hepatitis, the medical staff at Willowbrook consulted Saul Krugman.... Krugman found that hepatitis developed in 90 percent of children admitted to Willowbrook soon after their arrival. Although it was known that hepatitis was caused by a virus, it wasn't known how hepatitis virus spread, whether it could be prevented, or how many types of viruses caused the disease. Krugman used the children of Willowbrook to answer those questions. One of his studies involved feeding live hepatitis virus from others stool samples to sixty healthy children. Krugman watched as their skin and eyes turned yellow and their livers got bigger. He watched them vomit and refuse to eat. All the children fed hepatitis virus became ill, some severely. Krugman reasoned that it was justifiable to inoculate retarded children at Willowbrook with hepatitis virus because most of them would get hepatitis anyway. But by purposefully giving the children hepatitis, Krugman increased that chance to 100 percent. According to vaccinologist Maurice Hilleman, "They [the Willowbrook studies] were the most unethical medical experiments ever performed on children in the United States." Historian David Rothman notes that, "The research was even included in Henry Beecher's 1966 New England Journal of Medicine listing of 'ethically dubious' experiments." Bioethicist Art Caplan has stated that, "The Willowbrook studies were a turning point in how we thought about medical experiments on retarded children... Children inoculated with hepatitis virus had no chance to benefit from the procedure—only the chance to be harmed." Scandals and abuses By 1965, Willowbrook housed over 6,000 intellectually disabled people despite having a maximum capacity of 4,000. Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo" and offered a series of recommendations for improving conditions. Although the hepatitis study had been discontinued, the residential school's reputation was that of a warehouse for New York City's mentally disabled people, many of whom were presumably abandoned there by their families, foster care agencies, or other systems designed to care for them. Donna J. Stone, an advocate for mentally disabled children as well as victims of child abuse, gained access to the school by posing as a recent social work graduate. She then shared her observations with members of the press. A series of