What Research Scandals? Welcome to the Bioethics Memory Hole

For the past decade or so I have taught a seminar on abuses of human research subjects. When I started preparing for the seminar, I assumed that it would be a simple matter to find bioethics literature. After all, abuses such as the Tuskegee syphilis study and the Willowbrook hepatitis studies played an outsized role in the emergence of bioethics as a field. What I discovered, however, was that scholarly accounts of even the most iconic cases were often surprisingly hard to find. At best, the record is thin. At worst, it is distorted and factually mistaken.

Take, for instance, the CIA-funded studies by Ewen Cameron on psychiatric patients at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. Without their consent, the patients were given massive, repeated courses of electroshock therapy; they were dosed with LSD and other drugs; and they were put into comas for weeks or even months at a time. Once the patients had been “depatterned,” or brainwashed, Cameron attempted to rebuild them psychologically with a process he called “psychic driving,” in which they were forced to listen to taped instructions on