Wendell Johnson
Scientific experiment healed the lives of 22 healthy orphans. The story of one of the most controversial episodes in the history of scientific research in the United States.
Em 1939, Wendell Johnsona prestigious speech-disorder specialist at the University of Iowa, and his graduate assistant, Mary Tudor Jacobs, subjected 22 children from an Iowa orphanage to one of the most unethical studies ever carried out.
The two researchers sought to test a pioneering theory: that stuttering was a learned behaviorcaused by psychological pressures.
Half of the children received positive encouragement and were praised for the way they spoke, while the other half were subjected to a negative therapy — were constantly corrected and warned for any imperfections in the speech.
For six months, Mary Nixon and ten other children were repeatedly told that they stuttered, she recalls, 64 years after taking part in the experience that left scars: none of the children developed stuttering, but many revealed loss of self-esteem, anxiety and insecurity — effects that, according to the victims’ lawyers, lasted their entire lives.
Mary Nixon and two other participants, Kathryn Meacham and Hazel Potter Dornbush, all Iowa residents, sued the University of Iowa in 2003 demanding compensation for lasting psychological injuries.
The controversy reignited the debate on ethics in scientific research. Eight decades ago it was common to use minorities, disabled children or prisoners as guinea pigs, as they were not given the same moral value as other people.
The “monstrous” study, conducted when the science of language was in its infancy, is today seen as a paradigmatic example of bad ethical practices. Similar cases, such as Tuskegee experience — in which African-American men were left untreated for syphilis for decades — led to the creation, in 1974, of informed consent standards in all US state-funded studies.
Today, science recognizes that , and that it affects around one in every 100 people, generally appearing between the ages of two and five.
Mary Tudor Jacobs, co-author of the study, expressed regret and said she returned to the orphanage several times in the 1940s to try to repair the damage caused. But for Mary and other victims, the scars of the “Monster Study” seem impossible to erase.
