Introduction: Tuskegee was thought to be an aberration; but the extensive scope of 4,000 radiation experiments — conducted on an estimated 20,000 unwitting victims, including military personnel, prisoners, federal workers, hospital patients, pregnant women and thousands of infants and disabled children — most of them poor and powerless. These nefarious experiments confirm the moral failure of American medicine and that medical researchers working with the government cannot be trusted.
Reports about secret radiation experiments appeared in the scientific literature as early as 1948, but none were concerned with the serious consequences for the human subjects. Few (if any) Americans had any idea about the nature or risks involved in radiation experiments initiated by their government until 1993 when investigative reporter, Eileen Welsome, wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles in the Albuquerque Tribune in which she described the nature and devastating effects of Plutonium injected into 18 hospitalized patients who were unwitting subjects: “the unspeakable scientific trials [ ] reduced thousands of men, women, and even children to nameless specimens.”
The malignant flowering of curiosity about the effects of radiation on humans continued for three more decades. Until the 1970s, government scientists and physicians made use of unwitting Americans in order to discover the effects of exposure. Scientists already knew that radiation was dangerous. (Harriet Washington. The New England Journal of Medicine, 1999)
Eileen Welsome’s articles prompted Hazel O’Leary, then Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, successor to the Atomic Energy Commission) promptly declassified the documents pertaining to human radiation experiments and President Bill Clinton appointed t Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE). Its to Report (1995) following a yearlong investigation demonstrates clearly that scientists knew from the beginning of the 20th century that radiation could cause genetic and cell damage, cancer, cell death, radiation sickness and even death.
Secretary Hazel O’Leary confessed being aghast at the conduct of the scientists. She told Newsweek in 1994: “aecI said, ‘Who were these people and why did this happen?’ The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.”[vii] None of the victims were provided follow-up medical care.
Dr. Mark Siegler of the University of Chicago stated: “I think the reason we’re seeing so much focus on these radiation experiments is that they involve a large number of Government departments and agencies that were pursuing these research programs for other than traditional medical purposes. It’s not just an outcry against medical research but against Government secretness and the way the Government might use the medical establishment.”
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…
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…
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…
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…
In December of 1993, Scott Allen, a journalist at the Boston Globe, uncovered documents showing years of ethically dubious experiments conducted on Fernald Center youth. The day after Christmas, he published an article, “Radiation Used on Retarded,” noting that “Records at the Fernald State School list them as “morons,” but…
U.S. Air Force threw “Radiation bombs” expelled from USAF planes intentionally spread radiation to “unknown distances” endangering Americans young and old alike. 1949: “Green Run” intentional radioactive contamination experiment over Hanford, WA. A massive intentional experiment was conducted by General Electric officials and officials from the Department of Defense (DOD)…
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…
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…
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…
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…
1953: CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA included at least four sub-projects specifically using children; 102, 103, 112, and 117 to radiation. Indeed the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) heard testimony from persons who had been used in mind control experiments when they were children. ACHRE identified 81 pediatric radiation exposure…
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,…
