Alexander von Schwerin

Pathways to Human Experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan, and the United States

The history of human experimentation in the twelve years between Hitlers rise to power and the end of the Second World War is notorious in the annals of the twentieth century. The horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, Birkenau, and other National Socialist concentration camps reflected an extreme indifference to human life and human suffering. Unfortunately, they do not reflect the extent and complexity of the human experiments undertaken in the years between 1933 and 1945. Following the prosecution of twenty-three high-ranking National Socialist physicians and medical administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Medical Trial (United States v. Karl Brandt et al.), scholars have rightly focused attention on the nightmarish researches conducted by a small group of investigators on concentration camp inmates. Less well known are alternative pathways that brought investigators to undertake human experimentation in other laboratories, settings, and nations.

Shaping Vulnerable Bodies at the Thin Boundary between Environment and Organism: Skin, DNA Repair, and a Genealogy of DNA Care Strategies.

This paper brings together the history of risk and the history of DNA repair, a biological phenomenon that emerged as a research field in between molecular biology, genetics, and radiation research in the 1960s. The case of xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), an inherited hypersensitivity to UV light and, hence, a disposition to skin cancer will be the starting point to argue that, in the 1970s and 1980s, DNA repair became entangled in the creation of new models of the human body at risk - what is here conceptually referred to as the vulnerability aspect of body history - and new attempts at cancer prevention and enhancement of the body associated with the new flourishing research areas of antimutagenesis and anticarcinogenesis. The aim will be to demonstrate that DNA repair created special attempts at disease prevention: molecular enhancement, seeking to identify means to increase the self-repair abilities of the body at the molecular level. Prevention in this sense meant enhancing the bodys ability to cope with the environmental hazards of an already toxic world. This strategy has recently been adopted by the beauty industry, which introduced DNA care as a new target for skin care research and anti-aging formulas.This paper brings together the history of risk and the history of DNA repair, a biological phenomenon that emerged as a research field in between molecular biology, genetics, and radiation research in the 1960s. The case of xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), an inherited hypersensitivity to UV light and, hence, a disposition to skin cancer will be the starting point to argue that, in the 1970s and 1980s, DNA repair became entangled in the creation of new models of the human body at risk - what is here conceptually referred to as the vulnerability aspect of body history - and new attempts at cancer prevention and enhancement of the body associated with the new flourishing research areas of antimutagenesis and anticarcinogenesis. The aim will be to demonstrate that DNA repair created special attempts at disease prevention: molecular enhancement, seeking to identify means to increase the self-repair abilities of the body at the molecular level. Prevention in this sense meant enhancing the bodys ability to cope with the environmental hazards of an already toxic world. This strategy has recently been adopted by the beauty industry, which introduced DNA care as a new target for skin care research and anti-aging formulas.