Ohio State Prison System - Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research
- The Kettering Instituting for Cancer Research was founded in 1884 and is now a cancer treatment and research institution in New York. During the 1950s, Dr. Chester M. Southam was a researcher studying cancer-killing viruses and sought to investigate whether the body could be trained to destroy infection and control tumors. With a desire to study how the body reacts to cancerous viruses, Southam injected tumor cells into 53 prisoners in the Ohio State Penitentiary and later, 22 elderly, patients in Brooklyn in 1952. Bear in mind, that none of his human subjects had cancer. The inmates were told that they faced, “no grave danger. Any cancer that took would spread slowly…and could be removed surgically” (Hornblum, "They Were Cheap and Available..."1440). Additionally the majority of the prisoners who participated in his research were black, prompting many concerns in the medical community about the vulnerability of racial groups in biomedical research. In 1964, Southam was sued by the Board of Regents of the State University of New York and was found guilty of “fraud or deceit” and unprofessional conduct in his research.