The Malaria Project: The U.S. Government's Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure

The Malaria Project: The U.S. Government's Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure

Karen M. Masterson

Language: English

Pages: 416

ISBN: 0451467337

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A shocking exposé of America’s secret mission to combat malaria during World War II with a campaign that tested experimental drugs on men gone mad from syphilis.

Foreseeing the need for a malaria drug, American war planners re-created Germany’s research model, then grew it tenfold. Spearheading the effort, Dr. Lowell T. Coggeshall recruited private corporations as well as chemists from Harvard and Johns Hopkins to make novel compounds, which were then tested on human subjects.

By 1943, a dozen strains of malaria were injected into mental health patients and convicted criminals—including the infamous murderer Nathan Leopold. After hundreds of trials and many deaths, the “magic bullet” was found not in a U.S. lab, but captured from the Nazis in battle. Still used today, chloroquine went on to save more lives than any other drug in history.

Journalist turned malaria researcher Karen M. Masterson uncovers the story behind this dark tale of wartime science seeking treatments for disease while ignoring the human condition.

INCLUDES PHOTOS

Tightrope

From Brittany to the Reich: The 29th Infantry Division in Germany, September-November 1944

Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk

Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin

War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROJECT 1 Earle, 12. 2 Thomas H. Maren, “Eli Kennerly Marshall, Jr.: 1889–1996,” Biographical Memoirs (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1987), 336. 3 For records pertaining to the different research institutions involved in bird malarias, see NACP, RG 227, Box 94. 4 NACP, RG 112, Box 1160, Minutes of the Subcommittee of Tropical Diseases, June 1942. 5 NACP, RG 227, Box 94, “Reports of Investigations of Malaria Research Projects under OSRD Contracts, January–April 1943,” for A.

Immunity, 9, 14, 15, 16, 18, 94, 101, 102, 104, 127, 130, 201, 278, 312, 315, 326, 338 Imperial Chemical Industries, 222 India, 22, 61, 81, 115, 122, 131, 133, 146, 164, 183, 197, 235, 237–38, 254, 267, 290, 338–39 Indiana University (IU), 31–32, 42, 43, 51, 56–57, 59, 116, 186 Indian Ocean, 115, 121, 146 Industrial Revolution, 17 influenza, 88 Inland Alkaloids Company, 166 insectaries, growth of, 157, 158 insecticides, 9, 11, 44, 91, 139, 140, 143–44, 145, 148, 191, 194, 195, 197,.

235, 238–39, 246, 247, 250, 251, 289, 290 resochin, 115 Revolutionary War, 47 Reynaud, Paul, 114 rhesus monkey studies, 301–2 Rice, Earle (Colonel), 239 Rice, J. B., 333 Richards, A. N., 110, 118–19, 161, 163, 228, 265, 281, 282, 299–300 Roberts Field, Liberia, 125–26, 143, 242 Robertson, O. H., 88, 91, 92, 94 Rockefeller Foundation. See also Alving, AlfSven; Coggeshall, Lowell T.; control programs; Darling, Samuel T.; drug treatment challenge; Malaria Project; Russell, Paul Accra,.

“never-seen” landlady sent her black servant to apologize for the broken shutters and cracked windows. And an indifferent cook served terrible food in a grimy dining room.4 The hotel’s saving grace lay outside the front door, where a large veranda with elegant pillars caught gentle breezes. All Darling’s staff and visiting scientists—from exotic places like Ceylon and China and Malaya—spent the last hours of the day here to relax and talk, turning Darling’s weathered porch into an international.

Well—extremely well—but they were expensive to keep and hard to come by, especially with half the world at war. Even canaries—which Bayer used for preliminary drug screenings—were too expensive at a dollar each. The committee envisioned all the major drug companies feeding experimental compounds into university labs, which would then run large controlled tests on lower species. They needed an animal they could raise for next to nothing and infect with lethal malaria—some small creature that could.

Download sample

Download