The truly shocking aspect of revelations concerning the use of native children as research subjects is that we were shocked by the revelation, says author Tom Koch

Demonstrations were held across the country Thursday July 25, 2013 as a growing chorus of Canadians urged the federal government to release documents related to nutritional experiments done on aboriginal children decades ago. The protests, which varied in size, were sparked by a report published earlier in the month that said 1,300 children in northern Manitoba and at six residential schools across Canada were deprived of food and used as subjects to test the effects of minerals and vitamins in the 1940s and 1950s. [source: CTV].

The research report led to immediate, and shocked, reaction from across the country. Assembly of First Nations national chief Shawn Atleo said the report ignited a firestorm at the group’s Annual General Assembly in Whitehorse and galvanized Chiefs to table an emergency resolution calling for swift action and redress.

Researchers have routinely used the poor and powerless in their studies

Ethicist, author, and gerontologist Tom Koch wrote in the Toronto Star that medical and pharmaceutical research industries have routinely used the poor and powerless as research subjects for more than 100 years:

This has not been genocide, which requires a wilful intent to destroy a people, but something even more horrifying: a studied indifference to their fates. The same attitude today transforms the needy and poor from patients into research objects across the industrial world. [source: Toronto Star]

Koch provides a list of several infamous American research projects, including U.S. government-approved research in 1956 that saw handicapped children at New York’s Willowbrook State School infected with live hepatitis virus so the effect of a new treatment could be studied. While a number of changes occurred as a result of the public outcry associated with some of the more infamous research projects, Tom Koch reminds us in his article:

We like to think the transformation of needy patients into research objects is only history. Nothing is further from the truth. The pharmaceutical and research industries today rely on human subjects as research objects in studies that might, or might not, result in some new insight and eventually a new treatment…

As Canadians, we like to think we’re different — and better. The sorry history of the use of aboriginal children is probably only one of numerous examples that will be discovered. [source: Toronto Star]

We speak with Tom Koch, in an interview from August 2013.

496_august_01_2013_sm  Left-click to listen; right-click to save.

RELATED | Read the full research article in PDF: Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952 | Many stories to be heard: Networks across the country attempt to build a national archive in Winnipeg | Heavy stuff: Canada’s history awash with crimes against First Nations | Routine exploitation: Powerless poor are handy research subjects | Scientist’s son: “Just trying to do good work” | Horrific policy: Starving children is not enough? | Staggering callousness: Nutrition tests unethical | Shawn Atleo: Harper must address | Research finds: Canadian government withheld food from hungry aboriginal kids | Disclose all records: Former PM calls experiments ‘monstrous’ | Mid-Island News Blog: Canada’s nutrition experiments on First Nations |