"Strange Brotherhood": An essay on an all-but-forgotten episode of research ethics by Penn undergraduate Will Schupmann

[Editor’s note: While researching a paper on the origins of gamma globulin therapy, Will Schupmann C’17 examined the Joseph Stokes (M’20) Papers, a 252-box archive housed at the American Philosophical Society. In it he uncovered documentary evidence of the following all-but-forgotten episode of campus history.]

The stone and brick building at 307 South 39th Street is familiar to several generations of Penn undergraduates as the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity house. Since the 1940s, it has served as the home of hundreds of DKE fraternity brothers. During World War II, however, it served an entirely different purpose. Between November 1944 and February 1946, Joseph Stokes, Jr. M’20, a Penn professor and physician-in-chief of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, converted it into an isolation ward for human experimentation.

The DKE house’s role in wartime medical research had its genesis in the 1941 establishment of a civilian Board for the Investigation and Control of Influenza and Other Epidemic Diseases in the Army. As the US prepared to enter World War II, the military knew its troops were at risk of contracting infectious diseases. The Army created seven commissions within the Board, one of which was the Commission on Measles, led by Stokes. Stokes was a prominent physician researcher. In addition to his leadership role at CHOP, he also helped to develop vaccines for influenza, measles, mumps, infectious hepatitis, and polio.