Ian Mosby, a post-doctoral researcher in the history of science at the University of Guelph, was investigating Canada’s nutrition policies during the Second World War when he saw a paper by a federal scientist comparing Aboriginal children with white children. Scientific curiosity had Mosby wondering where this data had come from, but tracking it down did more than just sate his interest.



Mosby’s digging led him to one of the biggest stories ever told of biomedical research in the North, a story of experiments on Aboriginals in the 1940s and 50s that ranks among the most unethical research projects in Canadian history.

In the wake of Mosby’s exposé, I wrote about the need for an investigation into these experiments, but that wasn’t the end of my interest in this dark era. I wanted to know about Mosby’s process, the behind the scenes story of how one historian’s digging unveiled what otherwise likely would have remained hidden.


Through interviews with Mosby and others, I learned how light was shone into dark corners, and how difficult it is to pull information out of the shadows.

Mosby’s research sent him down a few blind alleys as he searched, unsuccessfully, for the private papers of prominent scientists involved in the experiments on Aboriginal children.


At Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, he requested publicly accessible files from the federal government’s Nutrition Division, but the results were hit and miss.

“I’d order a lot of files which would say ‘Health-Residential Schools’ and I’d get the file and it would just be empty,” Mosby told me in an interview in August. When actual documents did arrive, he said, “you can just go through boxes and boxes. Most of them are useless, and hopefully, you find something.”


Working around changing rules for when it was permissible to use a camera at the budget-slashed, short-staffed Archives, Mosby photographed any documents that looked marginally relevant. Returning home, it would take him about a week to read the material he shot in one day.


Supplementing the archival material with research papers he’d pulled from digitized materials at university libraries, Mosby eventually put enough together to write an academic exposé on the experiments that were carried out on Aboriginal adults who lived on reserves in Northern Manitoba, and children at six residential schools across the country, from the 1940s through to the early 1950s.

In the early 1940s, scientists working with the federal government first documented malnourishment on the reserves, where some people were getting by on an average diet that provided just 1470 calories—a caloric content similar to the diet used to induce starvation in the famous Minnesota Starvation Experiment of 1944-1945.

Based on that figure, Mosby determined that what would have been needed was “emergency food relief.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, the federal researchers divided the adults on the reserves into two groups.


They provided vitamin supplements of thiamine, ascorbic acid, and riboflavin to one, while the other served as a control, with both groups undergoing medical exams including photos of their eyes, gums, and tongues.

Nutrition was a relatively young field in the 1940s and scientists were theorizing about the general effects of supplementing a diet with vitamins and minerals.

Mosby thought that what drove the experiment on the reserves was “the nutrition experts’ desire to test their theories on a ready-made ‘laboratory’ populated with already malnourished human ‘experimental subjects.”

A few years later, the tests at the residential schools began. At a residential school on Vancouver Island researchers kept Aboriginal children on less than half the amount of milk recommended for children in the rest of Canada.

They did this for two years, to establish a ‘baseline.’ For the next three years, they added extra milk, to see what tripling the kids’ intake would do.

In Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, the scientists used students to test the utility of ascorbic acid, or Vitamin C, to prevent gum disease. Since dental care could have affected the results, the team stopped Indian Health Services dentists from visiting the study schools.

In an interview with Ottawa journalist David Napier in 2000, Lionel Pett, the biochemist and medical doctor who supervised the research in the schools, defended his work. Pett said that withholding dental care “was not a deliberate attempt to leave children to develop [cavities] except for a limited time or place or purpose, and only then to study the effects of Vitamin C or fluoride.

His argument would not be persuasive today. “It’s very easy to say that this could never happen now,” said Susan Zimmerman, executive director of the federal Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research, in an interview. “Scientific goals and ethics are not always one and the same; you have to sometimes adapt your scientific goals.”

Zimmerman recently led the development of the second edition of the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS), the rules that now guide research on people in Canada. In the guide, one chapter is specifically devoted to rules for research with Aboriginal communities.

Today, Zimmerman said that if her office receives allegations of unethical research they can require the scientist’s institution to investigate and, if the ethical breach is serious, the institution and her department can take recourse against the researcher.

Mosby’s paper was accepted by the journal Histoire Sociale/Social History and once it was published, he honed his social media skills, with cause. At 33—and as a new father—Mosby is nearly jobless. His post-doctoral fellowship at Guelph expires in November, and career prospects in the history of science are not good. Last year in Canada there were just three job openings in the field.

Read more: https://secretsofaidsandebola..be/2018/03/oh-no-canada-also-involved-in-human.html

Photo: The cruelty of man has no boundary: The Canadian government used babies and little children for experimentation

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