President Trump is trying to save money by terminating leases on facilities used by federal agencies. One of these is EPA’s Human Studies Facility located at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Scientists are trying to save it,” reports Nature magazine. But being a waste of money is the least interesting aspect of the infamous lab.
In 2011, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I exposed the lab’s illegal experimentation on humans with air pollutants that EPA considers to be deadly. The lab’s central feature is an actual gas chamber into which EPA pumped exhaust from a diesel truck idling outside in a parking lot. You can see a photo of the twisted arrangement here.
After filtering out the carbon monoxide, EPA concentrated the exhaust’s fine particulate matter (soot, called “PM2.5” by EPA) to unrealistically high levels and pumped it into the chamber in which human guinea pigs inhaled it for periods of two hours. The purpose of the experiments was to observe the effects, if any, of inhaling PM2.5. For these experiments, EPA had recruited: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and elderly persons up to 80 years of age. EPA paid its human guinea pigs as much as a couple thousand dollars for their participation in the experiments.
All this may seem harmless enough. But was it? EPA had previously concluded that PM2.5 was, essentially, the most toxic substance known to man. Any inhalation could cause death within hours, the agency had determined. It had also stated that the people most at risk from inhaling PM2.5 were: asthmatics; people with heart disease and diabetes; and the elderly. Those at risk from PM2.5 were the very sort of people upon whom it had been experimenting.
But EPA had not disclosed any of this to, and so did not obtain legally required “informed consent” from its human guinea pigs. Instead of informing its human guinea pigs in writing that the agency believed the experiments could kill them, as was required by federal regulations, state law and the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation, the agency’s consent forms only disclosed that some temporary coughing or wheezing may result from the experiments.
Hellbound and Down 