17. Arthur St. Germain
Blood drives for donations of both whole blood and plasma preceded the bovine blood substitute experiments. The high rate of inmate response encouraged officials to offer incentives to prisoners to volunteer for the experiments. One such prison, Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, had 200 prisoners volunteer, of which 64 received injections of bovine albumin to test its effectiveness in humans. One of them, Arthur St. Germaine, had completed 18 months of a 5-to-7 year sentence when he stepped forward to volunteer. How much of the risk he actually knew about is unknown, but the 27-year-old was stricken with serum sickness in reaction to the injection and died in November, 1942. Several other inmates became seriously ill, though only St. Germaine died from the tests, which caused so much concern among the doctors and researchers they were canceled.
After his death, other inmates referred to St. Germaine as the “Prison Martyr”. The following year, Norfolk inmates raised over $7,000 in war bonds in a contest between prisons nationally. The winner gained the right to name an Army bomber. Having won the contest, the Norfolk inmates voted to name the bomber the Spirit of St. Germaine. St. Germaine was awarded a full pardon posthumously by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. Of the two hundred inmates who volunteered for the research, only 14 remained incarcerated at the end of the war three years later. Amazingly, following the death of St. Germaine and the illness of several others who participated in the tests, all but eight later told prison authorities they would volunteer again should the suspended program resume. It never did.