Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (37 page)

In exchange for participating, the men were granted their freedom. Goldberger had convinced Governor Brewer that the public health benefits of curing pellagra outweighed the political repercussions of releasing the inmates, some of whom were murderers serving life sentences. When the experiment was over and the men were allowed to
resume a wholesome diet, Brewer held a small ceremony in his office for the pellagra squad and gave each one of them his pardon along with a new suit and $5 in cash.

“Dr. Jos. Goldberger,” a
Jackson Daily News
editorial proclaimed on November 2, 1915, the day after the study ended, “[has] robbed pellagra of its terrors [and] is entitled to rank with the men of medical science who developed the mosquito theory of yellow fever transmission, the antitoxins for diphtheria and typhoid, the cure for hookworm disease and the eradication of the bubonic plague.” Newspapers in other cities gushed with similar praise. Some Mississippi citizens did protest, angry that convicted killers had been let back into society for doing little more than consuming a diet barely worse than their own. None of their indignation, however, concerned doctors from a federal agency performing, for the first time in our nation’s history, prolonged and potentially lethal medical experiments on prisoners.

American prisoners, to be specific. In November 1906, while stationed in the Philippines (a U.S. territory then), Army doctor Richard Strong infected thirty-four Filipino inmates with a cholera vaccine tainted with plague organisms. Thirteen died. Strong was investigated but cleared of any criminal wrongdoing. Six years later he was researching the deficiency disease beriberi and ended up killing several more Filipino inmates. Unlike Goldberger’s squad, however, Strong’s subjects were not pardoned but paid off in cigarettes. Strong returned to America in 1913 and became Harvard University’s first professor of tropical medicine.

More than three decades later the same German doctors who quoted from Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race
during the Nuremberg trials to try to prove that Americans had acted no differently than the Nazis, also cited Richard Strong’s experiments in the Philippines. And Dr. Joseph Goldberger’s at Rankin Farm.

“Goldberger, every now and again, comes [to Rankin] fagged, gray-faced from his incessant prowling up and down through the asylums, mill villages, orphanages, wherever this death of the poor and lowly
may call him,” Paul de Kruif wrote in his best-selling book
Hunger Fighters
, excerpts of which were submitted by Hitler’s top physicians at Nuremberg. “Goldberger and [Dr. George] Wheeler,” de Kruif continued,

The fact that Nazi doctors obscenely exploited Goldberger, the “hawk-faced” Jew (de Kruif’s words), as an involuntary witness in their defense, does not of course make his actions comparable to theirs. But this depiction of Goldberger engaging in “criminal research” has gained traction over the years. Most of the scholarly works and references I’ve found on the history of medicine in America either ignore him entirely or lump him in with Richard Strong and Leo Stanley, the unscrupulous chief surgeon at California’s San Quentin State Prison. Beginning in 1918, Stanley implanted testicular glands and entire testicles—originally from executed inmates, and later from rams, goats, boars, and deer—into the scrotums of living prisoners. An early devotee of eugenics who believed that hormonal imbalances were linked to criminality, Stanley experimented first on senile inmates, followed by those he deemed of “moron intelligence.” His ghoulish operations ended not due to any public outrage but because Stanley decided to retire from San Quentin and practice medicine in more posh conditions as a cruise-ship physician.

Medical ethics aren’t my forte, but considering that there were no established guidelines for human experimentation in 1915, I do think Goldberger’s actions deserve to be put into some context. Goldberger enlisted only volunteers and warned them of the risks involved. He gave the men written consent forms and encouraged them to talk with family members and attorneys before signing up. He monitored their health constantly to make certain no one was at risk of suffering long-term effects, and when one prisoner became seriously ill early on (from an unrelated ailment, it turned out), Goldberger immediately released him from the study. The man still received his freedom.

Goldberger’s inmates were unquestionably enticed by the promise of a full pardon, a reward that wouldn’t be allowed today. Current regulations prohibit giving prisoners in federal studies
any
“possible advantages,” not even a more spacious cell or tastier meals, that might influence their decision to participate in medical tests. They must be motivated solely by a desire to further scientific research. Some ethicists argue that this policy is itself unfair because nonprison (or, “free-world”) subjects almost always receive incentives, and prisoners shouldn’t be denied the same opportunities. Goldberger’s true motivations are impossible to know, but by all accounts he treated his pellagra squad with respect and secured their freedom because he believed they deserved compensation for their hardship.

In the aftermath of the Rankin experiments, several prominent southern doctors refused to accept Goldberger’s dietary-deficiency hypothesis and clung stubbornly to the idea that pellagra was communicable. Undaunted, Goldberger conducted a series of tests on himself that if nothing else underscored his personal dedication to bringing the deadly scourge to an end. On April 28, 1916, Goldberger mixed the dried, flaky scabs from various pellagrins with their urine, nasal secretions, and liquid feces, and then, as colleagues looked on, swallowed the concoction whole. He repeated the process several more times and never developed pellagra or any other illnesses except light indigestion and, I’m guessing, a staggering case of bad breath.

Many of Goldberger’s skeptics
still
remained unconvinced and continued to denounce his theory, and they were joined by southern politicians who resented a Yankee from New York lecturing their citizens on how to adopt better eating habits. Frustrated that regional pride was undermining public welfare, Goldberger nevertheless recognized how costly it would be, with or without federal help, for southern states to overhaul their agricultural system and ensure that every individual received enough fresh milk, eggs, meat, vegetables, and bread to stave off pellagra. Finding a cheap, readily available preventative became Goldberger’s obsession, and after years of trial and error he was able to isolate which foods were most effective. The results defied common sense. Buttermilk did the trick, but butter did not. Beef and canned salmon were a yes, gelatin and cod-liver oil a no. Baker’s yeast proved only moderately successful, but brewer’s yeast worked wonders. It appeared, in fact, to be the panacea Goldberger had been searching for. Just two teaspoons three times a day were necessary, and it cost only pennies to purchase and distribute. (Biochemists learned eight years after Goldberger’s death that niacin was the active nutrient, and in 1943 the War Food Administration mandated that all commercially made white bread be enriched with niacin and other vitamins.)

Whatever scorn Goldberger had endured from his southern critics all but dissipated after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered an estimated 16.5 million acres across seven states, killed hundreds, and destroyed $100 million worth of crops, countless livestock, and more than forty thousand homes and farms. The flooding began in mid-April, and by summer, pellagra cases were rising again. Surgeon General Hugh Smith Cumming ordered Goldberger to the South, and this time he was embraced like a conquering hero. “Delta in Grip of New Menace from Pellagra,” exclaimed the
Jackson Daily News
on July 25, 1927. “Poor Diet Causes Wide Spread of Disease, Goldberger Coming.” And with him came 12,000 pounds of brewer’s yeast to be doled out across the region, followed by another 350,000 pounds to avert future epidemics. The aid was accepted with open arms.

During the fall of 1928, Goldberger was recommended for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “It is not an exaggeration to say that many competent observers believe that no more important piece of medical research work has been accomplished in this generation than has been done by Doctor Goldberger,” the official nominating statement read. “It has put in our hands knowledge which when applied may be expected to lead to the eradication of pellagra. In addition to this immediately practical outcome of his investigations, there has come a broader understanding of human nutrition and diet by the definite establishment of pellagra as one of the deficiency diseases.”

Christiaan Eijkman, the Dutch doctor who discovered what caused beriberi, and Sir Frederick Hopkins, a pioneer in vitamin research, ultimately received the 1929 Nobel award. But even if Goldberger had won, he wouldn’t have been alive to accept the prize; a malignant kidney tumor had metastasized throughout his body in December, and he passed away on January 17, 1929. Before he died, Goldberger offered up his body for scientific study.

Goldberger had also instructed that his memorial service be a simple affair. Having dedicated his entire career to public service and raising four sons, he had no life savings to leave his wife, and an elaborate funeral would have been one more financial burden Mary couldn’t afford. After his death, Goldberger’s friends and admirers—including the Mayo brothers—successfully lobbied Congress to provide Mary with a pension. She would have been destitute otherwise.

Not until 1946, in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, did the American Medical Association formulate its “Rules of Human Experimentation,” which stated that “(1) the voluntary consent of the person on whom the experiment is to be performed must be obtained, (2) the danger of each experiment must be previously investigated by animal experimentation, and (3) the experiment must be performed under proper medical protection and management.” (Goldberger didn’t initially use animals because he thought only humans contracted pellagra. He later realized that the canine disease “black tongue” was similar,
and he began conducting dietary tests on dogs. It was during these trials that he discovered the efficacy of brewer’s yeast.)

Ironically, experimentation on human subjects in the United States only got worse after Nuremberg. Cold War hysteria prompted an almost “anything goes” mentality among government scientists, and thousands of ghastly tests were performed on inmates and unsuspecting members of the general public.

In 1946 scientists with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission collaborated with Quaker Oats and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to feed breakfast oatmeal spiked with radioactive calcium to mentally retarded children and teenagers at the Walter E. Fernald State School outside of Boston. (MIT and Quaker Oats paid a $1.85 million settlement to the test’s adult victims in 1998.) And when the arms race escalated in 1949 after the Soviets set off their first nuclear bomb, U.S. troops bore the brunt of early, large-scale radiation experiments. On November 1, 1951, some three thousand military personnel were trucked to the Frenchman Flat basin in the Nevada desert, and a bomb more powerful than “Fat Man,” which wiped out Nagasaki, was detonated seven miles away. Given no shelter or protective gear, the men were exposed to the shock waves, intense heat, and radioactive fallout. During a similar exercise the next year, troops were positioned four miles from a nuclear blast, and in 1953 they were placed a mere seven thousand feet away. Sailors aboard U.S. warships were also anchored downwind of nuclear explosions in the Pacific, and the Veterans Administration has since designated 210,000 Americans “atomic veterans” from Cold War–era tests like these, many of whom have reported increased rates of thyroid disease, leukemia, and terminal cancers.

In 2003 the Pentagon admitted that between 1962 and 1974, Army scientists based out of the Dugway Proving Ground—my original Utah site until I was nearly arrested for taking pictures of the Deseret Chemical Depot—were infecting service members on land and sea with nerve agents such as sarin gas to better understand how various toxins affected the immune system. (Not well, they discovered.)

President Bill Clinton offered a formal apology on October 3, 1995, for the government’s radiation experiments after a Department of Energy report laid bare the agency’s earlier transgressions. Both his statement and the DOE exposé on its past actions were unprecedented, and they would have been major news if both the media and the American public hadn’t been distracted by a more pressing story that broke just hours later: football legend O. J. Simpson was found not guilty following an eight-month murder trial.

After I walk the perimeter of the Mississippi State Hospital to make sure I haven’t missed anything, I circle back to the front gate and ask the security guard if he remembers seeing Goldberger’s tribute or has any knowledge of its fate.

He answers no to both questions and offers his own anticlimactic theory on why it’s gone: “Someone probably just wanted it for the scrap metal.”

When I mention that the sign had been shot up pretty badly, indicating, I think, some element of displeasure with the intended target, the guard looks at me like I’m from Neptune.

“Around here folks shoot at signs all the time, just for the hell of it,” he tells me. “They don’t need a reason.”

On that note I thank him for his time and scoot off to the airport. The National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in central Illinois is my next stop—thanks, indirectly, to Joseph Goldberger.