In the 1970’s a group of parents in Baltimore thought they were enrolling their boys in a free Johns Hopkins child-care program.
More than 7,000 young boys — “95 percent from underprivileged Negro families” — were used as guinea pigs in a three-year experiment that could have branded them as latent criminals for life.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the project extracted blood samples, ostensibly to test for anemia and other medical problems.
In reality, the blood was drawn to screen boys with an extra “Y” chromosome, making them XYY males instead of normal XY males. This was done because a theory, which remains unproved to this day, holds that males with the extra Y chromosome are more likely to become criminals later in life.
This genetic testing was done without the parents’ knowledge or consent.
