Serving Their Country

    As late as the 1970s American soldiers and prisoners were used as medical research test subjects.

Henry Langlois was one of 38 soldiers who were told in 1955 that they were serving their country when they volunteered to inhale a biological agent that the government was testing.

A year later, inmates at the Ohio Penitentiary were told they were serving society when they volunteered to let researchers inject them with live cancer cells.

In the 1960s and 1970s, 15,000 Marines were told the same thing when Ohio State University scientists tested a pneumonia vaccine on them.

Perhaps the most famous was the cancer-vaccine test. As many as 160 prisoners were injected with live cancer cells.

The study, co-sponsored by Ohio State and the Sloan-Kettering Research Institute, ran from 1956 until 1961. Eventually, researchers said they lost track of most of the prisoners and thus had no results.

More at the link:

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/03/06/osu-had-role-in-old-drug-trials.html?sid=101