How Imperial Japan tried to still publish their studies on live human experiments: “Manchurian Monkeys”
“One may wonder about the career ambitions of the scientists who performed these experiments, knowing that their results were valuable in terms of medical advances and scientific discovery, yet were necessarily conducted under extreme secrecy due to their gross inhumanity. How could they gain fame and share their results with the outside world? The solution was to publish their results in esteemed, peer-reviewed journals–more than a hundred such articles were published or read aloud in lecture halls–but with the subjects described as monkeys, rather than people.
It was not hard to discern the truth. Experiments that did truly use monkeys as subjects provided the proper species name of the monkey, such as ‘long-tailed monkey’; when humans were used, the subjects were written up simply as ‘monkeys’ or ‘Manchurian monkeys.’
The number of people who realized that they were actually reading about human subjects must have been fairly high. The name Shiro Ishii or Ryochi Naito at the top of a paper, for example, would tip off many readers to the nature of the experiment–as Naito himself said, many in Japan knew about Ishii’s program. The discerning reader knew to read between the lines.
For those who did not know about Unit 731, however, there were plenty of other tip-offs, facts, and statistics that just wouldn’t make sense to the careful doctor or scientist. Monkeys and men, while both primates, have distinct physiological markers. One case written by Dr. Masaji Kitano and Dr. Shiro Kasahara in a 1944 edition of the Japan Journal of Physiology, a top medical periodical in Japan, described a lab monkey with a temperature of 40.2 degrees Celsius during a fever episode. No species of monkey could spike a temperature that high. But a human could.”
Barenblatt, Daniel. (2004) A plague upon humanity: the secret genocide of Axis Japan's germ warfare operation. Harper Collins. p. 69-70