In his article "Vaccines and Medical Experiments on Children, Minorities, Woman and Inmates (1845 - 2007)" lambasting the government for its abuse of patients in medical experiments, medical investigator Mike Adams had this to say about Joseph Goldberger:
[BEGIN] (1915) Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through "a thousand hells." In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.). [END]
A somewhat similar attitude is expressed about Goldberg by Bradley K Evans in the following passage which is taken from his curiously titled article "Joseph Goldberger: Unsung Hero" (Annals of Internal Medicine, 15 January 1995 | Volume 122 Issue 2 | Page 157)
[BEGIN] For his pellagra studies in the first quarter of this century, Joseph Goldberger is considered a hero [1]. However, Goldberger deliberately induced pellagra in prisoners, and, in an attempt to show that pellagra was not infectious, he injected blood from patients with pellagra into volunteers and had them ingest feces from patients with pellagra. Elmore and Feinstein's opinion [1] is that the first study in prisoners, at least, is questionable: "This study would probably not receive institutional review board approval today. At the time of Goldberger's work ... some of our modern legal and ethical principles had not yet been developed ... Conducting research on prisoners was a common procedure". However, ethical principles from religion and physicians—Hippocrates to Claude Bernard—were available to Goldberger. [END]
In sharp contrast to these two negative opinions of Goldberger's ethics is that of Bryan Ellison and Peter Duesberg (Why We Will Never Win the War on AIDS, Inside Story Communications, 1994, p 32):
[BEGIN] .... the Public Health Service replaced Lavinder with an obscure officer named Dr. Joseph Goldberger as head of their team. This was the turning point in the epidemic [of pellagra].
Within weeks of arriving in the South, Goldberger saw the obvious that the entire medical establishment and its experts, gripped in the madness of microbe hunting, refused to notice: venturing both into rural areas and insane asylums to see the victims firsthand, he was astonished to find that even where many patients were concentrated, their doctors and nurses did not catch pellagra. He also observed the different diets of the two groups, the doctors eating meat and vegetables and the farmers their customary corn diets. Goldberger drew the inescapable conclusion. Some nutritional deficiency was the cause. After publicly stating his hypothesis in 1914, he was attacked by doctors who insisted the disease was contagious. He also stirred up excited debate and opposition at that year's conference of the Southern Medical Association.
Gathering the proof for his notion through a series of experiments in which he completely cured pellagra by changing diets in orphanages, hospitals, and prisons, Goldberger announced his findings in 1915. The New York Times carried the story, though buried inside its pages. At another medical conference, where the leaders of the Thompson-McFadden Commission presented further findings on infection, Goldberger stirred up intense anger and controversy by critiquing the commission's latest study. When he then presented his own results, the effect was electrifying. Two leading advocates of the contagion view backed down, one of them a leader of the Thompson-McFadden Commission, the other withdrawing his own paper from submission.
But when the news media began giving Goldberger's results favorable publicity, pellagra microbe hunters reacted with alarm and anger. Prominent doctors joined in a growing chorus of protest against the supposedly dangerous nutrition hypothesis, arguing that the public was now being misled. One such doctor at a medical conference "drew applause when he described as 'pernicious' the newspaper publicity that told people there was no danger of pellagra except from poor food and cooking."^
The Thompson-McFadden Commission struck back especially hard in 1916, in the pages of medical journals as much as in The New York Times. They reiterated their conclusions, including the dangers of insects. Goldberger patiently confronted his critics and answered their objections, but finally reached a point of exasperation. He decided to perform a new experiment to prove the disease non-infectious. He, his wife, and fourteen co-workers injected themselves with samples of blood, feces, mucus, and other bodily fluids from pellagra patients. As he expected, none contracted pellagra. Even this experiment had little effect on medical opinion. Opponents continued to attack or ignore him for several more years, their ranks only gradually thinning with time. Part of the problem lay in pellagra's increasing human toll until the early 1930s, when diets finally began changing to include greater variety. Goldberger continued studying the disease until his death in 1929, and niacin, the vitamin missing in pellagra diets, was isolated in the mid-1930s. [END]
It is a shame, and in fact a deep tragedy, that Goldberger's work was not recognized for the outstanding success that it was, altho Goldberger himself was nominted for a Nobel prize on five different occasions. We can only hope that Goldberger's critics were not motivated by antisemitism, since while the Jews have much to answer for, it is hardly a mark of moral superiority to criticize one of them undeservedly, and even moreso when the individual in question has made such an enormous contribution to human wellbeing.
In closing, we cannot help commenting on the excerpt from Evans above which held up Claude Bernard as an ethical icon. In this regard, here is part of a brief biography of gifted psychic Anna Kingsford, taken from http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Fight/Fight-AnnaKingsford--PsychicKiller.html:
[BEGIN] As a medical student in Paris, Anna was sitting in the library one day when she heard weird screams coming from a nearby laboratory. She learned from an attendant that one of her instructors, Dr. Claude Bernard, was dissecting a live dog in one of his medical experiments. Revolted by this example of what she considered hideous murder, she became an ardent and vocal opponent of vivisection, the surgical use of live animals in medical studies. She wrote pamphlets and articles and debated at the university to stop the practice, but without success since most people believed vivisection was necessary for the advancement of science. Holding her pet guinea pig Rufus, Anna would emotionally debate the problem with Maitland, and she once offered herself for vivisection if the professors would stop experimenting on animals. In December of 1877, while listening to Dr. Bernard lecture on his latest experiments, in which he had slowly baked animals to death in a specially constructed oven in order to study body heat, Anna jumped up and screamed, "Murderer!" There followed an argument between Anna and Bernard over the morality of his "torturing of defenseless animals." After storming out of the classroom, Anna stopped in the hall and summoned all of her powers. Feeling as though she were a "spiritual thunderbolt," she launched her occult self against Bernard, cursing his existence, and then she collapsed. Soon after that Bernard fell ill. Six weeks later, when Anna arrived at his classroom, she found a note tacked to the door announcing his funeral. [END]
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