1995: Findings of the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments

The government began sponsoring total body irradiation (TBI) research in 1942 in connection with the Top Secret Manhattan Project — the nuclear scientists who developed the Atom Bomb. From its inception with the US nuclear program and supporting government policy placed scientific and military advancement far above the safety of…

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…

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…

1995: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) published a Roadmap of Human Radiation Experiments summarizing 150 plus an additional 275 radiation experiments conducted by DOE and its predecessor, the AEC, during the 1940s–1970s. The Roadmap cites a 1986 congressional report entitled American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on…

Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. AEC issues a secret document (07075001, January 8, 1947) stating that the AEC will begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects. An April 17, 1947, AEC document states: “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with…

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…