Henry K Beecher

Henry Dale put Beecher in touch with William Sargant

". Schmidt asserts that Britain’s exploration of ‘truth drugs’ seems to have ‘partly’ come from the United States with a visit to the UK by Henry K. Beecher, a Harvard anaesthetist and former member of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). Beecher was tasked by his bosses to gather information on drugs and narcotics and asses their potential as weapons. This assignment was part of Operation Artichoke set up by the CIA in 1951. Another of Beecher’s objectives was to identify scientists who could be recruited for secret work back in the US. Schmidt then goes on to discuss LSD experiments with service personnel at Porton Down in the 1950s done at the behest of MI6 who were much vexed by questions of mind control, truth drugs and brain washing,. ."

What’s your poison? Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments Ulf Schmidt Oxford: Oxford University Press found in 

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster70/lob70-secret-service.pdfOberursel had become Camp King, the homeof the European Command Interrogation Center where, after 1948, a staff of ex-Gestapo soldiers and former Nazi doctors, including the notorious deputy Reich health leader KurtBlome, were employed in inhumane interrogations of Soviet defectors and double agents.Nearby in the town of Kronberg, the CIA used Haus Waldhof, a former country estate, as asafe house for drug testing, brutal torture, and lethal experiments on Soviet bloc expendables. In 1952, for example, the CIA’s Morse Allen—assisted by Dr. Samuel V. Thompson, aNavy Psychiatrist, and Professor G. Richard Wendt, a University of Rochester psychologist—would use the site to test dangerous combinations of drugs such as Benzedrin andPentothal-Natrium on Russian captives, under the protocol that “disposal of the body is not aproblem” (Silver, 1993, pp. 199–213; Pruitt, 18 January 1993, pp. 18–19; Koch and Wech,2003, pp. 50, 89–121, 269; Bower, 1987, pp. 254–256).At Oberursel, Dr. Beecher discussed possible drug uses for interrogation with six staffersincluding a Major Hart, head of a “brutal interrogation team” known as the “rough boys,” andCaptain Malcolm Hilty, chief interrogator. All agreed: “It would be desirable for me to return,jhbs434_04_20271.qxp 9/10/07 4:38 PM Page 411412 ALFRED W. McCOYJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbsperhaps in a year, when we know better the signs and symptoms of the newer derivatives ofmescaline and lysergic acid [LSD], to interrogate especially high level escapees fromRussian interrogation.” In the interim, they recommended he work with a Dr. Schreiber,Camp King’s former staff doctor, whom Beecher described as “a physician and formerGerman general who is now on his way to the States, will be at the School of AviationMedicine . . . Schreiber is intelligent and helpful” (Beecher, 21 October 1951; Koch & Wech,2003, pp. 102–103).Who was Dr. Schreiber, this ideal partner for Professor Beecher’s secret drug research?He was, in fact, General Walter Schreiber, former medical chief for the Wehrmacht who hadpresided over “concentration camp . . . experiments on inmates that usually resulted in a slowand agonizing death.” After Camp King commended his “high efficiency,” the Pentagon senthim to Texas, where he joined other Nazi doctors at the School of Aviation Medicine, albeitonly until May 1952 when complaints about war crimes forced his departure for Argentina(Bower, 1987, pp. 255–258; Koch and Wech, 2003, p. 94; “Nuremberg,” 28 August 1946;“German,” 27 October 1948; “Accused,” 13 February 1952).Moving on to Berlin, Dr. Beecher met with a Military Intelligence officer and “Mr. PeterSichel, C.I.A.” to discuss acquisition of human subjects for his plans “to interrogate as manyhigh-level escapees as possible as to the presence of significant signs and symptoms[of drugs] during periods of interrogation.” When Dr. Beecher’s report on his voyage into thisintelligence netherworld reached the Pentagon in October 1951, it was, at his recommendation, stamped “TOP SECRET” and not declassified until 1977, only months after his death(Beecher, 21 October 1951).A year later in August 1952, Dr. Beecher, discarding Dr. Ploetner’s preference for mescaline, returned to Europe where he now focused solely, almost obsessively, on the threat andpromise of LSD 25. In the year between his visits, Beecher had joined the U.S. intelligencecommunity’s interrogation project with a “top secret” security clearance and a Pentagon grantto study the “Response of Normal Men to Lysergic Acid Derivatives” (Lund, 26 May 1951;Project Title, 31 December 1954). Just as Dr. Ploetner’s results had once heralded the promise of mescaline, so the Sandoz report, provided earlier by the Pentagon, hinted that this newdrug might open the human mind for interrogation: “LSD 25 can bring thoughts from the subconscious into the conscious, can increase associative activity and, by removing inhibitions,can also improve the ekphoric ability.” But Sandoz had also warned that the new drugproduced “a peculiar personality disturbance similar to ‘split personality,’” and induced a“tendency to pathological reactions (hysterical attacks, trances, epileptic fits)” (Rothlin, n.d.).Evidently intrigued, Beecher wrote the company’s chief pharmacologist in Basel, Dr. ErnstRothlin, to arrange a meeting, explaining that “we have been doing some work in man with. . . LSD 25, which was kindly furnished us by your company” (Beecher, 4 August 1952;Beecher, 29 August 1950).Consequently, Dr. Beecher returned from Europe warning about LSD’s effect of “severeimbalance, hysteria” on, say, “a battleship’s crew.” In a secret report to the U.S. Army’ssurgeon general, he advised this drug should be studied “(1) as aids to obtain suppressedinformation . . . (2) as threats to security when used by an enemy agent . . . (3) as tools ofbiological warfare.” The latter was particularly important because “the water supply of a largecity could probably be disastrously and undetectably (until too late) contaminated.”Determined that “the United States . . . not get behind in this field for want of an organizedplan of attack,” he now planned to intensify dosage in his Boston LSD experiments, saying:“We need to know the effects of larger doses, of prolonged administration of small doses andso on.” Fortunately for Beecher’s plans, a professor he had met in Europe “has promised tojhbs434_04_20271.qxp 9/10/07 4:38 PM Page 412SCIENCE IN DACHAU’S SHADOW 413JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbssend me for study the new L.A.E. (a mono ethyl amide of lysergic acid). This is said to bemore excitant to normal individuals than is L.S.D. 25” (Beecher, 4 September 1952).Over the next two years, Dr. Beecher carried out these LSD tests using the unwittinghuman subjects he now believed, through his conventional work, essential to serious pharmacological research—creating, for Beecher, a productive confluence of his covert and conventional work (Beecher, 13 February 1953). In his final report on these tests to Pentagon,Beecher noted that after administering LSD doses—“as unknowns”—four among the ninesubjects given the stronger LAE became “mildly hostile and paranoid; another experiencedacute panic” (Project Title: Neuropsychiatry, 1954).In his decade of secret drug testing, Dr. Beecher sacrificed his subjects to the cause ofnational security. During his European travels in 1951–1952, he had sought expendablesubjects for secret interrogation experiments. Back home at Harvard, Beecher, thoughaware of the drug’s painful effects from the Sandoz report, tested powerful LSD and LAEdoses that inflicted the trauma of “paranoid” reaction and “acute panic” on his unknowinghuman subjects—a “psychosis in miniature” that, he said coolly, “offers interesting possibilities.” In sum, knowing in advance the serious trauma these drugs would cause, Beecherplaced his unwitting subjects at risk by giving them dangerous doses dictated by thedemands of secret research—all in violation of the Nuremberg Code. Yet he also maintaineda perfect cover, minimizing public knowledge of his military research by publishing asingle LSD study as third author—and even that was packaged innocuously as last in aseries of drug tests. Throughout, he sat on influential biomedical bodies, such as the NationalResearch Council, setting the U.S. research agenda (Beecher, 1959, pp. 287, 309–311;Von Felsinger, Lasagna, & Beecher, 1957, pp. 1113–1119; Von Felsinger, Lasagna, & Beecher,1956, pp. 414–428; Beecher, 31 May 1950; Beecher, 13 June 1955; Leake, 7 June 1955).When controversy erupted over LSD tests at Harvard in the 1960s, Dr. Beecher played thestern moralist, roundly condemning one of Timothy Leary’s colleagues Dr. Walter N. Pahnke,for using the drug to ease the pain of dying. “There is an abundance of evidence,” intonedDr. Beecher, condemning such experiments, “that LSD can produce, has produced, lasting,serious damage to young people” (Beecher, 1969, pp. 21–26; Lee & Shlain, 1985, pp. 74–76).MODERN MEDICAL ETHICSThis past may have some lessons for the present debate over ethical standards within theAPA. In one of history’s supreme ironies, this secret CIA research, with its harsh treatment ofhuman subjects, seemed to produce its own correction, making Dr. Beecher the ultimatevictor in this silent, scientific competition. By the early 1960s, as the CIA finalized an interrogation paradigm based on behavioral methods, not drugs, and his defense contracts thusdwindled, Beecher seems to have been freed from conflicts that may have restrained his moralregeneration (Goliszek, 2003, pp. 179–180). In 1966, Beecher published his famous essay,“Ethics and Clinical Research” in The New England Journal of Medicine, citing 22 instancesof medical research whose human subjects suffered “grave consequences . . . as a direct result ofexperiments” and warning that these practices “will do great harm to medicine unless sooncorrected” (Beecher, 1966, pp. 1354–1360).Initially controversial, Dr. Beecher’s 1966 article made his name synonymous with “informed consent” and ethical treatment of human subjects—a legacy commemorated todaywith the annual award of the Henry K. Beecher Prize in Medical Ethics at Harvard MedicalSchool (Countway Medical Library, 2003, para. 1). The award’s 1993 recipient, Yale bioethicsprofessor Jay Katz, praised Beecher for “the moral passion that punctuated his every word”jhbs434_04_20271.qxp 9/10/07 4:38 PM Page 413414 ALFRED W. McCOYJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbsin that 1966 essay (Katz, 1993, pp. 31–39). Typical of this laudatory treatment, a 2001 article inthe Bulletin of the World Health Organization describes how Beecher drew on his “deep Christianfaith” to produce “the most influential single paper ever written about experimentationinvolving human subjects” and thereby “played a significant role” in enacting strict federalregulations (Harkness, 2001, pp. 365–366).Apart from Beecher’s own oblique references to his lab’s ethical lapses, the literature seemsignorant of his darker side. Even aggressive exposés of government abuses have hailed him a“hero” of medical ethics, whereas investigations of the CIA drug scandal make but cursory references to his early LSD research (Harkness, 2001, p. 365; Rothman, 1991, pp. 2–3, 70–84, 251;Moreno, 2000, pp. 239–242; Marks, 1979, pp. 67n, 72n; Lee & Shlain, 1985, p. 86). Today, everyacademic researcher in America and Canada lives under Dr. Beecher’s long shadow, forced tosubmit all research to institutional review boards that would certainly ban the experiments oncedone by Hebb, Cameron, Milgram, and ironically, Beecher himself.So what lesson might we draw from the career of Dr. Henry K. Beecher, other than theimportance of dying before your secret reports are declassified? If members of the APA feeltainted by the work of colleagues at Guantánamo and their association’s inaction, thenDr. Beecher provides a clear path to ethical reform. Just as he transformed himself fromDachau disciple and CIA drug researcher into moral paragon by embracing ethical standards,so the APA can expunge the stigma of its association with psychological torture. By using itsprofessional standing to endorse ethical standards for its members, and more broadly, todefine “severe mental pain” in ways that restrains future abuses, the APA can readily recoverits moral leadership.More broadly, recent research reminds us that this Cold War past continues to shape ourpolitical present. Just this year, a full half-century after Hebb discovered sensory deprivationand the Cornell team documented Soviet stress positions, we have the first clinical evidencethat psychological torture is just as traumatic as its physical variant. “Ill treatment during captivity, such as psychological manipulations . . . and forced stress positions,” Dr. Metin Basoglureports in the Archives of General Psychiatry after interviews with 279 Bosnian victims, “doesnot seem to be substantially different from physical torture in terms of the severity of mentalsuffering . . . and their long-term psychological outcome” (Basoglu, Livanou, & Crnobaric,2007, pp. 277–285).In light of this troubled past, biographers and historians alike should be cautiousbefore rushing to canonize cognitive scientists who worked during the Cold War. If we donot investigate this past and the ways that it has shaped our present, then we cannot critiqueand correct. Clearly, history is too important to become mere hagiography.https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/jus/ikrs/KRIM2950/h11/undervisningsmateriale/McCoy.pdf