Dangerous Medicine: The Story behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis (Zoom Program)

*This is a Zoom program*

From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and to develop interventions that would quell recurring outbreaks. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-person interviews, Sydney Halpern traces the hepatitis program from its origins in World War II through its expansion during the initial Cold War years, to its demise in the early 1970s amid an outcry over research abuse.

The subjects in hepatitis studies were members of stigmatized groups—conscientious objectors, prison inmates, the mentally ill, and developmentally disabled adults and children. The book reveals how researchers invoked military and scientific imperatives and the rhetoric of a common good to win support for the experiments and access to recruits. Halpern examines the participants’ long-term health consequences and raises troubling questions about hazardous human experiments aimed at controlling today’s epidemic diseases.`

Sydney Halpern is a historical sociologist who has written extensively about twentieth-century American medical institutions and biomedical science. For some time, her focus has been the framing of moral issues in the conduct of human research. She earned her doctorate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, with a concentration in historical analysis, and has served as Full Professor at both Vanderbilt University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioethics, University Pennsylvania School of Medicine; the Institute for Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois; and the American Bar Foundation, a center for socio-legal scholarship. Her funding awards include an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a major grant and several University Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For Dangerous Medicine, she received a multi-year award from the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health. She is currently Professor Emerita at University of Illinois at Chicago, and Lecturer at the Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

A complimentary copy of Dangerous Medicine will be distributed in advance to the first 30 judges who register.