The discovery by a University of Guelph researcher that hungry and malnourished aboriginal children and adults across Canada were the subject of nutritional experiments during the 1940s and 1950s is shocking, horrifying and hardly surprising.
The research, some of which occurred in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, involved at least 1,300 people, most of them children living in residential schools. The schools withheld milk and vitamins to various degrees, along with access to dentists, in an effort to measure the short-term and long-term effects on health.
This offensive and immoral investigation is part of the dirty secret underlying modern science. It's only been in the past few decades, coinciding with the rise of individual rights, that scientists have seen people and animals as actual beings and more than just useful tools on the path to knowledge. Before then, the pursuit of knowledge and how the whole world could benefit easily outweighed the discomfort and pain of people. To this day, animals are used routinely for various experiments that involves their suffering and execution. While today's researchers must have the methodology of their projects approved by ethics boards, the quest for knowledge can blind even the best-intentioned scientists to ramifications of their work.
It's also important to see the nutritional experiments in a historical context, not to justify these experiments but to point out that this disregard of human subjects by researchers at this time was the norm, not the exception.
During the same time period, the Nazis were also doing nutritional experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Extensive research by German scientists on this same captive population generated valuable information on the treatment of hypothermia, which is used to this day. While those treatment methods would likely have been discovered later in an ethical manner, much good did eventually arise from knowledge acquired through such evil means.
The same cannot be said of the Canadian nutritional experiments. Despite the fact they went on for years, it appears the results of the experiments revealed little and there is no evidence so far that the research was even finished.
Closer to home, research sponsored by the CIA was done in Canada during the 1960s, testing the behavioral effects of LSD and other drug cocktails on human subjects.
Some of this human behavior research during this time is both infamous and fascinating. The Stanford prison experiment in 1971 was funded by the U.S. military to try to find the source of conflict between prisoners and guards. The randomly-chosen group was put in isolation and the results were so shocking that the experiment was shut down six days into its two-week run. The guards quickly began engaging in acts of psychological torture on the prisoners, while the prisoners either passively accepted the treatment, encouraged the treatment on others or were punished for questioning the behaviour of the guards.
The Milgram experiment from 1963 is similarly notorious for its work on human perceptions of power and authority. Study participants were asked to question a subject and administer increasing levels of electric shocks for every wrong answer to the subject, who was in on the ruse and was not shocked. The participants, however, were played recordings of the subject reacting to the pain, from shouts to screams to pleas for it to stop to no response. A research scientist in the room with the participant encouraged but did not force the participant to continue when asked if the questioning should stop. The results were also shocking - more than half of the participants continued to the very end, when the subject was no longer responding and the shocks, if really administered, would have been deadly.
Another study from the early 1970s put randomly-chosen men and women in a completely dark room together for an hour to test behavior when people believe they can't be seen. Let's just say that many of the research subjects became surprisingly cozy with complete strangers.
While this behavioral research is nowhere near as repugnant as the nutritional studies completed on aboriginal children, it still shows an uncomfortable willingness to use others to test a theory. While we should encourage scientists to further understand humanity and the world, we should remember that knowledge comes with a cost and we should always be cautious about paying the price.
