In the Grip of a Higher Purpose

A man at the Carnegie Museum in Oakland was injured in a shooting Friday. This apparently was accidental.

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Niners rookie receiver and first round draft pick Ricky Pearsall was shot in the chest during a robbery attempt in San Francisco’s Union Square on Saturday afternoon, the team said in a statement.

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In the Grip of a Higher Purpose

The current election is not a good example of this divergence, but most national debates on government revolve around how much confidence the citizen has--or should have--in the government doing the right thing, regardless of motive. 

Here is a cautionary tale, from a paper by Coyne and Hall.

'In July 1946, 20-year-old Helen Hutchison walked into the Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic in Nashville, Tennessee. Helen found herself pregnant after her husband had returned from combat in World War II. The pregnancy, however, had not been easy. During her visit to the clinic Helen’s doctor handed her a small drink.

“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a little cocktail,” her doctor replied. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“Well I don’t know if I should be drinking a cocktail,” she responded in jest.
“Drink it all. Drink it all down” (quoted in Welsome 1999, p. 220).

Helen did as her doctor ordered.

Three months later Helen’s daughter, Barbara, was born. Not long after, Helen began to experience some frightening health problems; her face swelled, and her hair fell out. She then experienced two miscarriages, one of which necessitated 16 blood transfusions (Welsome 1999, p. 220). Baby Barbara experienced her own health problems from early childhood. She suffered from extreme fatigue and developed an autoimmune disorder and eventually skin cancer.

…Unbeknownst to Helen, she and her unborn baby had been subjects in a government-funded experiment. She was one of hundreds of women who received an experimental “cocktail” between 1945 and 1947 during one of their prenatal visits, compliments of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which provided the materials (Wittenstein 2014, p. 39).

The 829 women of the Vanderbilt clinic were but a few of hundreds of thousands of individuals, mostly U.S. citizens, who would be subjected to illegal experiments and suffer human-rights violations during in the post-World War II period at the hands of scientists with funding and materials provided by the U.S. government. These experiments were meant to provide the government with information about the effects of atomic weapons on the human body to advance military capabilities in the name of “national security.”

This paper tells the story of U.S. government activities related to human experimentation after World War II.'

That’s Coyne and Hall writing on Dr. Mengele, USA Style: Lessons from Human Rights Abuses in Post World War II America. 

It’s interesting that these immoral experiments using radiation and also agents of chemical warfare are less well known to the public than say the Tuskegee Study even though they involved far more people.