Infected for Science

by Matt Peters

In 2016, historian Sydney Halpern found something unexpected when she was searching library archives to learn about vaccine studies from decades past. Among the more ordinary documents was a strange batch of consent forms from the 1940s. They were from a group of civilian volunteers who agreed to be infected with hepatitis as part of a military research program during World War II. Their inoculation with the virus, it was hoped, would lead to medical advances that could keep soldiers safe from hepatitis during wartime deployments.

What Halpern uncovered was a forgotten chapter in the history of hepatitis research. Making it even more unique was a collection of cartoons that was stashed amid its paperwork. One of the program’s volunteers, David Miller, had studied animation and cartooning at Hollywood Art Center, and his artistic training found a new purpose during his participation in the hepatitis study. Miller drew cartoons to chronicle what he and the other volunteers experienced, using his offbeat sense of humor to bring levity to a situation that was often physically and emotionally challenging for those involved. His cartoons lifted the spirits of those around him who were gambling with their health to help scientists understand a serious disease.

The consent forms and cartoons inspired Halpern to find out everything she could about Miller and the wartime research program. Eventually, the story that surfaced from her research inspired Infected for Science, a book she worked with artist Trygve Faste to create. More than just a retelling of history, Infected for Science contemplates what that history says about the values and beliefs that are embedded in medical science and clinical practice.

Throughout their book, Halpern and Faste alternate between two narrative threads. One thread dramatizes Miller’s wartime experiences as a research participant, and the other recounts how Halpern pieced together Miller’s story through documentary research and interviews. By switching back and forth between time periods, the book is able to fill in missing pieces from the past with current knowledge of medicine, medical ethics, and other fields. As one example, dialogue in the book’s wartime narrative illustrates how the biomedical community was just beginning to understand the different strains of hepatitis. To fill in the blanks, dialogue in the book’s contemporary-era narrative provides information about hepatitis A, B, and C based on current scientific knowledge.

In a nutshell, all three types of hepatitis are contagious, but hepatitis A is spread through food and water, while B and C are transmitted through blood and other bodily fluids. The three types (as well as the less common types D, G, and E) share common symptoms, including liver inflammation, nausea, abdominal pain, and jaundice (yellowing of the eyes and skin). During World War II, military field hospitals were often full of soldiers who had fallen ill with the disease, prompting the military to invest in a program that could accelerate the development of treatments.

Infected for Science opens with Miller’s journey from California to Connecticut to volunteer for the research program. Upon arrival at the volunteer camp—a repurposed dormitory at Yale University—Miller starts to meet administrative and medical staffers, as well as other volunteers. Through dialogue with others at the camp, as well as various flashback scenes, readers learn Miller’s backstory. As a member of the Church of the Brethren, Miller felt it was central to his faith to never kill another person, even in war. When he received a draft card after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he registered as a conscientious objector. He was unwilling to pick up arms for the war effort, but he was willing to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS) for alternative service. Though his faith kept him from entering the battlefield, he was willing to put his life on the line in other ways. When he learned that CPS needed volunteers for a hepatitis study, he jumped at the opportunity.

When Miller and the other volunteers are briefed on the nature of the hepatitis study, their initial enthusiasm for helping their country is put to the test. They’re told that all of them will be intentionally exposed to the hepatitis virus but that only some of them will develop a positive case of hepatitis afterwards. They hear how the virus’s incubation period will leave them waiting and wondering about their fates—and how they’ll have to undergo extensive medical screenings to monitor their health throughout the experiment. Miller makes light of the medical screenings with a cartoon depicting a volunteer leaping from his seat from the sting of multiple needle pokes, his blood being drawn to assess his health.

To integrate Miller’s cartoons into the graphic novel, Faste took scans of Miller’s original artwork and made color adjustments, both to remove yellowing (cellulose oxidation) in the paper Miller used and to distinguish Miller’s cartoons from Faste’s illustrations. When Miller’s cartoons are shown in a sketchbook, on a table, or in another context that requires them to be seen at an angle, Faste warped and skewed Miller’s cartoons so that they would appear in the correct perspective. In one scene (page 90, panel 4), Faste removed portions of one of Miller’s cartoons to depict a work in progress that Miller was still drawing.[1] For his own illustrations, Faste developed a visual style that would harmonize with Miller’s but have its own look, one that is semi-realistic and versatile enough to communicate the book’s emotional turns and its retelling of consequential historical moments.

Infected for Science does some of its best work depicting how the world outside affects the small camp community. Several weeks into the program, as many of the volunteers are recovering from hepatitis, a sense of hope and optimism fills the camp when news breaks of Germany’s surrender in the war. The war, though, is still not over. It moves to the Pacific theater, focusing on the threat still posed by Japan. With the war still ongoing, a new round of hepatitis experiments begins, and a new cohort of volunteers arrives to participate in the research.

Miller and many of the original volunteers stay for the second round, but instead of serving as research subjects, they assume new roles as research assistants and other staffers. In their new roles, Miller and the original volunteers have access to data from other military research sites, and they get to interact with volunteers like themselves who have transferred from those other sites. Alarmingly, they learn of a site in Trenton, New Jersey, where the research subjects were patients at a state mental hospital. Miller and his fellow volunteers question whether those subjects were truly in a position to give their informed consent without coercion, especially given the subjects’ state custody and psychiatric conditions. They worry that the urgency of wartime medical needs could be affecting the moral clarity of the site’s administrators.

Here again, alternating between narrative threads provides helpful exposition. The concerning revelations about the Trenton site are followed by a jump to the recent past, to a scene in which Halpern is meeting with a small group of Miller’s surviving family members, people she previously interviewed during her research. With her research now winding down, she’s meeting with them for an informal chat to hear their recollections about Miller. In a conversational exchange, she reciprocates by summarizing some of what she learned about Miller through documentary records and other sources. Halpern shares how Miller’s concerns about the Trenton site were prescient, followed just two years later by the 1947 Nuremberg Trial (often called the Doctors’ Trial), in which scientists from Nazi Germany were convicted of crimes against humanity for the cruel medical experiments they conducted in concentration camps. The horrors of those experiments prompted the international scientific community to adopt new standards of research ethics, focusing on voluntary consent and other safeguards against harmful and exploitative research.

Infected for Science performs an impressive balancing act throughout its pages, taking on weighty topics and complex ethical questions in a clear and accessible style. Without trivializing the risks that Miller and his campmates took, Infected for Science captures the upbeat outlook that kept them going, the feeling of finding their calling in alternative service during World War II.

Though the book is written by an academic and first-time writer of a graphic novel, it uses the comic medium with grace and fluency, showcasing a creative synergy between Halpern and Faste. At the same time, Infected for Science showcases the work of its main character, David Miller. Miller’s own cartoons are embedded throughout the book and given context and meaning by the story Halpern uncovered in her research.

Miller was one of the luckier volunteers whose inoculation with the hepatitis virus never resulted in a positive case of the disease. That first round of experiments helped researchers understand the levels of exposure that result in full-blown hepatitis. Miller left the research program in excellent health. He died decades later, in 1994, in Mesa, Arizona. His cartoons—and the events that inspired them—live on in Infected for Science.

Notes

[1] Email correspondence with Trygve Faste, April 18, 2026.

Matt Peters is a program manager at Health Sciences Design, an interdisciplinary health innovation program at the University of Arizona Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. He is also a longtime comic book reader and collector who can be found from time to time at his local comic book shops. Views expressed are his own.