1995: Findings of the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments

In 1950, Dr. Joseph G. Hamilton, a top radiation biologist at the AEC, sent a memo to Dr. Shields Warren, a senior AEC official who directed human radiation experiments; he warned him that the radiation experiments might have “a little of the Buchenwald touch,” and that commission officials “would be…

Background: In the early part of the twentieth century, radium was a symbol of science, medicine, and technology; power and wealth. Radium was a luminous vehicle for progress, publicly displayed for a week at the Public Health Exposition in Grand Central in New York (1921) to which medical students, physicians…

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…

1994: Ali Zaidi, a student at the University of Rochester, was not informed about the risks of radiation when he was asked to sign a consent form for a clinical trial testing Heliobacter pylori. The study was eventually terminated and researchers placed on probation.

In 1963, prior to flights into space, scientists were concerned about the effect of space radiation on astronauts’ testicles. They also were concerned about radiated gonads of workers at America’s atomic energy plants. So, they conducted experiments designed to test the effects of massive radiation on prisoners’ testicles without any…

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,…