A vitamin and mineral study on malnourished aboriginals, first with the Norway House Cree in Manitoba and then spreading. The results were inconclusive, but that was due to the fact that the scientists knew the problem beforehand and knew the problem afterhand.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmon...boriginal-nutritional-experiments-canada.html
Mosby — whose work at the University of Guelph focuses on the history of food in Canada — was researching the development of health policy when he ran across something strange.
"I started to find vague references to studies conducted on 'Indians' that piqued my interest and seemed potentially problematic, to say the least," he told The Canadian Press. "I went on a search to find out what was going on."
Government documents eventually revealed a long-standing, government-run experiment that came to span the entire country and involved at least 1,300 aboriginals, most of them children.
It began with a 1942 visit by government researchers to a number of remote reserve communities in northern Manitoba, including places such as The Pas and Norway House.
They found people who were hungry, beggared by a combination of the collapsing fur trade and declining government support. They also found a demoralized population marked by, in the words of the researchers, "shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia."
The experiments, repugnant today, would probably have been considered ethically dubious even at the time, said Mosby.
Not much was learned from those hungry little bodies. A few papers were published — "they were not very helpful," Mosby said — and he couldn't find evidence that the Norway House research program was completed.
"They knew from the beginning that the real problem and the cause of malnutrition was underfunding. That was established before the studies even started and when the studies were completed that was still the problem."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmon...boriginal-nutritional-experiments-canada.html