Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [48]
After the Second World War, the Allies held war crimes trials in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. During the proceedings it became clear that members of the Nazi party had carried out horrific experiments on Jews. Japanese scientists had also experimented on prisoners of war, and the Allies had experimented on their own citizens and soldiers. All were roundly and rightly condemned, and science was commanded to put its house in order. And so arose the defining ethical guidelines in medical science: the Nuremberg Code.
According to this code, scientists must not do anything to anyone without the subject’s informed consent. The experiment must be purposeful, and likely to yield beneficial results. It should avoid unnecessary suffering or injury, and there should be no chance of permanent damage to the subject. And so on and so forth: these are now the standards we assume to lie behind every medical research programme. What happened during the Second World War is shocking: to us, these guidelines seem like common sense, the kind of rules that any normal human being would unthinkingly follow.
Not that all wartime science was mired in dark deeds. During the First World War, for example, father and son biologists J.S. and J.B.S. Haldane subjected themselves to chlorine gas inhalation in order to find the best respirators for the troops; they unquestionably saved thousands of lives. J.B.S. Haldane went even further: during the Second World War he tortured himself to help British navy divers swim deeper and longer underwater without getting the painful and potentially lethal decompression sickness known as the bends. In his experiments he breathed various mixes of nitrogen and oxygen, and used different rates of decompression. Some threw him into seizures: he spoke of suffering ‘extreme terror, in which I may make futile attempts to escape from the steel chamber’. He suffered some lasting injuries: a bout of convulsions permanently compressed his vertebrae, for example. After a decompression experiment he ended up with perforated eardrums – by the time the war was over, Haldane could blow smoke out of his ears.
But these experiments were of vital importance. It was Haldane’s research that enabled British commandos to defend and hold Gibraltar in the Second World War, despite Hitler’s attempts to take control of this vital fortress, the gateway between North Africa and Europe. Whoever controlled Gibraltar controlled the flow of shipping between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.
Werner Forssmann also showed himself to be a brave and honourable researcher, despite his anarchic methods. When he was offered the chance to do medical research on prisoners during the Second World War, he refused. ‘To use defenceless patients as guinea pigs was a price I would never be prepared to pay for the realisation of my dreams,’ he wrote in his autobiography.
And his pioneering spirit was eventually recognised. Humiliated by Sauerbruch’s brush-off, he transferred to urology. Eventually, he joined the army and served on the Russian front. Forssmann ended the war as a prisoner of the Allies, but his breakthrough research paper had a life of its own. While he languished in an American POW camp, two Allied physicians – one French, one American – read about his self-catheterisation and used the idea to develop a technique for diagnosing various cardiac diseases. In 1956 Forssmann joined them in Stockholm, where the three surgeons were jointly presented with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Scientists are not reckless without reason. They don’t go about breaking rules for kicks. But the fact is that the rules are sometimes a hindrance to the creative process of science. And when that’s the case, the rules will – make no bones about it – be broken. Why? Because science existed before the rules.
The history of science – particularly of medicine – is crammed with examples of reckless behaviour like Forssmann’s. It goes back right to the beginnings