Ethics of BioWeapons researched by Kent Prof.

Link to the article in Kent on Sunday freesheet May 8th
 http://www.kentonsunday.co.uk/editions/frontpage.asp

It doesn't link direct, so go via main page, then in the
news section bring up page 17. The use the zoom in key
to read. (Can also be pdf'd)

Text...

May 8, 2005.
THE BALANCE between
human rights and national
security is to be investigated by
a Kent history lecturer who has
been given a research grant to
look at Britain’s secret warfare
establishment at Porton Down.
Dr Ulf Schmidt, lecturer in modern
history in the School of History at the
University of Kent, has been awarded
£167,000 by the Wellcome Trust for the
three-year research project.
Last year an RAF man who took part
in a test of the nerve agent, sarin, at
Porton Down in 1953, told an inquest
how he saw a colleague collapse during
the experiment.
The victim, leading aircraftsman
Ronald Maddison, 20, died later in hospital.
He may have believed he was
taking part in an experiment to find a
cure for the common cold.
In November last year the inquest
ruled that Maddison was ‘unlawfully
killed’ at the hands of the state and the
Ministry of Defence later apologised to
his family, admitting some of Porton’s
scientists had acted negligently.
The MoD also said it would challenge
the verdict of the inquest.
Dr Schmidt, who was an expert witness
at the inquest, said: “This sends
rather mixed messages, not only to the
Maddison family, but also to the large
number of Porton veterans who are
looking for the Government to acknowledge
that some of the Porton experiments
may not have fulfilled some of
the basic standards of consent and
human rights in biomedical research.”
Dr Schmidt, whose works include
Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia
in Nazi Germany, and Justice at
Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the
Nazi Doctors’ Trial, said of his research
project: “There are many parallels with
what went on at Porton Down and what
is happening today. Again, we live in an
era where the Government is trying to
protect itself from an external threat.
Toxic agents
“The question is, whatever external
threat there is, to what extent can you
restrict people’s freedom, and bend
international law to protect the nation?
“What matters more, individual
human rights, or national interest and
security? Opinions vary, but I believe
even in very difficult circumstances,
the rights of the individual in medical
experiments must be protected.”
He will be joined in his research by
Ryan Hills, a former Kent graduate in
international conflict analysis, who
has recently been working with the
British Army in Iraq.
Under the title, Cold War at Porton
Down: Medical Ethics and the Legal
Dimension of Britain’s Biological and
Chemical Warfare Programme, 1945-
1989, Schmidt’s work on Porton Down
will reconstruct the nature of government-
sponsored warfare research in
Britain, and assess the ideology, politics
and ethics behind the Wiltshire laboratory’s
programme of experiments.
Dr Schmidt’s project aims to examine
the extent to which scientists from
one of Britain’s most controversial military
establishments carried out secret
nerve gas and chemical warfare experiments
on soldiers who were exposed
to toxic agents and chemicals such as
mustard gas, sarin, and LSD.
Central to Schmidt’s project are a
number of basic questions: Did the
subjects give voluntary consent? How
was consent obtained? Were the risks
explained to the subjects? What safeguards
were taken? How, if at all, was
research regulated and how effective
were ethics guidelines in regulating
experimental research in Britain?
He will also investigate whether ethics
codes were mere instruments to safeguard
the reputation of the profession.
In July, 2004, Dr Schmidt gave evidence
for two days at the magistrates’
court in Trowbridge that was partly
based on his 71-page report on
Informed Consent.
This report examined the role of
informed consent in Britain’s medical
research community in the first half of
the 20th century, and assesses the role
of the Nuremberg Code (a set of ethical
guidelines formulated during the
Nuremberg doctors’ trial) in human
experimentation in the UK up to the
mid-1950s.
Lecturer probes ethics
of chemical warfare
RESEARCH: Modern history lecturer Dr Ulf Schmidt
By NEIL CLEMENTS
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