Our speaker will be Barbara Boyer. Barbara is currently a teacher at South Plainfield High School. A summa cum laude graduate of Rider University, Barbara Boyer holds a Master's Degree in Spanish Linguistics from Penn State and a second Master's Degree from Kean University.
Barbara has a keen interest in Asian history and in the summer of 2012 she traveled to China on a scholarship to study Chinese history. The focus was on China and Japan during World War II. Barbara's presentation will focus on a little known but profoundly disturbing book by Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731 Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II.
During World War II Japanese scientists, with full knowledge and approval of their superiors, secretly carried on a series of cruel and painful medical experiments on prisoners of war, such as injecting them with deadly bacteria, subjecting them to oxygen deprivation, submersing them in freezing water, operating on them without anesthesia and much more, all in an effort to determine the outside limits of human endurance. Thousands died from these callous experiments, yet the persons responsible were never punished after the war. Barbara will tell of of the secret agreement made between those responsible for these inhuman acts of torture and the Allies, and the reasons for the suppression of this story of man's inhumanity to man, and its legacy.
This is the last lecture of the season; we will resume our series in September.
