For the past several days the CBC has been reporting on the horrible evilness of nutritional experiments conducted on Aboriginals during the 1940s & 1950s by the federal government.
See:
Most Recent Article
First Report
But as is typical of news these days, they fail at discussing the context surrounding them. Of course, today research on humans is highly regulated and controlled, every experiment no matter how seemingly benign (eg. conducting a survey) must have piles of forms detailing the precise nature of the experiment filled out and receive approval from an ethics committee (composed of experts from a variety of fields), any changes or follow-up experiments must pass through the whole system again.
For example a former colleague wanted to do research into the eye-health of homeless people, which involved a survey and an eye-test (results not disclosed to the participants). I believe the ethics committee required them to revise the procedure at least twice before they were satisfied the participants were receiving sufficient information about the importance of eye health, how they could access discounted or free eye health-care and that is was clear that just receiving the eye-test would not mean that their eyes were fine.
But back in the 1940s and 1950s the ethical framework of experimentation was still in development after the horrors perpetrated during the holocaust. The Second World War had ushered in a culture of "the ends justify the means" and racism was prevalent (see: the Japanese internment, and rampant antisemitism).
But let's return to nutrition and the Aboriginal Peoples. The Second World War and the Great Depression which preceded it were very expensive. Canada was left with $18 billion dollars of debt and very little of anything left in reserve. Rationing of food was common not just for marginalized populations but across the country. Malnutrition was a serious concern prompting the introduction of the first national food guide in 1942, despite the limited knowledge about human nutrition at that time. In fact, this book about vitamins from 1937 only includes 5 of the 13 essential vitamins for human health.
The result was intense interest in human nutrition.
In the late 1940s-1950s, malnutrition was a problem across the country but it was particularly severe in Aboriginal communities as they are remote making food importation expensive; and the residential schools, common from 1876 to the 1990s (peaking in 1930s), had disrupted the traditional social structure of Aboriginal communities. The First Nations have never been a funding priority for the Canadian government so of course they were chronically underfunded during this period as well.
When researchers arrived they found contained groups of malnourished people. Given the high debt load, the priority on funding the war and general insufficiency of food at the time (as demonstrated in war-time rationing), it is questionable whether it would have been practical/affordable to try to provide a healthy diet to these communities. And without solid data to back up the use of targetted vitamin supplements the government of the day is unlikely to have been willing to pay for such a program either. Hence it was natural for the researchers to see this as an opportunity to conduct nutritional experiments to gain knowledge useful to all communities/individuals facing undernourishment.
That is about as far as can be ethically justified. For it is clearly more ethical to test nutritional theories on a population that is already malnourished than deliberately creating a malnourished population to test the theories on. Some evidence suggests the researchers were more progressive than many of their contemporaries since they attributed negative social outcomes of First Nations to nutritional deficits rather than an inherent genetic difference. However, it seems this progressive thought did not extend to getting informed consent of the participants (or their parents) prior to conducting the studies. And the withdrawal of existing dental treatment is inexcusable. But the outrage over the use of control groups who were not given supplements is misplaced, the research would have been meaningless without them.
While well intentioned the research only lead to a few publications, so it seems overall the research was mostly a wasted effort and some studies likely did more harm than good.
