<\/a>\u00a0he \u201cmade important contributions to the understanding of nature-nurture problems within psychiatry.\u201d\u00a0 This clearly did not include the field of medical ethics.<\/p>\n The program Wennick participated in was almost certainly a violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947,\u00a0which stipulates<\/a>\u00a0that, \u201cThe voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.\u201d\u00a0 Consent can only be ethically obtained where the person has legal capacity to do so, has exercise of free power of choice, and has \u201csufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable them to make an understanding and enlightened decision.\u201d<\/p>\n Disturbingly for Wennick, he remained a subject of interest for decades.\u00a0 In 1974, he participated in what he thought was the last trial but received no answer on what sort of research was being conducted.\u00a0 A decade later, seeking treatment for a skin condition in hospital,\u00a0he discovered<\/a>\u00a0that he was the subject of interest to psychologists each and every time he used the health system.\u00a0 \u201cI think,\u201d he reflected, \u201cthat this is a violation of my human rights as a citizen of this society.\u201d<\/p>\n An important source of funding for the Municipal Hospital project, supplied under the auspices of US health care, was the Human Ecology Fund,\u00a0a CIA front<\/a>\u00a0overseen by Cornell University Medical School neurologist Harold Wolff. \u00a0The Fund, which supplied the Danish program some $21,000, proved a vital source for underwriting research projects to better inform the agency about the use of torture and interrogation techniques.<\/p>\n Caught unawares by this rude revelation, unwitting CIA grant recipients Alan Howard and Robert Scott\u00a0could only rue<\/a>\u00a0the circumstances and suggest that their work had been noble, even if the money source had not been. \u201cAll our contributions to the health and welfare literature have been written with the goal of alleviating human suffering, not using it to gain hegemonic advantage.\u201d\u00a0 Academics and researchers can be such blithely ignorant creatures.<\/p>\n This has been a delicious revelation in the human rights propaganda wars fed by the Biden Administration in its battles against authoritarian demons and abusive bogeymen.\u00a0 The Chinese Foreign Ministry was delighted in turning the tables on such cant, drawing upon the CIA-Danish project.\u00a0 In January, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian\u00a0pointedly remarked<\/a>\u00a0that the US both apologise and offer compensation to the victims of such \u201csecret experiments\u201d.<\/p>\n Such compensation would lead to a hefty bill for the US treasury.\u00a0 For decades, unethical and illegal experiments have been conducted by US authorities upon unsuspecting citizens.\u00a0 In 1932, the Tuskegee Institute, working with the US Public Health Service, commenced work on the natural history of syphilis that would do much to foster perennial suspicion of public health authorities and their ignoble intentions.\u00a0 The\u00a0Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male<\/em>\u00a0began<\/a>\u00a0with 600 Black men, 399 with syphilis, 201 without.\u00a0 Informed consent was not sought, the men being told that they were being treated for \u201cbad blood\u201d.\u00a0 Incentives were offered to the participants: free meals, burial insurance, gratis medical exams.<\/p>\n It took four decades before an advisory panel established by the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs\u00a0found<\/a>, with few traces of indignation, that the study had been \u201cethically unjustified,\u201d yielding results \u201cdisproportionately meager compared with known risks to human subjects involved.\u201d<\/p>\n Wishing to be a true international citizen in such matters, the US imperium proceeded to expand such experiments beyond its shores.\u00a0 In 1946, the US government\u00a0was involved in medical trials<\/a>\u00a0affecting at least 5,128 unconsenting and uninformed Guatemalans, including children, orphans, child and adult prostitutes, leprosy patients, prisoners, soldiers, mental patients and Guatemalan Indians.<\/p>\n Of these, some 1,308 were infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea and chancroid.\u00a0 Others had serology tests conducted upon them.\u00a0 \u201cThe researchers,\u201d\u00a0write<\/a>\u00a0Michael A. Rodriguez and Robert Garc\u00eda, \u201csystematically and repeatedly violated profoundly vulnerable individuals, some in the saddest and most despairing states, and grievously aggravated their suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n A subsequent\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0on the experiments by the Guatemalan government,\u00a0Consentir el Da\u00f1o: Experimentos M\u00e9dicos de Estados Unidos en Guatemala<\/em>\u00a0(To Agree to the Harm: Medical Experiments by the United States in Guatemala) found that such acts constituted \u201ca crime against humanity\u201d.\u00a0 The US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues shied away from such language in its two reports but conceded that the experiments would be \u201cimpossible\u201d to conduct under current ethical frameworks.<\/p>\n The response from Washington to the survivors of the CIA-funded program at Copenhagen\u2019s Municipal Hospital is unlikely to be much more than a barely audible apology.\u00a0 Wennick and his similarly abused compatriots are probably best off focusing their interest closer to home, targeting the connivance and complicity of those Danish officials who enabled this sordid enterprise to go ahead in the first place.<\/p>\n Dr. Binoy Kampmark<\/strong>\u00a0was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.\u00a0 He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.\u00a0 Email:\u00a0bkampmark@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n
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