Anger over East German Medical 'Human Guinea Pigs'

Germany is confronting another chapter from its past - allegations that Western drug companies used more than 50,000 people in the former communist East as "human guinea pigs" in 1980s medical trials.
News magazine Spiegel this week reported that a who's who of big German, Swiss and US pharmaceutical companies made deals with the dictatorship to test medicines, sometimes without the knowledge of the patients.
Several people were known to have died during trials, and some tests involved infants and delirious alcoholics, said the report on the agreements with the police state that collapsed with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
Major drugs companies, some of which..more