CHICAGO 
JOHN M. OLIN LAW & ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 544 
(2D SERIES) 
PUBLIC LAW AND LEGAL THEORY WORKING PAPER NO. 341 

 

 
MAKING WILLING BODIES: 
MANUFACTURING CONSENT AMONG PRISONERS AND SOLDIERS, CREATING 
HUMAN SUBJECTS, PATRIOTS AND EVERYDAY CITIZENS 
 

Bernard E. Harcourt 
 
 
 
THE LAW SCHOOL 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO  
 
February 2011 
 
This paper can be downloaded without charge at the John M. Olin Program in Law and 
Economics Working Paper Series: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/index.html and at the 
Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series:  
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/academics/publiclaw/index.html 
and The Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection. 

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1758829

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1758829

DRAFT: February 6, 2011
© Bernard E. Harcourt

MAKING WILLING BODIES:
MANUFACTURING CONSENT AMONG PRISONERS AND SOLDIERS, CREATING HUMAN
SUBJECTS, PATRIOTS, AND EVERYDAY CITIZENS
***
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MALARIA EXPERIMENTS ON PRISONERS AT STATEVILLE
PENITENTIARY
Bernard E. Harcourt†
“I assume all the risks of this experiment and declare that I absolve the University of
Chicago and all the technicians and researchers who take part in the experiment, as well as
the government of Illinois, the directory of the State penitentiary and every other official,
even as concerns my heirs and representatives, of any responsibility.” 1
I was struck when I came across this medical release at the end of Giorgio
Agamben’s book, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. The human experiments, I would
soon learn, began in March 1944 and, indeed, were conducted by doctors at the University
of Chicago on prison inmates in custody at the Illinois State Penitentiary at Stateville.2 The
first batch of human subjects—432 convicts, to be exact—would be deliberately infected by
malaria-carrying mosquitoes of the most virulent type under the supervision of physician
researchers from the Department of Medicine. The doctors not only oversaw the incubation
of the malaria-infected mosquitoes, but also the transmission and inoculation of the
parasites, and, for some prisoners, the administration of experimental drugs.
Each of the inmates had consented to be part of the experiment and signed a
standard release form. Ernest Beutler, one of the University of Chicago doctors stationed at
Stateville, recalled several years later: “I would talk to a group of eight or ten people, and we
would tell them what we’re going to do. Do you have any questions? Then there were
mimeographed forms and they would sign them. There was a guard there and he would
witness the signature. That was it. Then it would be filed.”3
Agamben writes that “The obvious hypocrisy of such documents cannot fail to leave
one perplexed.”4 That seems right, of course. But as I began to learn more about the
experiments, my original sense of outrage turned into morbid curiosity and genuine
perplexity—and a haunting feeling that I had to keep looking into this tragic incident.
                                                            
†

Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, and Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology,
University of Chicago. 

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1758829

Making Willing Bodies

2

The rationale sounded so familiar. The malaria experiments were conducted during a
period of active military engagement of American troops in subtropical regions and were
presented to the Stateville inmates as a vital part of the war effort. The principal investigator,
Dr. Alf Sven Alving, a nephrologist at the University of Chicago, would tell the prisoners
that “This was the number-one medical problem of the war in the Pacific” and that “we
were losing far more men to malaria than to enemy bullets”—as reported by Nathan
Leopold, the notorious Stateville inmate of Leopold and Loeb fame, or infamy, who would
participate actively in the human experiments as lab technician, as researcher, and as
volunteer subject.5 The war in the Pacific was raging and medical problems like malaria were
a top priority. “Between 1942 and 1945,” a historian reminds us, “American forces
reportedly lost some eight million mandays to malaria. In 1943, General Douglas MacArthur
reportedly exclaimed, ‘Doctor, this will be a long war if for every division I have facing the
enemy I must count on a second division in hospital with malaria and a third division
convalescing from this debilitating disease!’”6
The country needed volunteers for these kinds of experiments, human volunteers
because laboratory animals would not suffice. Bodies, human bodies were necessary.
Chimpanzees could not be used. “They had to use human subjects,” Leopold explained,
“vivax malaria won’t take in a monkey; they tried it!”7 Prisoner volunteers were as badly
needed, it turned out, as battlefield soldiers. Leopold explained in his memoirs:
“In some not too farfetched sense our bodies would be the battlefield in a
not unimportant war. Shaking the bed with your chills, saturating the
mattress with the sweat of a 107° temperature weren’t nearly so dramatic as
shouldering a tommy gun, but maybe they were just about as important in
the long run. And beggars can’t be choosers. Here was something we could
do as well, maybe better, than civilians. A malaria parasite isn’t a bit
snobbish. It would just as soon set up housekeeping in a con’s blood cells as
in anyone’s. And the time we lost from our jobs while in bed with malaria
wasn’t an economic loss to anyone.”8
The convicts—at least some of them, reportedly—spoke of themselves and viewed
themselves as sacrificial soldiers in the war effort. Leopold referred to them as “good
soldiers.”9 When they caught malaria, Leopold explained, the fevers were high, and the
control subjects were not allowed to have the anti-malarial drugs administered until they had
suffered five consecutive days of a temperature not less than 102°. “That 102° was easy;
nearly everyone had at least 106° before he started on the drug,” Leopold recounts. “They
were pretty uncomfortable boys for a while, but they got the best of nursing care and there
wasn’t a single complaint. Every last one of them was a good soldier.”10
Dr. Alving and Nathan Leopold were rehearsing a way of talking about prisoner
experimentation that would pervade the malaria project, the news media, and the

Bernard E. Harcourt

3

government communications: experimenting on live prisoners was necessary to win the war.
So, when the National Research Council lifted its “curtain of secrecy” and publicly
announced the malaria research program a year after its inception, in March 1945, the federal
agency portrayed the experiments, precisely, as central to the war effort: “These one-time
enemies to society appreciate to the fullest extent just how completely this is everybody’s
war,” the NRC declared.11 “Instead of being deterred by [the risk],” the Report continues,
“many of the volunteers actually invite danger, in order to share in some measure what their
friends and relatives are experiencing on the various battlefronts. Upon learning that,
through their cooperation, thousands of GI’s might be spared the ravages of the tropical
malady, the prisoners respond immediately and enthusiastically.”12
The media took the same angle. On page one of a front-page article on March 5,
1945, the New York Times presented the experiments as an effort “to determine whether the
chemicals can safely be given to our fighting men exposed to malaria and how large a dose
can be tolerated by the human system.”13 The Chicago Daily Tribune portrayed the researchers
as “a corps of four army doctors” and added that “The prisoners do this without any
promise of reward.”14 Life magazine, in its June 4, 1945 issue—an issue that carried on its
front cover an exclusive urging readers to invest in War Bonds—laced its photo-spread with
war and enemy motifs. “In three U.S. penitentiaries men who have been imprisoned as
enemies of society are now helping science fight another enemy of society,” the article
began.15 The first photo caption read: “Army doctor watches malaria-carrying mosquitoes
bite stomach of Richard Knickerbocker, serving 10 to 14 years at Illinois State Prison.”16
The prisoners, it turns out, were good soldiers—no more, no less than the
conscripted men who would put their lives at stake for their country. In fact, I began to
wonder, perhaps the prisoners were getting off relatively easy compared to the GI’s who
would be sent to fight at Okinawa or land on the Normandy beaches. Was the consent of
the prisoners any more or less informed or free than the willingness of these heroic men
called for military service and shipped off to land on enemy beaches? Naturally, we don’t
seek the informed consent of conscripted citizens. We just draft them into the war and
expect that they will fight, willingly. So why wouldn’t we simply “enlist” these prisoners to
serve in the war effort as well, with or without their consent—willingly or unwillingly? Surely

Making Willing Bodies

4

malaria parasites and anti-malarial drugs were less dangerous, in a supervised setting, than
military combat.
Indeed, the war rationale not only sounded so familiar, it was so very productive—
for everyone involved. Leopold himself would rely on it heavily when he sought executive
clemency in 1949. “Leopold told the [parole] board of his role as guinea pig for malaria tests
for army doctors,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reported in April of that year in an article
subtitled “Hopes Malaria Test Aid Will Benefit Him.”17 Like the other volunteers before
him, Leopold hoped to get a reduced sentence from his participation in the experiments.
And so, “he related his part in the malaria tests and told of how he had two small infected
pieces cut from his legs. ‘If the ladies were not in the room, I would be glad to show you the
scars, sir,’ he chuckled. At another time he chuckled as he tried to describe for the board
how ‘hot a malaria fever of 105 appears.’”18
A few years earlier, in February 1947, the Illinois Governor, Dwight H. Green, had
announced that the 445 convicts who had participated in the war-time malaria experiments
would be “given special consideration for paroles or executive clemency.”19 For prisoners
who were sentenced under the indeterminate sentence law, the Illinois Parole Board
scheduled special hearings; and for convicts serving longer terms under definite sentencing,
terms up to 199 years, the Governor asked the Division of Corrections to consider
recommending executive clemency.20 One historian reports that the next governor, Adlai
Stevenson, commuted or paroled 317 of the prisoner volunteers, including 24 men convicted
of homicide and one convicted of rape. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, “the usual
allowance by the parole board for malaria guinea pigs has been two calendar years’
shortening of time.”21 Leopold hoped to get his just recompense: “I hope I will get the same
reward as the other men in this malarial project. That is all I have to say, gentlemen. Thank
you.”22 The war effort was his strongest suit.
For medical research more generally, the war rationale was productive and helped
initiate a wave of experiments on prisoners. Allen Hornblum, a historian of human
experimentation, observes in an essay in the British Medical Journal that “The war years had
become the transforming moment for human experimentation in America and particularly
for penal institutions as a site of such scientific endeavors. What had once been a small,
under­funded, unsophisticated cottage industry had blossomed into a well financed, broad

Bernard E. Harcourt

5

clinical research programme investigating avant garde procedures, cures, and treatments.”23
As Hornblum suggest, “The overriding goal was to win the war in Europe and Asia;
everything else was secondary, including research ethics and the issue of consent. Millions of
American fighters were risking life and limb daily; at the very least, lawbreakers could
contribute to the war effort with similar commitment. And they did. One close observer
described it as ‘another shining light in the galaxy of wartime achievement’ by imprisoned
Americans.”24
The war-time malaria project, in fact, helped put in place a new model for medical
research that would ultimately lead to the National Institutes of Health. The idea of
combining governmental and private university research and funding dedicated to one
particular disease was the formative model for today’s NIH.25 The war rationale was also
useful to the Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg Medical Trial. The accused Nazi doctors
at Nuremberg brought up the Stateville malaria project in their defense, and it was vital to
the Allied prosecution—through its expert, Dr. Andrew Ivy, and his Green Committee
report—to emphasize the consent of the prisoners and the idea that they were engaged in a
patriotic act.26 In addition, “From a strictly military perspective, medical R&D was also a
success. World War II was the first major US ‘conflict in which fewer of our troops died of
disease than of battle injuries and wounds.’ The manufacture and use of [anti-malarial drugs]
kept the total number of cases of malaria in the US military below half a million.”27 In this
sense, the malaria project was “a productive undertaking.”28 As the New York Times
editorialized in April 1946, the malaria project was “proof that war accelerates the progress
of science and technology.”29
Human experimentation on prisoners also turned out to be a remarkably efficient
and productive way of conducting medical research. Think of how convenient it must have
been to experiment on captive subjects—available at all times, under surveillance at every
minute, controlled and isolated. The researchers knew what they ate, when they slept, where
they had been, what they had been exposed to for every waking and sleeping moment of
their participation in the tests. They were as close to lab animals—to caged lab animals—as
one could possibly hope. The University of Chicago doctors reported in their research,
published in 1948, that “Follow-up observations could be made in nearly 100 per cent of the
subjects.”30 The experimental conditions could not have been better. Ernest Beutler

Making Willing Bodies

6

remarked, “how would you get people to come back every day for two or three months,
hospitalized for two or three weeks at a time? You couldn’t do that with people who were
working.”31 One doctor familiar with another prisoner study referred to inmates as a “‘stable
group of people’” that contributed to the ‘assurance of continuity.’ Researchers, he argued,
clearly found it ‘more difficult to work with unrestrained, unrestricted’ test subjects.”32 No
doubt.
***
Today, we no longer run such experiments in the United States—or at least, that’s
what I believe or would like to believe. The University of Chicago malaria research ended
around the time that the federal government announced it would no longer use federal
prisoners for medical research.33 Since then, we no longer knowingly expose prisoners to
harm as experimental subjects in order to further scientific knowledge or national interest.
We no longer inflict disease intentionally on sacrificial bodies—even with their full consent.
Human subjects committees and institutional review boards now police that domain of
research and ensure that human subjects are not treated as laboratory specimen. We do
things differently today in the field of human subject research. And this narrative is
important to many of us—myself included. The Nuremberg Code and the standards
adopted by the American Medical Association are significant protections for these more
vulnerable populations, safeguards against potential abuses. It is meaningful that we would
no longer experiment on prisoners.
And yet. Though the practices of prisoner experimentation have changed—or at
least, I would like to think—the same rationale lives on and continues to thrive. No one
today would hesitate, for instance, to conscript young men and women to sacrifice their
bodies to the war effort. Every day, in fact, young men and women enlist to serve the
country in the struggle against terrorism in the wars in Afghanistan and the surrounding
region. We continue to expect that our fellow compatriots will sacrifice their bodies willingly
to fight our wars, to protect our country, to secure our homeland.
It suddenly dawned on me that, for each and every one of those men and women
who enlist, their willingness to serve the country is fabricated in the very same way that the
prisoners’ consent at Stateville had been manufactured. Consent and willingness to serve is
fabricated by tying the sacrifice of the body to the categories—those noble categories—of

Bernard E. Harcourt

7

citizenship, patriotism, and humanity. The Stateville prisoners, I had begun to see, were no
different than soldiers landing on the Pacific beaches and fighting heroic battles. Giving their
bodies, sacrificing their lives for the nation, for the greater good, for society, for their
children, for the war effort—that is what gave meaning to their acts and to the human
experiments.
I do not say this lightly and I do not mean, in any way, to demean the heroism of the
genuinely brave men and women who sacrificed their lives to liberate Nazi concentration
camps. As the son of a Jewish refugee from France and life-time admirer of the heroism at
the Normandy beaches, I do not say this in a cavalier manner. But the longer I picked at the
scab of prisoner experimentation, the clearer it became that the consent of those convicts
was fabricated in the same way as the willingness of our heroes to land on armed beaches—
the only difference, perhaps, was that it was achieved in a more disturbing way. It was
achieved under conditions of coercion.
Incarceration in Stateville prison had stripped these inmates of much of their
humanity and practically all of their citizenship rights. Not allowed to vote, and having no
voice in politics or in the war, the convicts had been demeaned, demoted, downgraded for
their crimes to something less than men, to inferior compatriots. By volunteering to be
infected with malaria, these inmates at Stateville were able to become fully human again,
patriots once more. In sacrificing their bodies and health to the war effort, they were able to
claim, once again, their citizenship. By their patriotic act of self-sacrifice, they were able to
regain their political voice and membership in society.
If consent could be achieved among these men, surely it could be achieved
anywhere. The trick was to portray the experiments in the right way, to anoint them
properly, to pull on the right strings. I say “trick,” but I do not mean to be disrespectful. For
the experiments to work, for the convicts to volunteer, the project simply had to be infused
with patriotism. It had to be made part, in everyone’s mind, of the war effort. Even if the
prisoners were participating because of their own pure self-interest, in the hope of leniency
or commutations, those outside the prison had to place the experiments under the rubric of
war—to appease their own conscience, to make them feel good about themselves, to justify
infecting someone intentionally with a virulent strand of malaria. Not just for the convicts,
but for the physician researchers as well, it was important that they take comfort in the fact

Making Willing Bodies

8

that they were advancing science in the interests of the war effort and humanity. It was
important that they be able to view themselves as dedicated public servants finding cures to
diseases in furtherance of a just war.
For the project to work, for doctors to participate, for men to volunteer, there had to
be a dominant framework of sacrifice for the soldiers fighting in the Pacific. And it did work.
As Ernest Beutler, one of the Chicago doctors reported, “there was really no reason to try to
coerce people or to mislead people because there were always more people who wanted to
do this than we really had slots.”34 In manufacturing consent, the doctors, the government,
the warden, and the inmates were engaged in a political economy of the body—a productive
enterprise. The prisoners’ bodies were needed to find a cure to malaria, just as they needed
waves of soldiers on landing beaches to invade foreign territory, or bodies to staff the prison
hospital ward, the military hospitals in the field, the amphibian landing vehicles, and the
munitions plants. The prisoners were fulfilling a vital role in this larger political economy.
Even more—though far less dramatically—the prisoners’ willingness to sacrifice
themselves was produced in a very similar way that we produce willingness in our everyday
lives to accept the daily and banal routines of service, work, family life, and citizenship. Like
the prisoners at Stateville, we are made to feel the need to sacrifice ourselves—to serve, to
abide, to agree—through associations of bodily self-sacrifice with fidelity, citizenship, and
patriotism. To be sure, we make our willing bodies in our everyday lives in far more delicate
and subtle ways. We use advertising, marketing to shape people’s desires in a far more
skillful manner. But again, if it is possible to manufacture consent in the prison, it is indeed
possible to produce willing subjects in everyday life. We are made to believe that there is a
connection between sacrificing our body and the ideas of citizenship and humanity.
These associations—of bodily sacrifice and country, or beyond that, humanity—are
the techniques of governance that produce willing subjects. They help produce experimental
subjects in prison, perhaps the extreme space for consent-making. But they also produce
daily acts of service to others. Not for everyone, of course, not exclusively, and not for every
act. But the idea that we are serving others, especially in times of war or social conflict, is a
productive way of speaking—as is the larger ideal of doing things for the betterment of
mankind or humanity. The new mother who stops working or goes off her chosen career
path in order to care for her children or the family hearth; the very act of childbearing as a

Bernard E. Harcourt

9

sacrifice of one’s body for one’s family; the wage-earner who accepts a night shift or takes
on a double shift to provide more for the children—all of the compromises that we make in
our daily lives and to our ideals of equality or liberty more largely, how often are they placed
within the rubric of making sacrifices or compromises for the stability of the larger society,
for the good of others?
Are we deluding ourselves? Or are we, on the contrary, simply masking more base
desires and selfish instincts? Or are we protecting ourselves from the ugly truth of our
unerring self-interest? These questions are, essentially, beside the point. Whether the
sacrificial rationale, whether that justification and way of speaking is actually the motive of
our actions and decisions is not the issue. Surely someone may ultimately volunteer because
they believe that their apparent selflessness will benefit them, for instance through leniency
or a commutation in the case of the Stateville prisoners; and others may genuinely be
motivated by a desire to do good for others. That is, however, beside the point.
What is significant is that this way of speaking frames and envelopes our projects,
desires, and daily decisions in such a way as to make them more acceptable. The Stateville
malaria experiments became possible, conceivable, because of the war rationale. It could not
have been marketed as a way for the convicts to get out of prison faster. It could not have
been presented as a pure financial exchange.
We justify things to ourselves in this way—ordinary decisions, everyday choices, as
well as life altering steps like catching malaria. The sacrifice of the body for the common
good is a productive way of thinking and talking. It produces willing bodies. And so, when
the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, service to the nation framed the debate—on
every side. Not only among those who volunteered to enlist; but as well among those
opposed to the war. For instance, as you may recall, there was a lot of talk that those who
opposed the war had to be careful how they expressed their dissent so as not to undermine
American soldiers who were risking their lives in battle. Many commentators argued that
internal opposition to the war could harm combat morale and undermine the war effort. It
was important to be careful about what you said and did, even if you did not agree with the
War in Iraq. There were men and women sacrificing their bodies for the greater good of the
country. Service to one’s country permeated the choices they made and formed an integral
part of governance.

Making Willing Bodies

10

In the end, those Stateville prisoner volunteers, they too were good soldiers, and in
the process, they became, once again, upright citizens. Volunteering to catch malaria
redeemed these men. As Leopold suggested, the experiments “put the administration and
the cons on the same side of the fence, partners in a common endeavor.”35 In a symbolic
way, these convicts had regained their citizenship and demonstrated their loyalty.
***
The “first bite day” was March 8, 1945.36 The procedure took longer than expected.
The plan was to bite sixteen prisoners on that first day, and “each man had to have the same
number of first bites, second bites, and third bites.”37 Each mosquito was in a little
cylindrical cage that was placed up to the skin of the inmate: “You took a mosquito, placed
its cage on A’s forearm and watched carefully until the mosquito bit him. Then, when you
were sure that the mosquito had inserted its proboscis well under the skin, but before it had
had a chance to fill up with blood, you lifted the cage gently from A’s arm and placed it on
B’s. Here, too, the mosquito must have a chance to bite, but not to fill up with blood. Then
you placed the cage on C’s arm, and here you let the mosquito ‘bite out’—drink its fill.”38
Easier said than done, naturally. Many of the mosquitoes did not cooperate, others
were not sufficiently infected after dissection, and so it took until 3 a.m. that first day to get
the job done—with all the doctors and researchers gradually leaving, eventually letting
Nathan Leopold and one doctor finish to the last bite.39 In all, each of the inmates “received
the bites of ten infected mosquitoes.”40
The prisoners at Stateville had not been chosen at random. They had to satisfy
certain criteria: they had to be white and in good physical health, and they had to be
confined for 18 or more months so that the follow-up observations could be made.41 The
subjects were nearly all between the age of 21 and 40. And they had to have had a medical or
genetic history that excluded prior exposure to malaria or certain immunities. As the doctors
explained, “Volunteers who had lived in known malarious areas, or who gave a history
suggestive of previous malarial infection, or who belonged to one of the colored races, were
excluded in order to minimize the factors of acquired or natural immunity.”42
Each candidate underwent a full physical examination and gave their medical history,
and were routinely subjected to the following battery of exams:
complete blood count, urinalysis, urinary urobilinogen concentration,
phenolsulfonephthalein excretion, cephalin-cholesterol flocculation, serum
bilirubin, blood nonprotein nitrogen, blood Kahn, blood typing, chest x-ray,
electrocardiogram, and, where indicated, erythrocyte sedimentation rate.43
The mosquitoes were also carefully selected and cultivated. Anopheles quadrimaculatus
mosquitoes, they were carefully infected with the strand of malaria—the Chesson strain of P.
vivax—by being allowed to feed on the psychotic patients at the Manteno State Hospital in
Manteno, Illinois, and on Stateville prison volunteers—and not on any, but on those patients

Bernard E. Harcourt

11

“whose gametocyte densities were such as to insure a reasonably high incidence of infection
in the biting mosquitoes.”44 These mosquitoes were then “incubated” at the “mosquito
insectory at the University of Chicago.”45
Once the mosquitoes had bitten the prisoners, they were then dissected and studied
under the microscope to determine if their salivary glands had the sufficient degree of
infection.46 The process was fascinating and is described in obsessive detail by Leopold in his
memoirs.47 There were then prophylactic tests and curative tests administered on the
prisoner subjects in order to assess the effectiveness and toxicity of new anti-malarial drugs.
The same kind of experimentation would take place in the 1960s, including infecting
the prisoners with new resistant strains of malaria that were first observed in South Viet
Nam in 1962.48 “Some of the volunteers are infected to test the effect of various drugs on
malaria. Others are infected to become ‘carriers,’ that is, to carry the disease for a period of
time so mosquitoes can be infected by biting them.”49 As in the 1940s, the inmate volunteers
also staffed the research during the Vietnam War: “the project has a permanent 18-man
inmate staff. It includes four nurses, six laboratory technicians, two clerks, four equipment
maintenance men, and two men who run the insectory—the hot, humid room where
mosquitoes are raised.”50
***
The war rationale also proved exceptionally productive during the Korean and
Vietnam Wars. The warden of Stateville prison, Frank J. Pate, told reporters in 1966—in the
middle of the Vietnam War—that prison inmates volunteer even more enthusiastically
“during wartime.”51 “During World War II, Korea, and now, the inmates have been more
receptive to the project than they are during years of peace,” Warden Pate stated.52 “I think it
gives these inmates a great chance to do a service to humanity. It’s definitely a morale factor
because it increases their self-esteem.”53
Not surprisingly, it was precisely during the Vietnam War that the malaria project got
renewed attention. “The project has taken on renewed urgency recently because of drugresistant malaria in Vietnam and Southeast Asia,” Stuart Kaminsky of the Office of Public
Relations at the University of Chicago reported on March 4, 1968.54 “The reaction of the
inmates to the project is enthusiastic support. As their reason for participation, they
frequently cite having relatives in Vietnam or the desire to do something useful.”55
One inmate, Earl Hanson, who worked in the hematology lab at Stateville, reportedly
told the Office of Public Relations at the University of Chicago that “I think they’re
depending on this work more and more now with all the fighting going on in Viet Nam.”56
Another inmate, Barrett Ingram, reportedly told the OPR from his hospital bed, “I wanted
to volunteer because I felt I was doing something good, something for the boys overseas
fighting.”57 “I read quite a bit about the project, and when they asked for volunteers, I did it
as a Good Samaritan, to try to prevent malaria from getting worse.”58

Making Willing Bodies

12

The war theme was prevalent throughout. According to the OPR, “Other inmates
participating in the project report motives ranging from helping humanity, to impressing the
parole board, to escaping boredom. Some have relatives serving with the armed forces in
Viet Nam.”59 Warden Pate himself emphasized the connections to Vietnam. “I’ve been
through the South Pacific, and I have some first-hand knowledge of what malaria can do to
a man,” he told the Chicago media folks.60
The malaria experiments were portrayed as simply indispensible to winning the
Vietnam War. “According to Dr. James V. McNamara, Research Associate at the University
[of Chicago] and a Major in the U.S. Army, malaria cannot be eradicated in Vietnam or
elsewhere with our present knowledge of the disease,” the OPR reported. “In Vietnam,
according to Dr. McNamara, the problem is further complicated by alien strains of malaria
being carried into South Vietnam by infected North Vietnamese regular army soldiers.
Estimates have been made, he continued, that if Americans were to be in the field in
Vietnam for three months, 90 per cent would have malaria.” The University of Chicago
underscored the importance of its research to the war effort: “The University of ChicagoArmy Medical Research Project has developed a drug which is now being tested in Viet Nam
against the resistant forms of malaria now affecting American servicemen there,” opens their
press release dated March 12, 1966.61 Highlighted in the press release, were the contributions
during World War II and “for the treatment of returning Korean war veterans exposed to
vivax malaria.”62
***
I am by no means suggesting that the war rationale was what truly made any of the
prisoners volunteer, nor that it was the only way in which the experiments were framed. The
war discourse dominated to be sure, but there were many other dimensions to the Stateville
malaria experiments and many other ways that the project would be discussed. There were
certainly other reasons why an inmate might volunteer. There was, for instance—and
unmistakably—a racial dimension. At Stateville, in 1944, the inmates were not chosen at
random. They were all white—more specifically, they were “white male” volunteers between
the ages of 21 and 40, with longer prison terms. Inmates who belonged to the “colored
races” were not allowed to participate “in order to minimize the factors of acquired or
natural immunity.”63 There was a certain racial prestige in being allowed to be infected by
malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
There were also financial incentives: each man who volunteered was offered
somewhere between ten and one hundred dollars to participate in the experiments.64 That
may have seduced some of the inmates—though it also, at least reportedly, disturbed others.
Leopold was among the latter: “To this a number of the early volunteers, including me,
objected strongly. We did not want to be paid for undergoing the experiment; we wanted to
be volunteers in the literal sense of the word.”65 Leopold took the issue up with the head
researcher, Dr. Alving, who argued that compensation was necessary to make the contract
legal, that the money was available and he wanted the inmates to receive it, and that no one

Bernard E. Harcourt

13

would think they were volunteering for the money. This, Dr. Alving suggested, would be
crazy. If they were doing it for the money, he argued, “[they] ought to have [their] heads
examined.”66 And anyway, he added, they can give it to charity if they desired. That’s exactly
what Leopold did: “The payment was made in two parts; as soon as the checks arrived I
endorsed them and sent one to the Red Cross and the other to the Salvation Army.”67 But
others, perhaps, did it for the money.68
For some, it was an opportunity to have contact with women—indeed, for some, the
first contact they had had with women in years: “for the first time there were several ladies
on the floor—nurses and laboratory technicians. That was an innovation, indeed; many of
the fellows had not been that close to a woman for years, and everyone felt a little shy and
strange.”69 Leopold notes: “the first week the nurses were present everyone’s blood pressure
rose.”70 Leopold would have known, he was the lab technician and took all the vitals. “The
average rise was twenty points.”71
The more general point, of course, is that being on the hospital ward may well have
been more entertaining and enjoyable than being locked down in general population. As
Ernest Beutler noted, “It was really probably more pleasant for them to be in this hospital
unit, where they could play cards with their friends, than being on the rock pile or the
laundry or whatever else their work assignment would be.”72 Many of the inmates, like
Leopold—or so he reports—also got an intellectual charge out of the experiment. At the
suggestion of Dr. Alving, Leopold began setting up a microscope on bite day for the
volunteers to see what malaria (more specifically, the sporozoites and trophozoites) looked
like. “This little lecture and demonstration became a standard part of bite day, and nearly all
the fellows were intensely interested.”73
Norval Morris, professor and dean of law at the University of Chicago, spent a
significant amount of time visiting and studying prisons, including Stateville. He knew
prisoners well, and recognized the myriad motivations that could lead an inmate to volunteer
in such an experiment:
Prisoner motivations, in fact, are many and complex. Machismo, which leads
prisoners to exaggerate the risks they take, is one. The altruism of community
service is another, carrying with it for the prisoner the assurance that he is as
virtuous as those outside who have banished and rejected him. And if he sees
himself as having wronged others by his crimes, here is a chance of expiation,
of making restitution. Participation in experiments also provides an
immediate temporary escape from the pervasive fear, endemic brutality and
total anonymity of the typical American mega-prison. (When we visited
Stateville, nearly 40 men were in solitary because they had asked to be—for
their own safety.) Other motives are obvious and more prosaic, the hope of
earlier release, the reward of payment.74
In truth, there is no good reason to believe that any one of the prisoners at Stateville
was really motivated to volunteer because of the war or patriotic sentiment.

Making Willing Bodies

14

By the same token, it is important to emphasize that prisoner experimentation more
generally has not always, nor only been discussed in terms of the war effort. By the time the
malaria research started at Stateville in 1944, prisoners in this country had been used in
experiments involving dengue fever, gonorrhea, gas gangrene, and tuberculosis—to name
just a few75—as well as in more esoteric medical research, and in all this the rationales had
varied. Some experiments were so eccentric as to defy rational discourse entirely. Charles
Wittmann-Todd, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, is researching the
experiments of Dr. L. L. Stanley, the resident physician at San Quentin Prison in California,
who was “transplanting testicles from recently executed convicts to senile and devitalized
men” in the period 1918 to 1922.76 Under Dr. Stanley’s supervision, “Hundreds of San
Quentin inmates received injections of animal testicular substance; some received a piece of
ram’s testicle the size of a silver dollar, which was implanted into the scrotum or abdominal
wall.”77
Other experiments occurred entirely during peace time, and had no tie to a war
effort. In fact, prisoner experimentation flourished during peace time. As the historian Allen
Hornblum documents, there was “tremendous expansion in prison experimentation in
postwar America. Federal prisoners, for example, were enlisted in a broad range of clinical
studies that included athlete's foot, histoplasmosis, infectious hepatitis, syphilis, and amoebic
dysentery, and in additional malaria experiments. State prisoners were considered to be
equally valuable and were soon utilised for studies of syphilis, malaria, influenza, viral
hepatitis, and flash burns ‘which might result from atomic bomb attacks.’”78
And in other human experiments—inside and outside the prison—the subjects
themselves often did not even know they were being experimented on. That was certainly
the case in the Tuskegee syphilis study (not a situation involving prisoners) which was well
under way in 1944 and would continued through 1972. There, the African-American male
subjects were not only denied the opportunity to consent, but were actively withheld
information and in some cases prevented from accessing treatment elsewhere. They were
never given the opportunity to need a story.
Many of these studies—wartime and post-war—put the volunteers at serious risk of
health. According to the official story and the news media, none of the Stateville prisoners
suffered fatal injury as a result of the malaria experiments. According to the Chicago Daily
Tribune, “None of the volunteering convicts died but many were made violently ill as a result
of their infection with vivax malaria and subsequent treatment with drugs then in the
experimental stage.”79 Leopold’s memoir, though, tells a slightly different story and does
include one inmate death directly associated with the testing of anti-malarial drugs.80 For
those inmates who didn’t die, the experiments were extremely painful. The malaria was a
virulent strand, one of the most potent—the Chesson strain of Plasmodium vivax malaria.
When Leopold had it, he claimed, it caused headaches “unlike any other headache in the
world. You think from moment to moment that your head is going to split, and you wish to
gosh it would!”81 As Nathaniel Comfort notes, “No longitudinal study was performed on the

Bernard E. Harcourt

15

Stateville prisoners to assess the long-term effects of these regimens. Heart failure is now a
known side effect of some synthetic antimalarials. Leopold suffered two heart attacks while
on the malaria project and eventually died of heart failure in 1974.”82
Other prisoner studies seemed even more risky. Hornblum reports that “The Ohio
state prison system, for example, allowed researchers from the Sloan­Kettering Institute for
Cancer Research to inject over 100 inmates with live cancer cells. The study was designed to
examine ‘the natural killing off process of the human body’; inmates were informed they
faced ‘no grave danger. Any cancer that took would spread slowly ... and could be removed
surgically.’”83 Another prisoner experiment Hornblum reports involved a certain Dr. Austin
Stough, who engaged in wide-ranging series of drug tests and blood plasma projects in
Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Alabama, which “resulted in inmate volunteers receiving the
wrong blood type and as many as 30 inmates a month contracting viral hepatitis.”84
I don’t want to be misunderstood. The war rationale may not have motivated any of
the Stateville prisoners and was not present in all prisoner experimentation. It would be far
too simple to attribute the Stateville inmates’ willingness to sacrifice their bodies to any
single factor such as the war effort—just as it would be far too naïve to characterize the
prisoners’ willingness as “obvious hypocrisy” or to cast doubt, with Agamben, on the very
possibility of consent.
What matters, really, is what sounded right: what sounded like a good reason for
catching malaria. And here, no doubt, the war effort was one of the better, more productive
stories. For the Stateville inmates, for the doctors, for the government, the war effort made
for a good story. For some inmates, perhaps, there was a genuine element of patriotism and
fidelity—and perhaps also of guilt, maybe, at not being on the front. Other men, it seemed,
were free to volunteer to die for their country. Other men could prove their commitment
and become heroes by sacrificing their bodies on the landing beaches of Normandy or
Okinawa. Other men could give themselves to their country and to the greater good of
humanity. But more importantly, the narrative provided a means of fabricating willing
bodies. It provided a way to present the malaria research as a fully legitimate enterprise.
***
Could the prisoners at Stateville then consent, really consent to catch malaria? The
question raises conventional ethical issues of informed consent under coercive conditions.
Can a prisoner ever consent? Can anyone in a coercive situation ever consent to anything? Is
it better to simply avoid the ethical dilemma entirely because of the moral hazard and
preclude the very possibility of consent? Perhaps. But there is, in truth, no easy or absolute
way to resolve these complex ethical puzzles.
Norval Morris, a true humanitarian, someone who dedicated much of his life to
improving prison conditions and who was himself a genuine humanitarian penal reformer,
took the position that prisoners should be allowed to volunteer for medical research under
properly supervised conditions—that there should be no flat ban on human subjects

Making Willing Bodies

16

research in prisons. “The free consent of the unfree can be protected,” he urged in the op-ed
pages of the Wall Street Journal in April 1974.85 “[R]esearch in prisons can with appropriate
safeguards make a useful contribution to the prisoner’s welfare, to reform of the correctional
system and not least to medical progress.”86
Morris emphasized that prisoners want to participate, or at least say they do and often
say so vehemently. “For example, last April, 96 of the 175 inmates of the Lancaster County,
Pa., prison wrote to the local newspaper protesting the state’s decision to stop all medical
experiments on state prisoners. The disgruntled prisoners made the point that they were
unharmed and that this project allowed them to pay off their fines and court costs.”87
Beutler agrees: “it’s my feeling that it’s really wrong not to allow prisoner volunteers
to participate in research projects. I think this is just part of the politically correct overreaction now to biomedical ethics. I think it’s perfectly all right to use these people.
Obviously, they shouldn’t be forced to do it, but there are people who want to do it, and
they’re an ideal population for studying certain kinds of problems.”88
Do we, in effect, harm or demean prisoners by denying them the ability to consent?
Do we fail to treat them as fully human? Should they not be allowed to make judgments
about their own well-being, choices about what they value most—their health or their
finances, or their likelihood of a commutation? Should they not be entitled to game the
system like everyone else?
And in the end, they did sign consent forms—for whatever that is worth. Ernest
Beutler, one of the Chicago doctors at Stateville, emphasizes: “Nowadays, when I talk about
prisoner volunteers, people sort of wink and sneer as if these people weren’t really
volunteers. But again, people didn’t force prisoners to undergo medical experiments. And
they really were volunteers. They actually signed informed consents that were witnessed….
There were less constraints, but certainly nobody was ever forced to do this.”89
Nathan Leopold recalls that the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg medical trials
brought up the Stateville malaria project as an example of involuntary human
experimentation. “That was absolutely false,” Leopold adamantly states. “The docs explained
in great detail to each and every volunteer before he was used just what it was planned to do.
We were told that there was danger, that we might be sick, that we might die. No man was
coerced or even persuaded. If anything, the Army officers threw their weight the other way.
Every man who went on the project at Stateville did so because he wanted to, almost
because he insisted on it.”90 At least that was how Leopold felt: “I really had to twist their
arms to get my own chance to go on the project.”91
***
The way Nathan Leopold tells it, he not only consented, he fought to catch malaria.
From the moment he first heard about the malaria experiment, Leopold desperately wanted
to volunteer—or so he says, but emphatically and repeatedly. In his memoirs, Life plus 99

Bernard E. Harcourt

17

Years, Leopold insists that he not only wanted to participate in the experiments, but that he
desperately wanted to catch malaria. From the minute he heard it was possible.
Leopold had been a prisoner for several decades by the time September 1944 rolled
around, and had earned a respected position in the penitentiary. With his intelligence, social
upbringing, and motivation, Leopold had held several trusted positions at the penitentiary,
and was considered by the prison authorities and by his peer inmates as a voice of reason. At
the time he first met Dr. Alf Alving of the University of Chicago, in September 1944,
Leopold was a trustee working in the X-ray room at the hospital of the penitentiary. And it
was as a trusted spokesman that he was approached.
The United States government was interested in running some human experiments
to test malaria drugs, Leopold and a handful of other inmates were told. “This was the
number-one medical problem of the war in the Pacific,” Dr. Alving said, “for we were losing
far more men to malaria than to enemy bullets.”92 The question to Leopold and his small
cohort was whether inmates might volunteer. Leopold had no doubt:
I had been looking around for a way of being useful in the war effort; this
was made to order. Further, I had heard quite a number of fellows express
themselves; they’d feel as I did, I knew. Then, in general, the cons have never
been slow in doing their part. I asked Dr. Alving how many volunteers he
contemplated using, and he answered that he might need as many as two
hundred. I told him that I was confident there would be no difficulty in
getting twice or three times that number.93
About two weeks later, the prison authorities asked for volunteers and the very first day 487
inmates volunteered.94
Leopold himself volunteered, and was thrilled to no end to be part of the malaria
research project. “I wanted to work on the project so bad I could taste it,” Leopold recalls.95
“Working on the project was one of the biggest breaks I’ve ever had in my life,” Leopold
would write.96 “The coming of the malaria project was probably the most stirring and
exciting event of my prison term,” he added.97 It was “providential”: “Here, without any
question, was a real chance to be useful. This time a fellow could be sure it wasn’t mental
mud pies he was making. This was a real problem, a real challenge…. Here was something
we could do as well, maybe better, than civilians.”98
Leopold had special reasons to enjoy working on the project. He was a bright man
and loved to learn and be with other intelligent people. “You were working shoulder to
shoulder with wonderful people,” Leopold explained.99 The young doctors assigned to the
research team, Leopold found, were “brilliant,” “among the finest people I’ve ever met.”100
They’d been “picked for their brains” and they were, in his own words, “the kind of guys
you’d want to have for younger brothers.”101 “Not only were they very pleasant to be
around; they were always willing to take time out to explain something you did not
understand. And that was plenty; I was learning more new things than I ever had before.
This was a completely new field to me: I had a vague idea that perhaps malaria might be a

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18

bacterial disease, and I hadn’t looked through a microscope since I was a kid in high
school.”102
“For me it was,” Leopold explains, “a liberal education, especially as all the doctors
were most generous in explaining all the details.”103 Leopold bought medical text references
and taught himself about malaria and heart disease. He also, in fact, engaged in research and
purportedly wrote a research article on measurement of parasite concentration, which Dr.
Alving recommended be published in the Malaria Bulletin.104
But he also wanted desperately to catch malaria. Not just to work on the experiment,
but to be a human subject. When the experiment was enlarged to include infecting volunteers
with malaria, Leopold fought tooth and nail to be among the first. “This was what I wanted
for myself,” Leopold explains.105 “I went to Captain Craige and asked if I might not include
myself in the first group to be bitten by malaria-infested mosquitoes.”106 No luck, at least not
at first. He was too valuable to the researchers in his capacity as research assistant and allaround supervisor of the operations.
Even after Leopold had seen his peers suffer through temperatures of 106° or 107°,
shaking in bed with chills, saturating their sheets with sweat, he wanted to get infected.
“Having seen the actual workings of the experiments with malaria and having infected other
men myself,” Leopold reflected, “I was more eager than ever to become a subject. I went to
Captain Craige and renewed my plea to be allowed to be a member of the next bite
group.”107 Still no luck, apart from a cooked up experiment involving the ingestion only of
anti-malarial drugs.108 But Leopold was still not content. “I wasn’t satisfied. I was determined
that I was going to have malaria too—the real thing. But I’d have to bide my time now.”109
When a specially toxic strand of antimalarial drugs was being tested—a family of
drugs called 8-amino quinolines that had been known to be very dangerous to patients—
Leopold jumped on it. “This was one of the times I was clamoring to be used as a
volunteer.”110
“My desire to take malaria myself continued to grow, and early in June I determined
to force the issue.”111 So he approached the medical captain in charge: “This is the seventh
time I have volunteered,” he emphasized. “I want very much to take malaria; I feel very
strongly about it. In fact, Captain, if you can’t see your way clear to giving your consent, I’m
afraid I’ll have to quit my job here, go to the coal pile, and volunteer from there. Then you’ll
have to take me.”112 On that seventh try, Leopold finally succeeded.
“I was jubilant,” Leopold reported.113 He had just volunteered to have the glands of
malaria-infected mosquitoes injected subcutaneously in his thigh on two subsequent days; to
have his thighs then cut open and a tissue the size of a silver dollar then removed from each
thigh and inserted into another man’s; and then to suffer through temperatures of 105°
continuously over five days. “I carry a scar on each leg to this day. They’re not very pretty,
but I’m rather proud of them.”114

Bernard E. Harcourt

19

Leopold loved being a human subject, he said, because he finally could be of use to
society and no longer despised. “I knew no one would hate us for what we were doing here,”
he explained.115 “If we did this job and did it well, it might conceivably soften public opinion
with respect to convicts. It might even help us here and now.”116
Maybe Leopold was lying or embellishing in his memoirs. Nathaniel Comfort at
Johns Hopkins University, who has written about the Stateville malaria research, refers to
Leopold, in passing, as a “savvy manipulator:”117
Nathan Leopold, savvy manipulator of the system that he was, understood
that the surest route to freedom was to convey to the prison and to the
public not only that he was no longer dangerous but that he was positively
useful. Interviews, memoirs, public-relations statements, and newspaper
articles all portray the Stateville project in a positive light, as putting the
prisoners to good use. The public nature of such statements supports … [the
idea that] we read them as persuasive rhetoric rather than literal truth.118
Persuasive rhetoric, indeed. Leopold was keenly aware of that himself. And only a
few years later, in 1949, he would base his plea for clemency on his participation in the
Stateville malaria experiment. Leopold never denied that self-interest played an important
role in his decision to participate in the malaria experiments. Although he knew there was no
assurance that it would benefit him or other inmates, Leopold could not put it out of his
mind: “the possibility did exist that there would be time cuts. And that was a chance I could
not afford to miss.”119
But in the same breath, Leopold asserted his genuine patriotism:
I have said before that as a boy of fourteen I was bitterly disappointed that I
was too young to take part in World War I, in which all three of my brothers
saw service. And the advent of World War II increased greatly the
punishment of being in prison. I wanted very badly to do my bit. Patriotism
is not highly thought of among cons. I think way down deep a pretty large
percentage are, in fact, patriotic, but somehow, in the face of the prevailing
bitter cynicism, it’s an emotion you don’t dare mention aloud…. O.K., let’s
face it: I was and am patriotic; I love my country. Giving blood to the Red
Cross, X-raying the men being considered for induction into the Army,
helping register the fellows for the draft—all these I enjoyed because they
gave me some slight sense of participation in the common effort. But they
were such little things. The moment I grasped the scope of what was being
attempted, I knew that being a malaria volunteer represented by far the best
opportunity to do my bit in this thing. That’s why I was so determined to be
a subject; that’s why I was willing to battle the whole staff and take a chance
on losing my job in order to ensure that I would be allowed to take part.
Opportunities like that come once in a term in prison; they have to be
grasped when available.120
Leopold knew he would be taken for a manipulator. “There would no doubt be
snide references to my participation in the experiments as a ‘play for sympathy,’” Leopold

Making Willing Bodies

20

recognized. But he didn’t really care. He knew some people would give him credit
nonetheless. “They couldn’t get away from the cardinal fact that I was participating, and I
was sure no one would hate me for that. I felt that I had some reason to hope that public
opinion in my regard might be softened to some degree.”121
In a passage in The Things They Carried, an autobiographical novel about Vietnam, Tim
O’Brien, the author, is on the brink of fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft, and invites the
reader to step in his shoes and experience what it was like to face that life decision. At that
moment, O’Brien is on a fishing boat, twenty yards from the Canadian shore, free to jump
into the Rainy River and avoid being sent into combat. “What would you do?” O’Brien asks.
“Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and
your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel
like dying? Would you cry, as I did?”122 O’Brien would sit there for what seemed like an
eternity, the aluminum boat swaying beneath him, paralyzed at having to make the decision.
He ultimately tried to jump, but couldn’t. “It just wasn’t possible,” O’Brien writes. “I
couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my
imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had
nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was.”123
What must it have felt like to be Nathan Leopold in 1944, several years into World
War II, locked up at Stateville, guilty of one of the most notorious and heinous crimes
committed in Chicago? Would you have felt embarrassed that other men were enlisting to
serve in the Pacific theater and that you could do nothing worthwhile for your country?
Would you have felt, in some sense, useless? Would you have wanted to redeem yourself?
Would you have been desperate to prove your willingness to serve for others? Would you
have sacrificed your body and put it at the service of army doctors? Would you have
embraced the idea of partaking in “the war effort”? Would that have been consent? And
how would you have felt like if you and all other prisoners had been barred outright from
participating in human experimentation?
***
These are intriguing questions, but in the end, the issue is not so much whether the
prisoners really consented, or whether they could consent, but how they were transformed
into consenting subjects. How their apparent willingness to catch malaria was fabricated.
And here, the answer turns out to be somewhat more routine than expected: by an ordinary
means of governance: by associating the sacrifice of the body to citizenship and country. It is
a device that is, as we have seen, productive.
The excesses bear that out. Buried in one of the malaria-research articles from 1948
there is an indication that the strain of malaria was actually “maintained in psychotic patients
at the Manteno State Hospital, Manteno, Illinois, chiefly by blood inoculations from donors
who had manifested high gametocyte densities during trophozoite-induced infections.”124
Apparently, the malaria project “was originally set up at Manteno State Hospital for the
Insane, and the experimental subjects were the insane patients confined there.”125 In other

Bernard E. Harcourt

21

words, patients deemed insane were given malaria in order to feed the mosquitoes. And so,
on the “first bite day” at Stateville, as Leopold confirms, the doctors used “mosquitoes
raised by the Department of Parasitology at the University of Chicago and infected on
patients at Manteno.”126 It is indeed hard to imagine that the psychotic patients
institutionalized in that mental asylum consented to sacrificing themselves for their country.
But it is not hard to believe that doctors would have felt that they were promoting the public
interest and serving the country. It is not hard to imagine that the Manteno initiative was of
vital importance to the war effort and to the GI’s fighting in the Pacific theatre.
Coda.
Alexander de la Paz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came into my
office yesterday with a book detailing the wide range of medical research that is being done
today using prisoners.127 “Despite the federal, state and local level regulations governing it,
and the gaze of the complex system of review and oversight monitoring it,” Alexander de la
Paz tells me, “contemporary social and biomedical research on prisoners is freckled with
violations. Determination letters from the Department of Health and Human Services attest
to this, as do recent controversial studies from Stanford University, the University of Miami,
and the University of Texas: Experiments on prisoners, clinical trials—some involving
“greater than minimal risk”—are still conducted in the United States, and the
pharmaceuticals tested range from Phase I HIV vaccines to Interferon-alpha therapies,
Depakote and Risperidone.”128 De la Paz is going to write his master’s thesis on the current
state of prisoner experimentation. I am eager to learn more. I had thought, well, I had
hoped, that we did not do this anymore.

Making Willing Bodies

22

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23

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April 23, 1949, p. 13.
Some of the original research findings:
Alving, A. S., Craige, B., Jones, R., Whorton, C. M., Pullman, T. N., & Eichelberger, L. 1948.
“Pentaquine (SN-13 276): A therapeutic agent effective in reducing the relapse rate in
vivax malaria.” The Journal of Clinical Investigation, 27, 25–33.
Alving, A. S., Eichelberger, L., Craige, B., Jones, R., Whorton, C. M., & Pullman, T. N. 1948.
“Studies on the chronic toxicity of chloroquine (SN-7618).” Journal of Clinical Investigation,
27, 60–65.
Alving, A. S., Pullman, T. N., Craige, B., Jones, R., Whorton, C. M., & Eichelberger, L. 1948.
“The clinical trial of eighteen analogues of pamaquin (plasmochin) in vivax malaria
(Chesson strain).” Journal of Clinical Investigation, 27, 34–45.
Craige, B., Jr., Alving, A. S., Jones, R., Jr., Whorton, C. M., Pullman, T. N., & Eichelberger,
L. I. 1947. “The Chesson strain of Plasmodium vivax malaria, II. Relationship between
prepatent period, latent period and relapse rate.” Journal of Infectious Diseases, 80, 228.
Edgcomb, J. H., Arnold, J., Yount, E. H., Jr., Alving, A. S., Eichelberger, L., Jeffery, G. M.,
Eyles, D., & Young, M. D. 1950. “Primaquine, SN-13272, a new curative agent in vivax
malaria: A preliminary report.” Journal of the National Malaria Society, 9, 285–292.
NOTES
Special thanks to Arien Mack for organizing a remarkable symposium, to Maxwell Kampfner
and Sam Lim for outstanding research, and to Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt for inspiring and
insightful discussions about courage, patriotism, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Making Willing Bodies

24

                                                            
1

 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 157. 
  The  malaria  experiments  at  Stateville  have  been  described  and  discussed  in  Comfort  2009;  Leopold 
1974;  
3
 Beutler 2007:39. 
4
 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 157. 
5
 Leopold 1974:305. 
6
 Comfort 2009:192‐193. 
7
 Leopold 1974:307. 
8
 Leopold 1974:307. 
9
 Leopold 1974:312. 
10
 Leopold 1974:312. 
11
  NRC  Report  quoted  in  Laurence  1945:1.  This  quote  has  oft  been  attributed  to  the  New  York  Times, 
though in matter of fact it was in the NRC report, reported in the Times. The distinction is important.  
12
 NRC Report, quoted in Laurence 1945:30.  
13
 Laurence 1945:1. 
14
 Wright 1945:18. 
15
 “Prison Malaria,” 1945:43. 
16
 “Prison Malaria,” 1945:43. 
17
 Wright 1949:13. 
18
 Wright 1949:13. 
19
 Howard 1947:10. 
20
 Id.  
21
 Wright 1949:13. 
22
  Wright  1949:13.  According  to  Comfort  2009:200,  Leopold’s  appeal  for  commutation  was  denied,  but 
“he was ultimately granted parole in 1958, shortly after he became eligible.” 
23
 Hornblum 1997:1439. 
24
 Hornblum 1997:1439. 
25
 Slater 2004:129. 
26
 See generally Harkness 1996. 
27
 Slater 2004:128. 
28
 Slater 2004:128. 
29
 New York Times, “Control of Malaria,” April 13, 1946, p. 16, quoted in Slater 2004:131. 
30
 Alving, et al. 1948:2. 
31
 Beutler 2007:30. 
32
 Hornblum 1997:1440. 
33
 On the federal ban, see Hornblum 1997:1440. 
34
 Beutler 2007:39. 
35
 Leopold 1974:330. 
36
 Leopold 1974:310. 
37
 Leopold 1974:310. 
38
 Leopold 1974:310. 
39
 Leopold 1974:310‐311. 
40
 Alving, et al. 1948:3. 
41
 This is all from Alving, et al. 1948:2.  
42
 Alving, et al. 1948:2. 
43
 Alving, et al. 1948:2. 
44
 Alving, et al. 1948:3. 
45
 Alving, et al. 1948:3. 
46
 Alving, et al. 1948:3; see also Leopold 1974:310. 
47
 Leopold 1974:311. 
2

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25

                                                                                                                                                                                 
48

 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 2. 
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 2. 
50
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 3. 
51
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 2. 
52
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 2. 
53
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 2. 
54
 Press Release 68‐141, 1968, p. 2. 
55
 Press Release 68‐141, 1968, p. 3. 
56
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 3. 
57
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 2. 
58
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 3. 
59
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 3. 
60
 Press Release 66‐121B, 1966, p. 5. 
61
 Press Release 66‐121A, 1966, p. 3. 
62
 Press Release 66‐121A, 1966, p. 3. 
63
 Alving et al. 1948:2. 
64
 See below. Leopold reports $100; Comfort reports, based on Beutler 2007, that it was possibly as low as 
$10 per year, and writes “between $25 and $100.” Comfort 2009:199. 
65
 Leopold 1974:309. 
66
 Leopold 1974:310. 
67
 Leopold 1974:310. 
68
 This raises an ethical dilemma. “Although they were technically volunteers, Allen Hornblum argued that 
these prisoners were coerced by being offered money, an incentive so valuable in a prison economy that 
it  was  impossible  to  resist.  We  must  acknowledge,  though,  a  double‐bind:  any  significant  incentive  or 
reward  exposes  the  experimenter  to  charges  of  compulsion,  but  withholding  compensation  smacks  of 
exploitation.” Comfort 2009:192. 
69
 Leopold 1974:309. 
70
 Leopold 1974:309. 
71
 Leopold 1974:309. 
72
 Beutler 2007:30. 
73
 Leopold 1974:314. 
74
 Morris and Miller 1974. 
75
 Hornblum 1997:1438. 
76
 Hornblum 1997:1438 (quoting an article by Dr. Stanley himself).  
77
 Hornblum 1997:1438. 
78
 Hornblum 1997:1439.  
79
 Howard 1947:10.  
80
 Leopold 1974:320. 
81
 Leopold 1974:321. 
82
 Comfort 2009:195. 
83
 Hornblum 1997:1440. 
84
 Hornblum 1997:1440. 
85
 Morris and Mills 1974.  
86
 Morris and Mills 1974. 
87
 Morris and Mills 1974. 
88
 Beutler 2007:30. 
89
  Beutler  2007:30.  According  to  Comfort,  “The  consent  form  was  almost  fact‐free.  On  paper,  the 
prisoners agreed to participate in ‘investigations of the life‐cycle of the malarial parasite’ and to ‘accept all 
risks connected with the experiment’. No explicit risks—or even experimental drugs—were mentioned on 
the form.” Comfort 2009:199. [see Pappworth 1967: 62.] 
90
 Leopold 1974:307. 
49

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26

                                                                                                                                                                                 
91

 Leopold 1974:307. 
 Leopold 1974:305. 
93
 Leopold 1974:305. 
94
 Leopold 1974:305. 
95
 Leopold 1974:308. 
96
 Leopold 1974:306. 
97
 Leopold 1974:307. 
98
 Leopold 1974:307. 
99
 Leopold 1974:307. 
100
 Leopold 1974:306. 
101
 Leopold 1974:306. 
102
 Leopold 1974:306. 
103
 Leopold 1974:315. 
104
 Leopold 1974:316. 
105
 Leopold 1974:309. 
106
 Leopold 1974:309. 
107
 Leopold 1974:312. 
108
 Leopold 1974:312‐313. 
109
 Leopold 1974:313. 
110
 Leopold 1974:317. 
111
 Leopold 1974:318. 
112
 Leopold 1974:318. 
113
 Leopold 1974:318. 
114
 Leopold 1974:320. 
115
 Leopold 1974:307. 
116
 Leopold 1974:308. 
117
 Comfort 2009:201. 
118
 Id.  
119
 Leopold 1974:332. 
120
 Leopold 1974:330‐331. 
121
 Leopold 1974:332. 
122
 O’Brien 1990:54. 
123
 O’Brien 1990:57. 
124
 Alving, et al. 1948:3. 
125
 Leopold 1974:306. 
126
 Leopold 1974:310.  
127
  The  book  in  question  is  Ethical  Considerations  for  Research  Involving  Prisoners,  published  by  the 
National Academies Press in 2006 and written by the Committee on Ethical Considerations for Revisions 
to DHHS Regulations for Protection of Prisoners Involved in Research, edited by Lawrence O. Gostin, Cori 
Vanchieri, and Andrew Pape. As Alexander de la Paz explains to me, “it offers a very broad topography of 
the contemporary research landscape, and a few recommendations for reform attentive to the changing 
demography and health profile of inmates in this age of mass incarceration.” There is a particularly helpful 
pie chart of all the types of research being done at page 61. 
128
 Communication with Alexander de la Paz, February 5, 2011.  
 
92