Since the discovery of
ionizing radiationIonizing radiation consists of subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves that are energetic enough to detach electrons from atoms or molecules, ionizing them. The occurrence of ionization depends on the energy of the impinging individual particles or waves, and not on their number...
, a number of
human radiation experiments have been performed to understand the effects of ionizing radiation and
radioactive contaminationRadioactive contamination is the uncontrolled distribution of radioactive material in a given environment. The amount of radioactive material released in an accident is called the source term.- Sources of contamination :...
on the human body.
Radioactive Iodine Experiments
In 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran several studies on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women at the
University of IowaThe University of Iowa is a public research university located in Iowa City, Iowa. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131, in order to study the women's aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In another study, they gave 25 newborn babies (who were under 36 hours old and weighed from 5.5-8.5 lbs) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through an injection, so that they could measure the amount of iodine in their thyroid glands.
In another AEC study, researchers at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine fed iodine-131 to 28 healthy infants, through a gastric tube to test the concentration of iodine in the infants' thyroid glands.
In a 1953 operation called "Green Run," the AEC dropped radiodine 131 and xenon 133 over a 500,000 acre area which contained three small towns near the
Hanford siteThe Hanford Site is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington, operated by the United States federal government. The site has been known by many names, including Hanford Works, Hanford Engineer Works, Hanford Nuclear Reservation or HNR,...
in Washington .
In 1953, the AEC sponsored a study to discover if radioactive iodine affected premature babies differently from full-term babies. In the experiment, researchers from Harper Hospital in Detroit orally administered iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants who weighed from 2.1-5.5 lbs
Uranium Experiments
Between 1953 and 1957, eleven patients at
Massachusetts General HospitalMassachusetts General Hospital is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and a biomedical research facility in Boston, Massachusetts....
were injected with uranium as part of research funded by the
Manhattan ProjectThe Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, and included scientists from Denmark, The United Kingdom and Canada...
Plutonium experiments
During and after the end of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, scientists working on the
Manhattan ProjectThe Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, and included scientists from Denmark, The United Kingdom and Canada...
and other
nuclear weaponA nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion...
s research projects conducted studies of the effects of
plutoniumPlutonium is a rare transuranic radioactive element. It is an actinide metal of silvery-white appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, forming a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen and...
on laboratory animals and human subjects. In the case of human subjects, this involved injecting solutions containing (typically) five
microgramIn the metric system, a microgram is 1/1,000,000 of a gram , or 1/1000 of a milligram, is one of the smallest units of weight/mass commonly used...
s of
plutoniumPlutonium is a rare transuranic radioactive element. It is an actinide metal of silvery-white appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, forming a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen and...
into hospital patients who were thought either to be
terminally illTerminal illness is a medical term popularized in the 20th century to describe an active and malignant disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated and that is reasonably expected to result in the death of the patient. This term is more commonly used for progressive diseases such as cancer...
or to have a
life expectancyLife expectancy is the expected number of years of life remaining at a given age. It is denoted by e
x, which means the average number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged x, according to a particular mortality experience...
of less than ten years due either to age or
chronic diseaseIn medicine, a chronic disease is a disease that is long-lasting or recurrent. The term chronic describes the course of the disease, or its rate of onset and development. A chronic course is distinguished from a recurrent course; recurrent diseases relapse repeatedly, with periods of remission in...
condition. The injections were made without the
informed consentInformed consent is a legal condition whereby a person can be said to have given consent based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications and future consequences of an action. In order to give informed consent, the individual concerned must have adequate reasoning...
of those patients.
In her book,
The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold WarThe Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome.It is a history of U.S. government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning series Welsome wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune.The purpose of...
,
Eileen WelsomeEileen Welsome received a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 while a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune. She was awarded the prize for her articles about the government's human radiation experiments conducted on unwilling and unknowing Americans during the Cold War...
,
Pulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by Hungarian-American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City....
-winning journalist for
The Albuquerque Tribune, revealed the extent of the experiments conducted on unwitting participants. At the
Fernald schoolThe Walter E. Fernald State School, now the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center, located in Waltham, Massachusetts, is the Western hemisphere's oldest publicly funded institution serving people who have developmental disabilities. Originally a Victorian sanatorium, it became a "poster child"...
in Massachusetts, an institution for "feeble-minded" boys, 73 disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive
calciumCalcium is the chemical element with the symbol Ca and atomic number 20. It has an atomic mass of 40.078 amu. Calcium is a soft grey alkaline earth metal, and is the fifth most abundant element by mass in the Earth's crust...
and other
radioisotopeA radionuclide is an atom with an unstable nucleus, which is a nucleus characterized by excess energy which is available to be imparted either to a newly-created radiation particle within the nucleus, or else to an atomic electron . The radionuclide, in this process, undergoes radioactive decay,...
s. The radioactive tracers allowed scientists to track how the nutrients were digested. Immediately after World War II, 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee received what they were told were "vitamin drinks" that would improve the health of their babies, but were, in fact, mixtures containing radioactive iron, to determine how fast the radioisotope crossed into the
placentaThe placenta is an organ unique to mammals that connects the developing fetus to the uterine wall. The placenta supplies the fetus with oxygen and food, and allows fetal waste to be disposed of via the maternal kidneys...
. Other incidents included an eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hospital, expecting to be treated for a
pituitary glandThe pituitary gland, or hypophysis, is an endocrine gland about the size of a pea and weighing 0.5 g . It is a protrusion off the bottom of the hypothalamus at the base of the brain, and rests in a small, bony cavity covered by a dural fold...
disorder, who was injected with
plutoniumPlutonium is a rare transuranic radioactive element. It is an actinide metal of silvery-white appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, forming a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen and...
. Such experiments are now considered to be a serious breach of
medical ethicsMedical ethics is primarily a field of applied ethics, the study of moral values and judgments as they apply to medicine. As a scholarly discipline, medical ethics encompasses its practical application in clinical settings as well as work on its history, philosophy, theology, and sociology.Medical...
.
Fallout research
In 1954, American scientists conducted
falloutFallout is the residual radiation hazard from a nuclear explosion, aptly named because it "falls out" of the atmosphere into which it is spread during the explosion. It commonly refers to the radioactive dust created when a nuclear weapon explodes. This radioactive dust, consisting of hot...
exposure research on the citizens of the
Marshall IslandsThe Marshall Islands , officially the Republic of the Marshall Islands , is a Micronesian nation of atolls and islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just west of the International Date Line and just north of the Equator. This nation of roughly 62,000 people is located north of Nauru and...
after the
Castle BravoCastle Bravo was the code name given to the first U.S. test of a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb device, detonated on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, by the United States, as the first test of Operation Castle...
nuclear test in
Project 4.1Project 4.1 was the designation for a medical study conducted by the United States of those residents of the Marshall Islands exposed to radioactive fallout from the March 1, 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which had an unexpectedly large yield...
. The Bravo test was detonated upwind of
Rongelap AtollRongelap Atoll is an island-atoll located in Micronesia. It is a municipality of the Marshall Islands. The Atoll consists of 61 islets with a combined area of approximately 3 square miles . Its lagoon covers 388 square miles...
and the residents were exposed to serious radiation levels, up to 180 rads. 236 Marshallese were exposed, some developed severe
radiation sicknessRadiation Sickness is a VHS by the thrash metal band Nuclear Assault. The video is a recording of a concert at the Hammersmith Odeon, London in 1988. It was released in 1991...
and one died, long term effects included birth defects, "jellyfish" babies, and thyroid problems.
The decision to explode the Bravo slide under the prevailing winds was made by Dr Alvin C. Graves (1912-1966), the Scientific Director of Operation Castle. Dr Graves had total authority over firing the weapon, above that of the military Commander of Operation Castle. Dr Graves had himself received an exposure of 200 Roentgens in the 1946 Los Alamos accident in which his personal friend, Dr Louis Slotin, died from radiation exposure. Dr Graves appears in the widely available film of the earlier 1952 test Mike, which examines the last minute fallout decisions . The narrator (Western actor
Reed HadleyReed Hadley was an American movie, television and radio actor.Reed Hadley was born Reed Herring in Petrolia, Texas to Bert Herring, an oil well driller, and his wife Minnie; Reed had one sister, Bess Brenner, and grew up in Buffalo, New York...
) is filmed aboard the control ship in that film which shows the final conference. Hadley points out that 20,000 people live in the potential area of the fallout. He asks the control panel scientist if the test can be aborted and is told yes but it would ruin all their preparations in setting up timed measuring instruments in the race against the Russians. In Mike the fallout correctly landed north of the inhabited area, but in the 1954 Bravo test, there was a lot of wind shear and the wind which was blowing north the day before the test steadily veered towards the east.
In addition, the yield of Bravo, the first ever American lithium deuteride (solid fusion fuel) bomb, was twice the maximum expected figure (because lithium-7 was unexpectedly split to give fusionable tritium, in addition to the predicted effect of lithium-6). The combination of unexpectedly high yield plus the wind veering (which was already in progress even before Bravo was fired), contaminated the inhabited islands to the east of the detonation. It was not a deliberate radiation experiment, although questions do remain over the reason the emergency messages from US weather personnel, who were contaminated on Rongerik like the Marshallese, were ignored for two days after the test. Once the heavy fallout on the inhabited islands was discovered, all of the people were evacuated promptly and regularly checked for signs of injury.
Project Sunshine
Early in the
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II , primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States...
, researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia attempted to determine just how much nuclear fallout would be required to make the Earth uninhabitable. They realized that atmospheric
nuclear testingNuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the effectiveness, yield and explosive capability of nuclear weapons. Throughout the twentieth century, most nations that have developed nuclear weapons have tested them...
had provided them an opportunity to investigate this. Such tests had dispersed
radioactive contaminationRadioactive contamination is the uncontrolled distribution of radioactive material in a given environment. The amount of radioactive material released in an accident is called the source term.- Sources of contamination :...
worldwide, and examination of human bodies could reveal how readily it was taken up and hence how much damage it caused. Of particular interest was
strontiumStrontium is a chemical element with the symbol Sr and the atomic number 38. An alkaline earth metal, strontium is a soft silver-white or yellowish metallic element that is highly reactive chemically. The metal turns yellow when exposed to air. It occurs naturally in the minerals celestine and...
-90 in the bones. Infants were the primary focus, as they would have had a full opportunity to absorb the new contaminants.
As a result of this conclusion, researchers began a program to collect human bodies and bones from all over the world, with a particular focus on infants. The bones were cremated and the ashes analyzed for radioisotopes. This project was kept secret primarily because it would be a
public relationsPublic relations is the practice of managing the communication between an organization and its publics. Public relations gains an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment...
disaster; as a result parents and family were not told what was being done with the body parts of their relatives.
Legal Repercussions
On January 15, 1994, President Bill Clinton formed the
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation ExperimentsThe Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was established in 1994 to investigate questions of the record of the United States government with respect to human radiation experiments. The special committee was created by President Bill Clinton in Executive Order 12891, issued January 15,...
(ACHRE).
Ruth FadenRuth R. Faden, M.P.H., Ph.D., is the Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Executive Director of The Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University.She has served on...
of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics chaired the first ever committee. This committee was created to investigate and report the use of human beings as test subjects in experiments involving the effects of ionizing radiation in federally funded research. The committee discovered the causes of the experiments, and reasons why the proper oversight did not exist, and made several recommendations to prevent future occurrences of similar events. The final report issued by the ACHRE can be found at the Department of Energy's website here:
http://www.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/report.html.
See also
- MKULTRA
- Nuclear and radiation accidents
This article covers notable accidents involving nuclear devices and radioactive materials. These accidents can hurt or kill almost anything that is around it while the accident is happening. In some cases, a release of radioactive contamination occurs, but in many cases the accident involves a...
- Radiation poisoning
Radiation poisoning, also called radiation sickness or a creeping dose, is a form of damage to organ tissue due to excessive exposure to ionizing radiation...
- Radioactive contamination
Radioactive contamination is the uncontrolled distribution of radioactive material in a given environment. The amount of radioactive material released in an accident is called the source term.- Sources of contamination :...
- Human experimentation
Human subject research includes experiments and observational studies. Human subjects are commonly participants in research on basic biology, clinical medicine, psychology, and all other social sciences. Humans have been participants in research since the earliest studies...
- Totskoye range nuclear tests
- Walter E. Fernald State School
The Walter E. Fernald State School, now the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center, located in Waltham, Massachusetts, is the Western hemisphere's oldest publicly funded institution serving people who have developmental disabilities. Originally a Victorian sanatorium, it became a "poster child"...
Further reading
- The Plutonium Files: America's secret medical experiments in the Cold War, by Eileen Welsome, Dial Press
The Dial Press was a publishing house founded in 1923 by Lincoln MacVeagh.Dial Press shared a building with The Dial and Scofield Thayer worked with both. The first imprint was issued in 1924. Authors included Elizabeth Bowen, W.R...
, c1999, New York, N.Y., ISBN 0-385-31402-7
- Killing Our Own: The disaster of America's experience with atomic radiation, by Harvey Wasserman, Delacorte Press, c1992, ISBN 978-0440045670
- The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests, by Martha Stephens, Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892...
Press, c2002, Durham, N.C., ISBN 0-8223-2811-9
- Holly M. Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World, Wadsworth, 2004. ISBN 0-534-61326-8
- Chair's Perspective on the Work of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments by Ruth Faden
Ruth R. Faden, M.P.H., Ph.D., is the Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Executive Director of The Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University.She has served on...
External links