Barbara Boyer to Speak at September Meeting

Barbara Boyer's topic for the September 16 meeting is the 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.

Ms. Boyer is currently a teacher at South Plainfield High School. A summa cum laude graduate of Rider University,  she holds a Master's Degree in Spanish Linguistics from Penn State and a second Masters 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, specifically focusing on China and Japan during World War II.