Unnecessary and questionable human experimentation is not limited to pharmaceutical development. In experiments at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a genetically engineered human growth hormone (hGH) is injected into healthy short children. Consent is obtained from parents and affirmed by the children themselves. The children receive 156 injections each year in the hope of becoming taller.
Growth hormone is clearly indicated for hormone-deficient children who would otherwise remain extremely short. Until the early 1980s, they were the only ones eligible to receive it; because it was harvested from human cadavers, supplies were limited. But genetic engineering changed that, and the hormone can now be manufactured in mass quantities. This has led pharmaceutical houses to eye a huge potential market: healthy children who are simply shorter than average.
Short stature, of course, is not a disease. The problems short children face relate only to how others react to their height and their own feelings about it. The hGH injection, on the other hand, poses significant risks, both physical and psychological.
These injections are linked in some studies to a potential for increased cancer risk, 5-8 are painful, and may aggravate, rather than reduce, the stigma of short stature. 9,10 Moreover, while growth rate is increased in the short term, it is unclear that the final net height of the child is significantly increased by the treatment.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine worked to halt these experiments and recommended that the biological and psychological effects of hGH treatment be studied in hormone-deficient children who already receive hGH, and that non-pharmacologic interventions to counteract the stigma of short stature also be investigated. Unfortunately, the hGH studies have continued without modification, putting healthy short children at risk.
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