Restoring a reputation

Health - Jonathan Wood | 29 Jul 10. An astonishing and shocking story from the time of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia has been unearthed, thanks to the efforts of J Kevin Baird, who directs the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit based in Jakarta, and his Indonesian colleague, Professor Sangkot Marzuki, Director of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology. Reported in The Observer at the weekend, the events include hundreds of deaths of forced labourers, accounts of the torture of local doctors and researchers, and the beheading of a leading Indonesian scientist who is likely to have been innocent of any crime. A full account also appeared earlier this month in Science . In July 1944, during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, around 900 Indonesians in a forced labour camp outside Jakarta were injected with a vaccine. All of them died within a week. The Japanese military police arrested local researchers, doctors and staff at a scientific institute in Jakarta, accusing them of sabotaging the vaccine.