UC Davis Bans Two Surgeons from Doing Research After Injecting Terminally Ill Patients With Bacteria

In a shocking letter to the Food and Drug Administration, two surgeons at the University of California Davis were banned from doing human research after it was discovered that they had injected terminally ill brain cancer patients with bacteria without approval. The surgeons, Drs. J. Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph J. Schrot claim that the injections were part of an innovative treatment where bacteria are used to create a postoperative infection to help terminally ill patients with brain cancer live longer.

The surgeons injected three patients with glioblastomas, or cancer that arises from the supportive tissue of the brain. Two of the patients contracted sepsis and died. Dr. Muizelaar was ordered to hand over his clinical investigations and Dr. Schrot was ordered to take the FDA's clinical investigator training course. The University research chancellor issued a statement that the two doctors "constituted serious and continuing noncompliance reportable to the FDA" while Dr. Muizelaar claims that "there are people who blatantly break the rules that endanger all of their research programs. We certainly didn't blatantly trample any rules."

All university researchers are required to apply for human subjects approval to minimize risk to those individuals participating in research trials and experiments. Several horrific experiments were carried out on human beings over the course of history, including the Tuskegee experiment. The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was conducted between 1932-1972 on impoverished African American sharecroppers infected with Syphilis who believed that they were receiving beneficial medical care. The researchers never revealed to the participants that they were infected with Syphilis or offered them penicillin, which was known to treat it by 1947. The researchers wanted to understand the natural progression of untreated syphilis, but ultimately injured or killed many impoverished African American sharecroppers with false promises of medical care.