Johnson, Kishor (Author)
The Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731’s Biological Warfare (BW) research program committed atrocious crimes against humanity in their pursuit of biological weapons development during the Second World War. Due to an American cover-up, the details behind Unit 731’s human experimentation were slow to be revealed. The recent literature discloses the gruesome details of the experiments but characterizes the human trials as crude in nature. Further, there is a lack of clarity as to how human trial results were extrapolated for use in real world missions., Through an examination of testimony from the Soviet Union’s Khabarovsk War Crime Trials, this paper argues that Unit 731’s inoculation and airborne warfare experiments on prisoners of war were scientifically rigorous. The scientific method is used as the basis against which the scientific rigor of the experiments is tested. The paper reveals that the successes and failures of the human trials were extrapolated to BW missions during the Sino-Japanese war. American researchers’ expectations of BW data were fulfilled, thus paving the way for an immunity deal. Ethical standards in medicine before WWII were not well established, but wartime medical practices and experimentation reveal the context in which the pursuit of scientific knowledge has no boundaries.
...More
Book
Harris, Sheldon H.;
(2002)
Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932--1945, and the American Cover-Up
(/isis/citation/CBB000201848/)
Book
Nie, Jing-Bao;
(2010)
Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics
(/isis/citation/CBB001252199/)
Article
Reinhardt, Klaus;
(2013)
The Entomological Institute of the Waffen-SS: Evidence for Offensive Biological Warfare Research in the Third Reich
(/isis/citation/CBB001213637/)
Article
Yudin, B. G.;
(2009)
From the History of Biomedical Experimentation on Humans: The 1949 Khabarovsk Trial
(/isis/citation/CBB001211346/)
Article
Herwig Czech;
Gabor S. Ungvari;
Kamila Uzarczyk;
Paul Weindling;
Gábor Gazdag;
(2020)
Electroconvulsive Therapy in the Shadow of the Gas Chambers: Medical Innovation and Human Experimentation in Auschwitz
(/isis/citation/CBB363337914/)
Chapter
Tsuneishi, Kei-ichi;
(2007)
Unit 731 and the Human Skulls Discovered in 1989: Physicians Carrying Out Organized Crimes
(/isis/citation/CBB000760183/)
Article
Newlands, Emma;
(2013)
“They Even Gave Us Oranges on One Occasion”: Human Experimentation in the British Army during the Second World War
(/isis/citation/CBB001320115/)
Chapter
Caplan, Arthur L.;
(2007)
The Ethics of Evil: The Challenge and the Lessons of Nazi Medical Experiments
(/isis/citation/CBB000760182/)
Chapter
Evans, Andrew D.;
(2003)
Anthropology at War: Racial Studies of POWs during World War I
(/isis/citation/CBB000501093/)
Book
Evans, Rob;
(2001)
Gassed: British Chemical Warfare Experiments on Humans at Porton Down
(/isis/citation/CBB000410848/)
Book
Marion Girard Dorsey;
(2023)
Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II
(/isis/citation/CBB896773160/)
Article
Stephan Schwarz;
(2021)
The Occupation of Niels Bohr’s Institute: December 6, 1943–February 3, 1944
(/isis/citation/CBB332875269/)
Article
Johnny Miri;
(2021)
The Fall of Vannevar Bush: The Forgotten War for Control of Science Policy in Postwar America
(/isis/citation/CBB869305077/)
Book
Steven K. Bailey;
(2019)
Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese-Occupied Hong Kong, 1942–1945
(/isis/citation/CBB521114387/)
Article
Bocking, Stephen;
(2012)
Nature on the Home Front: British Ecologists' Advocacy for Science and Conservation
(/isis/citation/CBB001231328/)
Article
Alexander, Jennifer K.;
(2006)
An Efficiency of Scarcity: Using Food to Increase the Productivity of Soviet Prisoners of War in the Mines of the Third Reich
(/isis/citation/CBB000700581/)
Article
Robertson, Thomas;
(2012)
Total War and the Total Environment: Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and the Birth of Global Ecology
(/isis/citation/CBB001232554/)
Article
Kelly A. Spring;
(2020)
‘Today We Have All Got to be Fighting Fit’: The Interconnectivity of Gender Roles in British Food Rationing Propaganda during the Second World War
(/isis/citation/CBB209443937/)
Article
Edward P.F. Rose;
(2019)
Lawrence Rickard Wager (1904-1965): A distinguished geologist who helped to pioneer aerial photographic interpretation for allied forces in World War II
(/isis/citation/CBB693801613/)
Chapter
Müller, Falk;
(2009)
The Birth of a Modern Instrument and Its Development during World War II: Electron Microscopy in Germany from the 1930s to 1945
(/isis/citation/CBB000960220/)
Be the first to comment!