Project Operation Whitecoat (2010)
112 comments
·March 24, 2025null
CalRobert
If 39 pages is too much for you, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Whitecoat#Seventh-da...
"""
Over the course of the 19-year program, more than 2,300 U.S. Army soldiers, many of whom were trained medics, contributed to the Whitecoat experiments by allowing themselves to be infected with numerous different kinds of bacteria that were considered likely choices for a biological attack. While some volunteered immediately after basic training, for conscientious objectors at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas (before they began their medic training), the near certainty of being assigned as a combat medic in Vietnam helped some medics choose instead to remain in the United States with the Whitecoat program. The goal of the program was to determine dose response for these agents.
"""
I attended an SDA high school and was a member of the church for a couple years in college (I dated an SDA woman). It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism. They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday. Conversely, this generally included a desire for religion not to get too involved in government, which I respected quite a lot.
I never really believed, and left the church after breaking up, but I really miss the sense of community. Every Saturday I'd go to a service with a boring sermon but some _fantastic_ singing (the entire congregation could, and did, sing, and those walls rang with "Down By The River To Pray" in 4 part harmony), then have a vegetarian (albeit cheesy) potluck after, and then just chill at the beach with friends. Society would do well to adopt the sabbath as a cultural practice. The minister where I was seemed pretty chill with marriage equality - I remember he gave a sermon about marriage while people protested California's prop 8 outside and he pointed out how badly LGBT couple wanted marriage at the same time others took it for granted.
I wonder if it's still like that.
dataviz1000
> California Adventists have higher life expectancies at the age of 30 years than other white Californians by 7.28 years (95% confidence interval, 6.59-7.97 years) in men and by 4.42 years (95% confidence interval, 3.96-4.88 years) in women, giving them perhaps the highest life expectancy of any formally described population. [0]
SDA live a lot longer.
The SDA vegetarian diet was also the driving force behind the Kellogg's Cereal company [1]
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
CalRobert
Vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and smoking, and maybe most of all pretty strong (albeit also quite insular) communities. They seemed to be pretty well-off too, for the most part.
MrMcCall
I can only imagine how much better a person does in college when they're not drinking or smoking and perhaps even minimizing their promiscuity.
That's gotta improve their chances against over 90% of their peers, at least, I imagine.
"Youth is wasted on the young" is only true because our youth are not taught how to not conserve and utilize their energy.
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ToucanLoucan
> It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism.
Creationism is a canned joke ideological point that American Christians of all types seemingly can't get enough of. It's hilariously bad "science" at the very best, and outright farce at the worst. But for some reason simply acknowledging evolution is, seemingly as of the last 20 years or so, utterly untenable, and so they perform.
> They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday.
I mean that just sounds like garden variety Christian persecution complex to me. I don't think a certain segment of the Christian population can properly reckon with reality if they don't feel they are being somehow oppressed despite running... basically everything.
CalRobert
Well, they view Genesis as a literal account. I agree with you, though.
As far as the latter point - it was mostly that, at least where I was, a desire to keep government out of religion paired with a desire for religion not to be too involved in government. Among other things they knew that other denominations were more powerful than them and would have far more influence in government.
I'm not an SDA booster (I'm not a member and haven't attended any church for 20 years, and found the insularity of the community stifling) but I still think it's a really interesting denomination.
jncfhnb
The origin the dispute is not so much arguing that Genesis must be literal but that acknowledging evolution diminishes the special uniqueness of the human soul
wizzwizz4
In what way does it? I thought all that was because of a distinction bestowed by God, not because of anything material.
mistrial9
> Creationism is a canned joke ideological point that American Christians of all types seemingly can't get enough of.
this is uninformed and prejudiced on its face. In Theology graduate class, the first week of lecture included the division between "literalist" Biblical traditions, and others. It is well known among anyone who has studied comparative religion in any way that Christians are not at all unified in the interpretation of Genesis, despite outward appearances.
sepositus
I don’t usually expect nuanced theological discussions here. It’s usually the equivalent of bumper sticker comments.
The “appetite” for Young Earth Creationism amongst my Christian group is very low if nonexistent. In fact we often spend more times groaning at the antics this crowd gets into.
BobbyTables2
Christians do seem to revel in how the early believers were persecuted for their faith…
Of course, they too shared that experience with others in the times of the Charlemagne and that of the Inquisition.
aredox
It's funny; unethical human experimentation during that period is often excused as "it was common practice at the time" (to "forget" to consult patients before enrolling them into experiments), and here we have people of the same period making sure to follow proper ethical procedures...
(The same way that even at the time slavery was common - be it XIXth century or Antique Greece - there were already quite a lot of people revulsed by it...)
sofixa
For what it's worth, enrolling patients without consent in unnecessary procedures still happens today. There's even a whole Wiki article about one category of those (which was banned in France in 2016, and US in 2024, but probably remains legal and pervasive in a lot of other countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelvic_examinations_under_anes...
tdeck
Unbelievable that this was and is a thing and that I've never heard of it before.
foxyv
Just a quick reminder, slavery is still common in the United States.
kjs3
Just a quick reminder, 1/3 of 1% is not 'common'. Unless you (predictably) redefine math and English so you get to be right.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie... https://ourrescue.org/education/research-and-trends/modern-d...
samplatt
3.3 people per thousand is pretty common for something that isn't meant to exist at all. I could meet 1000 people and, due to the ostensibly advanced & cultured world we live in, I would be confident none of them should be slaves.
Being so inflexible with the definition is not the same as being honest. Astrophysicists and statisticians often use the word 'common' to refer to vanishingly small numbers, and us uneducated laypeople are usually just fine with that.
MomsAVoxell
The Prison-slavery industrial complex is very, very real.
foxyv
Only 7 of 50 states ban forced labor. Seems pretty common to me.
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themaninthedark
Which Antique Greece was revulsed by slavery?
It wasn't the democracy of Athens... >Participation was open to adult, free male citizens (i.e., not a metic, woman or slave). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy
MisterTea
"there were already quite a lot of people revulsed by it...)" does not imply all of "Antique Greece" felt this way. Only that some people did.
senderista
Who?
mullingitover
This is a fascinating paper with a lot of interesting context, the mid-1900s were a different time for medical ethics.
I grew up in the Adventist church and it's been wild seeing it drift so far from its original distinguishing stances.
When I was a kid, I primarily went to Adventist schools. However, one year after my family moved there wasn't an Adventist school available. I went to a local evangelical school instead. It was a real eye-opener.
The evangelical school had a program of outright child brain-washing about abortion that I'd never heard as an Adventist. As a fifth grader I was getting daily updates about the Supreme Court nomination battle over (disgaced Nixon lackey) Robert Bork, because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement. There was daily news about abortion protests they were running. When I went home and asked my parents about it, they told me as Adventists we had the bible's stance on abortion: the bible says nothing about abortion. Adventists hospitals even allowed abortions to be performed on prem since they had no doctrinal problem with it.
Fast forward to now, a lot of Adventist members are loudly anti-choice, anti-vaccine (the church leadership had to post a very delicately worded statement about vaccines because they operate respectable medical schools, and had to please both the many facebook-addled cranks in their pews as well as the sane professionals in their medical school staff), generally indistinguishable from generic right-wing evangelicals. The Adventist core membership of today I have no doubt would've been mostly pro-slavery and definitely would have no qualms about shooting people in war.
The paper talks about the church's effort to go from 'sect' (firm moral stances putting them at odds with the majority) to 'denomination' (compromising their morals to fit in), and the church of today I'd say has run as far away as they could from being a sect.
CalRobert
I recall an organization that was proud of Desmond Doss (one of only 3 conscientious objectors to get the medal of honor) and pre-political Ben Carson (I never was able to square the person I saw campaigning with the extremely well-regarded neurosurgeon). I wonder what happened.
timewizard
> because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement.
Bork was a staunch capitalist and wanted to destroy anti monopoly laws. His position on abortion was that it should be a state legislature issue.
You spot the problem but I believe you misattribute the source in a way that actually only benefits Bork and those who would champion him.
chinathrow
Boy am I glad I went to a state school without this crap.
dang
Ok, but please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're invariably less interesting (because more repetitive, and more indignant) than the specific point they tangent off from.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
skyyler
The ideological games being pushed on children in state schools is different, but it's not entirely absent.
That being said, I'll take historical revisionism over the history of the empire over, uh, the evangelical option.
mullingitover
Main ideological information I learned in state schools: “there are these different ideologies” provided without judgement. There was even a devil’s advocate argument for the south and slavery.
In religious schools, even the best of them, I learned nothing about any ideology but the “true” one, everything else was people being deluded by the devil.
almostgotcaught
> The ideological games being pushed on children in state schools is different, but it's not entirely absent.
People say this all the time and it's facile. Yes ideology is everywhere and you cannot be completely free from it. But the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.
paxcoder
Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder, what with science informing us that human life begins at conception and our consciences, and God's moral law recorded in good book that murder i wrong.
I notice you use the word choice and classify the pro-life position s "anti-choice" which makes it seem like a bad thing. However the "choice we are talking about here is directly and intentionlly causing death to an innocent human being. I think it is very important to understnd that.
To borrow an atheist trope, you and I agree that murder is evil and immoral in most cases. I just think it's wrong in one more case, when the victims are yet unborn too (I reckon murder is intrinsically evil and immoral)
tbrownaw
> what with science informing us that human life begins at conception
No. Science can't say when life begins any more then it can say how much sand is needed to make a heap. Because it's a question of how we choose to define things, not a question of objective fact.
(And fyi... since what makes humans special is our rather absurd level of ability to think and learn things, human life begins with the ability to form long-term memories. Which is well past the end of infancy. This may seen counterintuitive, but there's a sound scientific basis for it.)
paxcoder
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mullingitover
> Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder
Which christians are you referring to? Plenty of christians disagree with you and will tell you it's a complicated issue with no black and white answer. There isn't even a completely agreed-upon definition of what a christian is[1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6gzr6p/americans...
paxcoder
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wolfhumble
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mullingitover
> I am surprised that Adventist Church, or the one you went to, said that the Bible does not say anything about abortion. The sixth commandment explicitly say that: "You shall not murder."
I'm not a theologian, but I know the Adventists took a much harder stance against killing real, live people in war than they did about in the abstract in utero, and that makes rational sense to me. Everyone has a different take on scripture so I expect for other religions it will say what they want to it say.
> Reading all these verses – and many others – and combining them, I don't think it is correct to state that: "the bible says nothing about abortion".
Great, don't get one. In any case, that's not how the Adventists have historically seen it, and I'm not an Adventist now in any case.
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6stringmerc
The Bible says a lot more directly about holding slaves and that being acceptable than anything you could argue regarding abortion as a divine directive. Even the New Testament is pro slavery in some respects. The citations noted, regarding abortion, are really stretching things.
Remember this is the same book that says “Oops we can’t let the Benjaminites die out because the prophecies won’t come true unless there are 12 tribes so because we won’t intermarry with them as punishment they can kidnap and keep women from a nearby people as wives so they survive.”
The article is fascinating.
bitsage
If one considers life to begin at conception, abortion unambiguously violates the commandment not to kill. I grew up Adventist, and contrary to OP, I didn’t know anyone pro-abortion. Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion. The Bible doesn’t command Christians to own slaves and keeping other commandments literally would conflict with chattel slavery, but it does command not killing (murder).
bentobean
It’s important to bear in mind the distinction between slavery and indentured servitude. While both are terrible, projecting modern day morales onto scripture on this subject isn’t appropriate. It’s not like people could file for bankruptcy as we know it 2,000 years ago. You had to work it off.
hulitu
> the mid-1900s were a different time for medical ethics.
But sadly, only nazis and japanese are bad, others (CIA) are good.
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1oooqooq
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