Subjects in a now notorious US medical experiment have won nearly $1 million in damages. The state of Iowa in the US has agreed to pay $925,000 to settle claims that a 1939 experiment by the University of Iowa Speech Pathology Department left six children with lifelong speech problems (Attorney General’s press release, settlement document). The children were harassed and belittled to get them to stammer in what became known as the ‘Monster Study’ (as AP notes). The man in charge of the study, Wendell Johnson, believed non-stutterers would develop the condition if labelled as stutterers. Oddly, and for reasons neither I nor the Des Moines Register can determine, one of the plaintiffs is getting $25,000 while the other five split $900,000.

This all makes you think hard about the kinds of trials that get approval, and wonder how much things have changed, especially given that when details of the study emerged in 2001 two professors said they’d known about it for years, but nobody listened to them (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Even ‘normal’ clinical trials for drugs can come with ethical issues that you’d think could be easily avoided (see column in Nature News today about gene therapy).

Wendell Johnson died in 1965; his son has established a memorial page with a huge amount of information about his work. He has also blogged about the settlement, with a rather different take on it to the newspaper reports, and provided a pdf of a book on the matter.