Unearthing the Past (extract)

2013

UNIT 731, 2024

Established in 1935 by imperial mandate, Unit 731 was a military bacteriological research unit of the Japanese army. The main goal of Unit 731 was to create biological and chemical weapons for implementation on the battlefield. Here, methods in delivering bubonic plague, cholera, and smallpox were developed. Under the direction of Gen. Shirō Ishii, this special army unit conducted bacteriological warfare experiments and vivisections of death-row inmates and prisoners of war near Harbin, Manchuria. 1 These experiments were carried out on human guinea pigs without anesthesia for research on various diseases such as the plague, typhus, and cholera, with a view to using them as bacteriological weapons during World War II. Vivisection on humans was routinely performed without anesthetic. Researchers believed that use of anesthesia would create interference with the disease process that they were studying.

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2013

Journal of Medical Biography, 2023

Hideo Fukumi (1914–1998) is renowned for his position as the director of Japan's National Institute of Health and his scientific contributions to the fields of bacteriology, virology and epidemiology. This article introduces Fukumi's career cultivated over decades in the Japanese national medical system and focuses on his research on Shigella, Salmonella and influenza. Yet any assessment of his career also has to take into account the considerable controversy and scandal it engendered. This necessary reassessment situates Fukumi's contribution within what has been revealed of Japan's biological weapons programme which reached its zenith during the Second World War. Very few scientists, including Fukumi, were prosecuted for their roles in this programme. Contrarily, they became core personnel in post-war medical research due to the patronage of the United States–Japan alliance in the context of the Cold War. Controversies that later surfaced over Fukumi's role in influenza immunisation campaigns reflect two currents of debate: A belated reckoning with Japan's use of biological weapons and the way this was ‘normalised’ and overlooked in the post-war period. The role of Japanese scholars and citizens’ movements who have interrogated Japanese war crimes and the U.S. cover-ups and made a demand for greater ethical transparency in medical science.

After the conclusion of the First World War in November 1918, the Japanese government began to consider the possibility of authorizing a series of projects for the development and creation of biological weapons to be used in future warlike confrontations, based on previous studies carried out in Europe. The highest authorities of the Japanese government eventually approved these projects and founded a research group , in the Chinese region of Manchuria, occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army since February 1932.

In the fall of 1950, eleven San Francisco residents were admitted to Berkeley Hospital with rare bacterial infections. Nearly thirty years later, a Senate subcommittee hearing revealed that the military deliberately released Serratia marcescens, a known opportunistic pathogen, from a naval ship in San Francisco Bay just days before the outbreak, which resulted in the death of Edward J. Nevin. Over the next twenty years, a court case and numerous investigations uncovered an alarming truth about the United States biological weapons program. Government and military personnel have repeatedly and publicly defended the safety and ethics of the research program, insisting that the released substances were "harmless simulants", and that their activities did not qualify as human experimentation. These claims contradict not only official project reports, but the knowledge of civilian scientists and the experiences of the exposed populations, which document the widely ignored human dimensions of the project.

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal

Abstract From the 1920s and 1930s, discussion of asymptomatic carriers started to appear in Japan and quickly became well established. Two important frameworks here were public health and laboratory experiment. Japanese public health policies existed in theory, isolating asymptomatic carriers within their own family to prevent infection of others. These theoretical policies did not, however, attract great attention either from doctors, carriers, or family members. The crucial aspect in Japan was laboratory experiment. Japanese doctors concentrated on experimenting with animals as carriers of typhoid and other asymptomatic infections, trying to incorporate the latest theories of life and death taken from physiology. One reason for the relative neglect of the public health and isolation policy was the ongoing presence of a large number of patients with such diseases; another was the prestige of the laboratory as intellectual authority among well-trained doctors.

Constellations, 2014

In the fall of 1950, eleven San Francisco residents were admitted to Berkeley Hospital with rare bacterial infections. Nearly thirty years later, a Senate subcommittee hearing revealed that the military deliberately released Serratia marcescens, a known opportunistic pathogen, from a naval ship in San Francisco Bay just days before the outbreak, which resulted in the death of Edward J. Nevin. Over the next twenty years, a court case and numerous investigations uncovered an alarming truth about the United States biological weapons program. Government and military personnel have repeatedly and publicly defended the safety and ethics of the research program, insisting that the released substances were "harmless simulants", and that their activities did not qualify as human experimentation. These claims contradict not only official project reports, but the knowledge of civilian scientists and the experiences of the exposed populations, which document the widely ignored human d...

Humanimalia

This article focuses on the use of nonhuman animals for biological weapons testing by military scientists at Porton Down Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, 1948–1955. After the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, the British state and its allies invested in new military technologies which could ensure their superiority in times of conflict. My analysis reveals the partial workings of the Porton Down Laboratory through its historical use of nonhuman animals. I demonstrate that nonhuman animals were simultaneously effaced and made visible during biological warfare experiments. This effacement and visibility was dependent on anthropocentric notions of animal subjection whereby their use in experiments made them “seen” as resources for use, yet paradoxically elicited their nonexistence as subjects. I extend the notion of “strategic ignorance” to develop a novel concept of “strategic effacement” to demonstrate this contradictory relationship which both ...

East Asian Science and Technology Studies

From the 1920s and 1930s, discussion of asymptomatic carriers started to appear in Japan and quickly became well established. Two important frameworks here were public health and laboratory experiment. Japanese public health policies existed in theory, isolating asymptomatic carriers within their own family to prevent infection of others. These theoretical policies did not, however, attract great attention either from doctors, carriers, or family members. The crucial aspect in Japan was laboratory experiment. Japanese doctors concentrated on experimenting with animals as carriers of typhoid and other asymptomatic infections, trying to incorporate the latest theories of life and death taken from physiology. One reason for the relative neglect of the public health and isolation policy was the ongoing presence of a large number of patients with such diseases; another was the prestige of the laboratory as intellectual authority among well-trained doctors.