Don't think that illicit experimentation is confined to secret military projects or misguided sociology. The complicity of the processed food industry with the FDA and Monsanto is making guinea pigs out of all consumers.

The madness of the Third Reich's medical experiments on live humans was in inspired in part by past US practices.

(SALEM, Ore.) - The atrocities of Nazi experimentation with humans revealed during the Nuremberg Trials resulted in a set of research ethics known as the Nuremberg Code. Despite a world galvanized against the infamous Nazi factories of torture and death, the reality of America's involvement in biological testing is an equally sordid affair in conflict with these fundamental rules, which include the voluntary consent of the subject, the avoidance of unnecessary suffering, and that the subject should be at liberty to end the experiment.

During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors reported being influenced by an American experiment in 1940 where 400 prisoners in Chicago were infected with malaria in order to study experimental drugs. Secretive exploitation of disadvantaged members of society, including children, the mentally handicapped, the poor, and African-Americans have characterized America's legacy of biological experimentation.

Frequently military personnel and the incarcerated have been unwitting subjects of chemical, biological, and surgical experiments. During classified atomic testing during the Cold War, military personnel and civilians were bombarded with lethal doses of ionizing radiation. More recently, secret dispersion testing of biological agents has involved military personnel and the general public.

Significant evidence exists that the outbreak of AIDS involved military experimentation with synthetic viruses with the intent of creating a powerful biological weapon. This revelation begins with the knowledge that in 1969 a request was made to Congress by Dr. Robert MacMahan of the Department of Defense (DOD) for $10 million to develop a biological agent capable of spawning an incurable disease.

H.R.15090 obtained the necessary funding in 1970 for the project, which was overseen by the CIA. The experiments were conducted at the Army's secret biological weapons facility within the Special Operations Division of Fort Detrick, and speculation was raised that AIDS-like retroviruses had been developed.

In 1975 Fort Detrick's Biological Warfare Research virus unit was renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facility, with operations supervised by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The U.S. Navy began experiments on cancer-causing viruses at Fort Detrick, and other efforts resulted in the isolation of a virus known as HTLV, for Human T-cell Leukemia Virus, for which there is no natural immunity. The next sinister development was the experimental vaccine trials conducted in 1978 by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for Hepatitis B, in which research advertisements in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles asked for promiscuous homosexual men specifically.

By 1981 the first cases of AIDS were verified in these same three cities. Immediately questions arose about the connection between the Hepatitis B vaccine and the AIDS cases.

Then in 1985, an article in the journal Science (227:173-177) links HTLV and a fatal sheep virus known as VISNA. Subsequent studies by the National Academy of Sciences (83:4007-4011) indicate that HIV and VISNA are suspiciously similar in genetic structure. The only difference is a segment virtually identical to HTLV. The informed speculation is that VISNA and HTLV have been joined by molecular biologists to produce a deadly new retrovirus.

This hypothesis is given weight by a 1986 report to Congress detailing that the U.S. Government's arsenal of biological weapons includes agents that have been modified through genetic engineering to create a lethal immunological profile, along with modified viruses.

In 1996 the DOD has admitted that soldiers in Operation Desert Storm were exposed to chemical agents. Subsequently eighty-eight members of Congress signed a petition demanding that Gulf War Syndrome and the use of bio-weapons be investigated.

Dr. Garth Nicolson discovered evidence in 1995 that biological weapons used during the Gulf War had been tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections. Furthermore, Senator John D. Rockefeller reported in 1994 that the DOD has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in experiments exposing them to nerve gas, mustard gas, psychochemicals, ionizing radiation, hallucinogens such as LSD, and other hazardous substances.

Also in 1994, Dr. Garth Nicolson used 'gene tracking' to reveal that many returning Desert Storm veterans are infected with a microbe used in the manufacture of biological weapons, incorporating a structure present in HIV. It is a powerful indictment of the suspected man-made origin of HIV and AIDS.

The US Military admits that personnel have been unwittingly exposed to Agent Orange along with other chemical and biological agents, but has downplayed the long-term health consequences despite the symptoms being reported by veterans. The Department of Veterans Affairs has characteristically denied claims for care and compensation in the face of documented exposure to known carcinogens and toxic substances.

It should be noted that President Richard Nixon ended the offensive aspects of the U.S. bio-weapons program in 1969, and the U.S. has ratified international treaties banning biological warfare. However, no provisions for enforcement apply, and the biological defense program continues. The U.S. military has sought loopholes and interpretations of these treaties that have resulted in numerous recent incidents of exposure to biological agents, prompting the Federation of American Scientists to declare that U.S. work on 'non-lethal' agents exceeds the limitations imposed by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972.

In 1970 the U.S. advanced its development of 'ethnic weapons', designed to selectively target and eliminate specific ethnic groups by exploiting variations in DNA. (Military Review, Nov. 1970) U.S. Navy ships sprayed a fog of the bacterium Serratia marcescens over San Francisco in 1950 to determine the susceptibility to a biological attack. Within two weeks, eleven people became ill with the same symptoms, including Edward J. Nevin, who later died from an infection of the Serratia bacterium.

The DOD atomic testing program in the 1950s became controversial because of reported cancer rates above the national average in areas downwind from desert test sites. The cancer controversy surrounding the filming of 'The Conqueror', starring John Wayne, is perhaps the most compelling. Many scenes for this 1956 movie were filmed 137 miles downwind of the U.S. Government's Nevada test Site, where above ground nuclear weapons testing had occurred in 1953. A disproportionately high percentage of the cast and crew later died of cancer.

Out of 220 people, 91 had contracted cancer by 1981. According to professor of biology Dr. Robert Pendleton at the University of Utah, "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law."

The Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Military, and other agencies of the U.S. Government have been responsible for a broad spectrum of radiation experiments inflicted on those who were powerless to protest. The studies included feeding radioactive food to conscientious objectors and retarded children, dispersing radioactive materials over U.S. cities, and contaminating pregnant women and school children with radioactive material.

America's 'Atomic Soldiers' - Nevada Test Site 1951

During the period 1946 to 1963, the U.S. military ordered over 200,000 GIs on active duty to observe nuclear explosions at close range. Military veteran Jim O'Connor provides this account of one such experience at the Nevada Test Site in March 1955: "There was a guy with a mannequin look who had apparently crawled behind the bunker. Something like wires were attached to his arms and his face was bloody. I smelled an odor like burning flesh. The rotary camera I'd seen [earlier] was going zoom, zoom, zoom and the guy kept trying to get up."

A secret document (# 07075001, Jan. 8) was issued by Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1947, allowing the injections of radioactive materials in human subjects. Medical experiments had also begun on unsuspecting patients in VA hospitals.

As late as 1942 the U.S. had deemed biological warfare impractical, although England, France, and Japan had already started their own programs. America began to study the possibilities of biological agents in 1943, initially as a defensive gesture, which was quickly expanded to exploit its offensive capabilities. The effort was kept secret until 1946.

The director of the U.S. Public Health Service was implicated in the Pellagra Incident in 1935, admitting that the agency had known that niacin would cure the condition responsible for millions of deaths, but failed to act because most of the casualties were confined to impoverished African-Americans.

The Tuskegee, Alabama Syphilis Experiment ran from 1932 to 1972, in which 399 African-Americans infected with syphilis were never informed of their condition by the U.S. Public Health Service, and were denied treatment for the disease even though programs were available.

The disease was allowed to run its course, resulting in numerous deaths, infected spouses, and children born with congenital syphilis. In return, the subjects were only given free meals and medical exams, and free burial insurance.

Don't think that illicit experimentation is confined to secret military projects or misguided sociology. The complicity of the processed food industry with the FDA and Monsanto is making guinea pigs out of all consumers.

The scope and sheer number of these transgressions precludes anything but the limited sampling provided. I direct the reader to the following links for more information.