1995: Findings of the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments

In 2000, the former participants in the Walla Walla experiments settled a $2.4 million class-action settlement from the University. Dr. Paulsen defended the tests stating, “If our work was unethical, then you’d have to say that all the [federal and UW advisory boards] that approved it in those days were…

During WWII, hundreds of scientists and technicians working to develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos were exposed to radioactive substances, including plutonium, whose hazards were not entirely known. Pioneers of nuclear science, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Louis Hempelmann, and Stafford Warren, masterminded the experiments from the headquarters they…

Dr. Lester Middlesworth of the University of Tennessee injected 7 newborn babies with radioactive iodine in an experiment sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission at a hospital treating low income people. Six of the babies were African American. Dr. Middlesworth lost track of the infants — no follow-up records were…

Between1948–1954, 582 Baltimore school children were subjected to radiation in a federally-funded experiment whose stated intent was to gauge long-term hearing loss. The treatment was incorporated as “standard care,” and an average of 150 patients a month, mostly children, were given the treatment at the Johns Hopkins clinic over a…

An exceptionally large-scale radiation exposure experiment at Vanderbilt University was funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and involved 820 poor pregnant Caucasian women who were given tracer doses of radioactive iron in a “cocktail” drink. The researchers worked with the Tennessee State Department of Health and they did not…

1953–1957: Oak Ridge-sponsored experiment injected uranium into eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. (ACHRE staff report) Dr. William Sweet, chief of Neurosurgery at Harvard’s MGH conducted numerous unethical experiments on terminally ill patients. Some of the experiments were conducted under a government shield of secrecy: for example,…