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

Masterson, Karen M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451467337 ISBN 13: 9780451467331

Verlag: NEW AMER LIB, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Karen Masterson is a former political reporter who won a Knight journalism fellowship to study malaria at the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and in rural Tanzania. She lives with her husband and daughters Arlington, Virginia.

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PROLOGUE

A decade ago I knew as much about malaria as I did about professional football—that is to say almost nothing.

This killer disease occupied little of my thinking as I chased down U.S. senators and congressional leaders and wrote daily political stories from Capitol Hill for the Houston Chronicle. Little did I know that I would soon cross the globe, go back to school, and spend hours in reading rooms flipping through archived boxes of moldy records. (One box at the National Archives smelled so strongly of ammonia I closed it and returned it to the counter unread.) I did all this to understand why malaria is still around. It is probably the most studied disease of all time, and yet it persists, even in the face of the hottest new science in Western medicine. It’s both preventable and curable. We’ve even deciphered its genetic codes. Still, it remains among the top killers of African children—at a rate of two per minute.

By a fluke, malaria crept into my intellectual pursuits. I had quit my job as a national reporter to explore my interests in science and medical writing, both of which I had done before coming to Washington. I accepted a teaching fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, where I studied the history of medicine, and I took a course in mining the National Archives to learn how to find its buried historical treasures.

There, in a hushed reading room of the agency’s annex in College Park, Maryland, I learned how to call up records from the building’s two million cubic feet of storage space. As an exercise, I searched for archived records on World War II blood plasma replacement studies involving Linus Pauling—two-time Nobel laureate for chemistry and peace activism. My call slips came back with a box marked with the correct record group number and bearing the letter “P,” for Pauling. But the contents were all wrong. Thinking his papers were mixed in under other headings, I thumbed through the entire box, reading through random letters.

One turned my blood cold.

The 1943 letter was to the Massachusetts surgeon general from a physician named George Carden. In it, Carden laid out what sounded like a sinister plan: Federal researchers would use blood transfusions and lab-raised mosquitoes to give malaria to brain-damaged syphilitics and schizophrenics held at Boston Psychopathic Hospital so new drugs could be tested against the resulting infections. No less than the war’s outcome was at stake, he wrote, explaining that the military desperately needed a new drug to counter malaria’s devastating attacks on U.S. forces in the South Pacific.

I reread the letter a dozen times before my blood warmed to the possibility that I had just stumbled onto a fascinating, if horrifying story. That night I went home and ran Google searches, which, back in 2004, turned up very little. The next day I returned to the archives and met with a specialist in World War II medical research. She helped me navigate the Byzantine reference catalogs used to pinpoint exact call numbers for relevant records. Over the next three days, I retrieved a dozen boxes from the bowels of the archives, each filled with letters, reports, and data sheets on the war’s antimalaria program—information that had been classified during and after the war, and, as far as I could tell, hadn’t been touched in decades. I also tracked down historian of medicine Leo Slater, who, at the time, was working at the National Institutes of Health. He had an unpublished manuscript on the war’s malaria-related work that tracked the involvement of American pharmaceutical companies—a history that has since been published by Rutgers University Press.

With Leo’s help, I slowly pieced together a fairly clear picture of what had gone on. The War Department and White House had launched a Manhattan Project–style program to find a cure for malaria, born out of wartime necessity and run by a small army of well-intentioned scientists, many of whom knew precious little about the tricky parasites they studied. All they knew for sure was that U.S. military leaders feared this one disease would force them to surrender to the Japanese—an unacceptable outcome in a war destined to determine the fate of the world.

I hunted for a published history or popular narrative on the subject, and found nothing. The more I searched the more I realized I was in uncharted territory. But to know whether this was something worth pursuing, I needed context and content. When I got to Hopkins that fall, I wrote my schedule to include public health courses that covered the epidemiology and medical history of malaria. I continued my treks to the National Archives—unearthing more and more documents—and took a microbiology course to understand the nature of microbial diseases.

Needing more background, I sought and was awarded a Knight Foundation public health journalism fellowship that funded me to work for three months in the Malaria Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In CDC’s labs just outside of Atlanta, I dissected mosquitoes, studied their salivary glands, and watched under a microscope the sticklike germs that enter the human body when a female anopheles mosquito bites for blood.

My teacher was Bill Collins, a seventy-six-year-old icon in malaria research who, at the time, was the only federally employed malariologist who had been at it long enough to remember what it was like to infect madmen with the disease. He did it in the 1950s and early 1960s for the Public Health Service at the South Carolina State Hospital, where drug experiments begun during World War II were continued.

He still used many of the techniques he learned from his state asylum days. The main difference was that at CDC he infected monkeys instead of humans. He recalled this with remorse. The “good old days,” as he called them, allowed scientists to observe malarial parasites in the blood of sick people. He and his colleagues gleaned data that helped the world better understand the microbes’ behavior and complex life cycle, ultimately resolving many mysteries that had shrouded the parasites in a type of protective secrecy. The intelligence gave scientists needed insights to develop ideas for a possible vaccine. That he gave a painful and potentially deadly disease to witless syphilitics posed no moral dilemma for Bill. Up until penicillin became available in the 1940s, the madness that came with untreated syphilis could be reversed by malarial fevers—as the fevers ramped up the immune system to kill syphilis spirochetes interfering with brain function. Two decades after penicillin, Bill still used this outmoded malaria treatment—which worked on only a fraction of cases, the rest having no benefit—in South Carolina. He was doing God’s work, trying to find a final solution to one of the world’s most menacing diseases, until an absence of syphilis patients and ethical concerns shut him down in 1962.

Four decades later, his mission hadn’t changed; it just got a lot more difficult. Even though monkeys are our cousins, they are hard to infect with human malaria. So Bill and his colleagues raised parasites to infect primates, and then ran experiments that attempted to extrapolate the extent to which a given drug or vaccine might also work against human malaria.

At CDC’s run-down campus on Buford Highway—miles from the glitzy labs that characterize its cutting-edge work on AIDS, Ebola, childhood obesity, and other hot topics—I was trained in the intricacies of manhandling these dangerous microbes. My education started in the insectary, where I helped a Kenyan researcher named Atieli breed colonies of the world’s most efficient...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: NEW AMER LIB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0451467337
• ISBN 13: 9780451467331
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar