with two different types of hepatitis virus. One type, which we now
call hepatitis A, spread from person-to-person, whereas hepatitis B
was blood-borne.
The research brought controversy as well as discoveries. In the
early 1970s, criticism of the work grew, and the experiments were
eventually halted. The study team argued that the project had been
ethically sound: it had approval from several medical ethics boards,
they’d obtained consent from childrens’ parents, and the poor
conditions in the school meant that many of the children would have
got the disease at some point anyway. Critics responded that,
among other things, the consent forms had brushed over the details
of what was involved and Krugman overstated the chances children
would get infected naturally. ‘They were the most unethical medical
experiments ever performed on children in the United States,’
claimed vaccine pioneer Maurice Hillman.[59]
This raises the question of what to do with such knowledge once
it’s been obtained. Research papers from the Willowbrook study
have been cited hundred of times, but not everyone agreed they
should be acknowledged in this way. ‘Every new reference to the
work of Krugman and Giles adds to its apparent ethical
respectability, and in my view such references should stop, or at
least be heavily qualified,’ wrote physician Stephen Goldby in a letter
to The Lancet in 1971.[60]
There are many other examples of medical knowledge that has
uncomfortable origins. In early nineteenth-century Britain, the
growing number of medical schools created a massive demand for
cadavers for use in anatomy classes. Faced with a limited legal
supply, the criminal market stepped in; bodies were increasingly
snatched from graveyards and sold to lecturers.[61] Yet it is
experiments on the living that have proved the most shocking.
During the Second World War, Nazi doctors deliberately infected
patients at Auschwitz with diseases including typhus and cholera, to
measure things like the incubation period.[62] After the war, the
medical community created the Nuremberg Code, outlining a set of
principles for ethical studies. Even so, the controversies would