Ethics

It's reasonable to ask how NIH could have so egregiously violated the Nuremberg Code and compromised its credibility in facilitating the quack torture of Ewen Cameron at McGill?  One answer lies in the excessively cozy relationship with and scientific prejudices of the responsible NIH official who helped champion the atrocities.  Maitland Baldwin, like Cameron, had studied under Donald Hebb, obtaining an M.S. from McGill in 1952.  In 1955, Baldwin was approached by the CIA with results from a sensory deprivation test in which an Army volunteer had been reduced to "crying loudly and sobbing in a most heartrending fashion" after 40 hours in a small isolation box.  Rather than being appalled by this outcome, Baldwin was thrilled, replying that "the isolation technique could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed."

  

Baldwin and the CIA soon learned that Cameron had gone far beyond the work of Hebb and was administering massive amounts of electroshock, placing patients in medically-induced comas for weeks or months at a time, and feeding them a steady regimen of LSD and other mind-altering drugs as part of his program of "depatterning" to supposedly eliminate harmful thought processes.  And though he like many others demonstrated that torture in sufficient quantities can break down anyone physically and mentally he never had the slightest success in reprogramming patients to produce more beneficial thoughts and behaviors, although it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.  As part of his regime of "psychic driving," patients were forced to listen to the same recorded messages thousands of times while profoundly medicated or sensory deprived.  The reality is that Cameron's experiments only tortured and traumatized people seeking treatment for relatively minor psychological issues such as mild postpartum depression to the extent that many no longer functioned for the rest of their lives.  

Of course, torture was of great interest to the Agency, going back to their employment of literal Nazis in secret prisons in West Germany following World War II, so Baldwin was dispatched to Montreal to persuade Cameron to apply for funding, which was swiftly provided.  

As for Baldwin, he apparently received CIA MKUltra funding himself not just for work on sensory deprivation but also ESP and radio frequency energy, which he claimed had "been found to effect reversible neurological changes in chimpanzees."  He even supposedly worked to remove a chimpanzee's head and reattach it on another chimp in a project that was of course called Operation Resurrection.  Then again, he probably did a great job filling out his timecard.  Nazis are always very meticulous about documenting their atrocities.