Moreno, Jonathan D. : Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. Nele são descritos experimentos acadêmicos sobre tortura, experimentos que dão arrepios a quem ainda pensa em termos éticos. Mas aquelas pesquisas são antigas, datam da Guerra Fria. E continuam ainda hoje.
RRSão Paulo, sábado, 20 de dezembro de 2008
Folha de São Paulo
Experimento faz pessoa comum virar torturador
Psicólogos reproduziram teste da década de 1960
DA REUTERS
Psicólogos conseguiram reproduzir um experimento clássico dos anos 1960, mostrando que a maioria das pessoas aceita infligir dor em outras quando recebe ordens de alguém em posição de autoridade.No novo estudo, 70% dos participantes convidados a ajudar um cientista aceitavam aplicar choques num voluntário, que deveria ser punido cada vez que errava uma resposta de uma prova oral. Mesmo quando o homem se contorcia (na verdade era um ator fingindo dor), as pessoas continuavam a aumentar a voltagem da "punição", a pedido do pesquisador."Se você colocar as pessoas em certas situações, elas vão agir de maneira perturbadora", diz Jerry Burger, da Universidade de Santa Clara (EUA).
A versão original do experimento, de 1961, foi feita por Stanley Milgram, da Universidade Yale, de Connecticut. Ele verificou que, mesmo depois de ouvir um ator gritar de dor no nível de 150 volts, 82,5% dos participantes continuaram a dar os choques -a maioria até o nível máximo de 450 volts. Até hoje, ninguém tinha replicado o experimento em razão do trauma sofrido por voluntários que acreditavam estar lesionando as pessoas. Burger, então, decidiu parar em 150 volts no estudo com 29 homens e as 41 mulheres.
Quando soldados foram pegos torturando prisioneiros no Iraque, alguns alegaram que o ato teria sido fruto dessa obediência irrestrita. Burger, porém, nega que esse evento possa ser totalmente explicado com os voluntários de seu teste."Não é que haja algo errado com essas pessoas", diz. "A idéia que vem dos anos 1960 é que, de alguma forma, elas têm essa característica de serem mais propensas a obedecer."
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RESENHA SOBRE OUTRO LIVRO RELEVANTE DE MORENO, NO
THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS.
Lab Humans
Undue Risk. Secret State Experiments on Humans.
Jonathan D. Moreno (New York,W. H. Freeman & Company).
By DANIEL J. KEVLES *
October 31, 1999
One day in March 1945, Ebb Cade, 53 years old and black, his bones broken in a car accident, was brought to the Manhattan Project Army Hospital in Oak Ridge, Tenn. During several weeks in the hospital, he was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium, radioactive fuel for atomic bombs. Medical scientists wanted to know what might happen if the metal accidentally entered the bodies of lab workers. Cade was the first of 18 people injected with plutonium in Federally sponsored experiments over the next two years. Probably none but the last of the subjects were told what he or she was being given, advised of the risks or asked to consent to the procedure.
In 1994, following the publication of a series of articles on the plutonium injections, President Clinton appointed an advisory committee on human radiation experiments to investigate the matter and gave it access to thousands of secret documents. Jonathan D. Moreno, a biomedical ethicist at the University of Virginia, worked for the committee, then went on to examine the broad history of experiments that the United States Government had secretly conducted on human subjects in the interest of national security from World War II through the cold war. The result is ''Undue Risk,'' an earnest, often chilling account of experiments with chemical and biological agents as well as radiation, and of the policies -- or, more accurately, lack of policies -- that long governed them.
During World War II, both military and civilian agencies sponsored numerous experiments with human subjects in connection with investigations of the new antibiotic penicillin, agents against malaria and protections against poison gases. The subjects were conscientious objectors, prison inmates, hospital patients, students and Army recruits. Most were volunteers who had been informed of the risks. But others participated without their consent, including, Moreno says, ''tens of thousands'' of soldiers who were exposed to poison gases to test protective clothing and gas masks.
Moreno shows that at the Nuremberg Trials lawyers for the Nazi doctors invoked some of the American experiments in attempting to defend their clients against charges of having committed atrocities. In the end, the Nuremberg court held that the issue before it was not medical ethics but murder. Still, apparently disturbed by a seeming muddiness of standards, the court promulgated what came to be called the Nuremberg Code, a bill of rights for people selected for medical experimentation. Among its tenets: Voluntary consent is ''absolutely essential.'' The participant must not be subjected to undue risk, and must have the right to terminate the experiment at any time.
Despite the Nuremberg Code, the Atomic Energy Commission had no general policy governing experiments with human subjects. The Defense Department did after 1953, at least for experiments in atomic, chemical or biological warfare, but it was not widely disseminated. Moreno contends that one reason for the lack of a well-recognized policy was the secrecy that surrounded security-sensitive defense programs. Another, he stresses, was that medical researchers tended to resist interference with their professional autonomy.
After World War II the military exposed ground troops to atomic test explosions without asking their consent and sent pilots through the mushroom clouds. The United States Public Health Service submitted to demands by uranium mine owners that scientists studying their miners' exposure to radiation not tell them about the hazard. About 6,700 people, some of them unaware of what they were receiving, were given psychoactive drugs by the Army or the C.I.A. One of the C.I.A.'s unknowing subjects died from the procedure and another jumped through a 10th-story hotel window while awaiting treatment for its effects.
Moreno has assembled his story from a wide range of sources, including the records of military and civilian agencies. Still, he provides little evidence that medical resistance played a significant role in the failure to promulgate effective policies for human experimentation. His treatment of policy issues is often murky, partly because his book is confusingly organized, moving back and forth in time and topic so that it is difficult to keep track of the military's or the A.E.C.'s attitudes toward human experimentation during any one period. He blurs focus by roaming far from his main subject, exploring, for example, Operation Paper Clip, the post-1945 recruitment by the American military of German scientists, including some complicit in the biomedical research of the Nazis. He suggests that ''the possibility cannot be ruled out'' that some of these doctors conducted abusive tests on American military personnel but acknowledges a lack of documentary evidence that they did.
In the early 1960's, the Army, which at least officially tends to care for the welfare of its recruits, disseminated a broadened directive requiring informed consent in all experiments with human subjects and has since further strengthened the rules. The civilian agencies of national security eventually arrived at the same position, goaded largely by increasing exposure of human experimental practices in Congressional hearings and the press. Although Moreno gives little attention to that part of the story, he does note the importance of the revelations in the 1970's of the syphilis study sponsored by the United States Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala., and of the Army and the C.I.A.'s inquiries into psychoactive drugs.
Moreno has been persuaded, if only by the problems of gulf war veterans, that the military needs reliable knowledge of how to protect its personnel, especially from the growing threat of chemical and biological warfare. Human experimentation, he notes, is ''probably unavoidable in the real world of national security.'' He suggests several ways that the human subjects in such research might be protected. Not all his proposals seem practical; indeed, his idea of opening to public scrutiny not only research practices but the weapons programs they serve will strike many as nave. But the historical record that he presents in ''Undue Risk'' strongly supports his contention that the rights of human subjects deserve to be held paramount over any needs of national security.
* Daniel J. Kevles directs the program in science, ethics and public policy at the California Institute of Technology. His most recent book is ''The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character.''
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MAS A SABEDORIA ANTIGA RECOLHE PROBLEMAS SIMILARES. VEJA-SE O RENASCIMENTO COM BACON E MONTAIGNE (NO SÉCULO 18 RECORDADOS POR DIDEROT SOBRE O MESMO PROBLEMA DE USAR CONDENADOS À MORTE, PARA QUE SEJAM ABERTOS VIVOS, EM FUNÇÃO DO CONHECIMENTO MAIOR DO CORPO HUMANO E DE SEU FUNCIONAMENTO).
MONTAIGNE, ENSAIOS, LIVRO 2, CAPÍTULO 23 (DOS MEIOS RUINS EMPREGADOS PARA BONS FINS) :
THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS.
Lab Humans
Undue Risk. Secret State Experiments on Humans.
Jonathan D. Moreno (New York,W. H. Freeman & Company).
By DANIEL J. KEVLES *
October 31, 1999
One day in March 1945, Ebb Cade, 53 years old and black, his bones broken in a car accident, was brought to the Manhattan Project Army Hospital in Oak Ridge, Tenn. During several weeks in the hospital, he was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium, radioactive fuel for atomic bombs. Medical scientists wanted to know what might happen if the metal accidentally entered the bodies of lab workers. Cade was the first of 18 people injected with plutonium in Federally sponsored experiments over the next two years. Probably none but the last of the subjects were told what he or she was being given, advised of the risks or asked to consent to the procedure.
In 1994, following the publication of a series of articles on the plutonium injections, President Clinton appointed an advisory committee on human radiation experiments to investigate the matter and gave it access to thousands of secret documents. Jonathan D. Moreno, a biomedical ethicist at the University of Virginia, worked for the committee, then went on to examine the broad history of experiments that the United States Government had secretly conducted on human subjects in the interest of national security from World War II through the cold war. The result is ''Undue Risk,'' an earnest, often chilling account of experiments with chemical and biological agents as well as radiation, and of the policies -- or, more accurately, lack of policies -- that long governed them.
During World War II, both military and civilian agencies sponsored numerous experiments with human subjects in connection with investigations of the new antibiotic penicillin, agents against malaria and protections against poison gases. The subjects were conscientious objectors, prison inmates, hospital patients, students and Army recruits. Most were volunteers who had been informed of the risks. But others participated without their consent, including, Moreno says, ''tens of thousands'' of soldiers who were exposed to poison gases to test protective clothing and gas masks.
Moreno shows that at the Nuremberg Trials lawyers for the Nazi doctors invoked some of the American experiments in attempting to defend their clients against charges of having committed atrocities. In the end, the Nuremberg court held that the issue before it was not medical ethics but murder. Still, apparently disturbed by a seeming muddiness of standards, the court promulgated what came to be called the Nuremberg Code, a bill of rights for people selected for medical experimentation. Among its tenets: Voluntary consent is ''absolutely essential.'' The participant must not be subjected to undue risk, and must have the right to terminate the experiment at any time.
Despite the Nuremberg Code, the Atomic Energy Commission had no general policy governing experiments with human subjects. The Defense Department did after 1953, at least for experiments in atomic, chemical or biological warfare, but it was not widely disseminated. Moreno contends that one reason for the lack of a well-recognized policy was the secrecy that surrounded security-sensitive defense programs. Another, he stresses, was that medical researchers tended to resist interference with their professional autonomy.
After World War II the military exposed ground troops to atomic test explosions without asking their consent and sent pilots through the mushroom clouds. The United States Public Health Service submitted to demands by uranium mine owners that scientists studying their miners' exposure to radiation not tell them about the hazard. About 6,700 people, some of them unaware of what they were receiving, were given psychoactive drugs by the Army or the C.I.A. One of the C.I.A.'s unknowing subjects died from the procedure and another jumped through a 10th-story hotel window while awaiting treatment for its effects.
Moreno has assembled his story from a wide range of sources, including the records of military and civilian agencies. Still, he provides little evidence that medical resistance played a significant role in the failure to promulgate effective policies for human experimentation. His treatment of policy issues is often murky, partly because his book is confusingly organized, moving back and forth in time and topic so that it is difficult to keep track of the military's or the A.E.C.'s attitudes toward human experimentation during any one period. He blurs focus by roaming far from his main subject, exploring, for example, Operation Paper Clip, the post-1945 recruitment by the American military of German scientists, including some complicit in the biomedical research of the Nazis. He suggests that ''the possibility cannot be ruled out'' that some of these doctors conducted abusive tests on American military personnel but acknowledges a lack of documentary evidence that they did.
In the early 1960's, the Army, which at least officially tends to care for the welfare of its recruits, disseminated a broadened directive requiring informed consent in all experiments with human subjects and has since further strengthened the rules. The civilian agencies of national security eventually arrived at the same position, goaded largely by increasing exposure of human experimental practices in Congressional hearings and the press. Although Moreno gives little attention to that part of the story, he does note the importance of the revelations in the 1970's of the syphilis study sponsored by the United States Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala., and of the Army and the C.I.A.'s inquiries into psychoactive drugs.
Moreno has been persuaded, if only by the problems of gulf war veterans, that the military needs reliable knowledge of how to protect its personnel, especially from the growing threat of chemical and biological warfare. Human experimentation, he notes, is ''probably unavoidable in the real world of national security.'' He suggests several ways that the human subjects in such research might be protected. Not all his proposals seem practical; indeed, his idea of opening to public scrutiny not only research practices but the weapons programs they serve will strike many as nave. But the historical record that he presents in ''Undue Risk'' strongly supports his contention that the rights of human subjects deserve to be held paramount over any needs of national security.
* Daniel J. Kevles directs the program in science, ethics and public policy at the California Institute of Technology. His most recent book is ''The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character.''
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
MAS A SABEDORIA ANTIGA RECOLHE PROBLEMAS SIMILARES. VEJA-SE O RENASCIMENTO COM BACON E MONTAIGNE (NO SÉCULO 18 RECORDADOS POR DIDEROT SOBRE O MESMO PROBLEMA DE USAR CONDENADOS À MORTE, PARA QUE SEJAM ABERTOS VIVOS, EM FUNÇÃO DO CONHECIMENTO MAIOR DO CORPO HUMANO E DE SEU FUNCIONAMENTO).
MONTAIGNE, ENSAIOS, LIVRO 2, CAPÍTULO 23 (DOS MEIOS RUINS EMPREGADOS PARA BONS FINS) :
"Toutesfois la foiblesse de nostre condition, nous pousse souevnt à ceste necessité, de nous servir de mauvais moyens pour une bonne fin. (...)