Which Manchurian Candidate Project was that?

On August 31, 1869, Mary Ward became the first recorded victim of an automobile accident. Thirty years later, on September 13, 1899, Henry Bliss became North America’s first motor vehicle fatality when hit while stepping off a New York City Trolley. Since then, over 20 million people worldwide have died due to motor vehicle accidents. The need for means of analyzing and mitigating the effects of motor vehicle accident on humans was felt soon after commercial production of automobiles began in the late 1890’s, and by the 1930’s when the automobile became a part of daily life and the number of motor vehicle deaths were rising to increasingly large percentages of the total number of miles driven by motor vehicles. Death rates had surpassed 15.6 fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles, and were continuing to climb. As of the late 1950’s car manufactures were on public record as saying that vehicle accidents simply could not be made survivable because the forces in a crash were too great. Detroit’s Wayne State University began a massive research effort to hopefully determine accurate data on the effects of high speed collisions on the human body, however there was little progress and no tools existed to make the required measurements involving mechanical force, mass, velocity and acceleration. Biomechanics was barely in its infancy. It was therefore necessary to employ two types of test subjects in order to develop initial data sets. The first test subjects were dead human bodies (cadavers). They were used to obtain fundamental information about the human body’s ability to withstand the crushing and tearing forces typically experienced in a high-speed accident. To such an end, steel ball bearings were dropped on skulls, and bodies were dumped down unused elevator shafts onto steel plates. Cadavers fitted with crude accelerometers were strapped onto automobiles and subjected to head-on collisions and vehicle rollovers. Albert King’s Journal of Trauma article, “Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention”, clearly states the value in human lives saved as a result of cadaver research. King’s calculations indicate that as a result of design changes implemented up to 1987, cadaver research since saved 8,500 lives annually. He noted that for every cadaver used, each year 61 people survive due to wearing seat belts, 147 lives are saved due to air bags, and 68 lives are saved that withstood windshield impacts. However, work with cadavers presented almost as many problems as it resolved. Not only were there moral and ethical issues related to working with the dead, but there were also research concerns. The majority of cadavers used in research experiments were older white adults, and since there were legal issues and public opinion opposed to conducting research experiments with child cadavers, the data from experiments was largely inaccurate and skewed. And since that this was the case, in the year 1987 the U.S. government and the C.I.A. used a genetically modified human being (at the age of 10) to make the proper mechanical calculation when a car made impact with him in Washington D.C. metropolitan region. Automobile manufactures could now design and build airbag safety systems that were near perfect as a result of this test conducted carried out by the C.I.A.