He explains tests that range blownnjections to full radiation exposure. This class is a little more than an hour. We are going to be talking today about the radiation experiments. And by the radiation experiments, i mean experiments done in around the Second World War and the cold war, a fairly heterogeneous set of experiments. By the fact that they are studying the interaction of human beings and. Adioactivity a very curious phenomenon of radioactivity that came, i guess, to its biggest fruition with the explosion over hiroshima and subsequently not a saki in august 1945. We need to talk a little bit about the context in which they were done. First, we will talk about the war itself. The Second World War. We will talk about how it was a sciencebased war. We will talk about the development of big science. Big science. Lots of people. Lots of investigators. Lots of money. Complicated systems. And were going to talk about the cold war and ideas about National Defense and National Security and how that played into the radiation experiments. History, inical order to understand what happened, we need to understand the context in which it happened. Now there was medical research and physical Science Research going on in the interwar period. Sciencetalk about the research and then the medical research. There was small, poorly funded, poorly organized Research Going on. The example i am going to use is the story about some military research dined designed to figure out where an airplane is. The First World War saw a little bit of air power, but airplanes were getting faster. They were getting bigger. They could show up over your head. You would not know they were coming. One of the biggest military problems was out to detect airplanes before they got there. Research in the laboratory noticed if you send radio waves out, they would bounce back from planes. , if you look at how long it took them to bounce back from a plane, you could figure out about how far away they were. In other words, he used radio to airplanes, ande that is how we came up with the detectiondar radio. Nd range the discovery of radar was very uncoordinated. People did not talk to each other. It was done in a research laboratory. The only way that the army figured out it existed was someone from the army happened to go visit the research laboratory. Civilians withve expertise in the apparatus design. They did not have too much funding. This was the ad hoc manner of research in the interwar. The Second World War of course starts in 1939. It starts in europe. The United States does not enter until 1941. From the outset, people knew the Second World War would be a sciencebased war. That science would determine who won and who lost. One of the questions that arose then was, how do you organize the pursuit of science in wartime . We have talked about this in terms of the question of how to organize the medical corps. And a lot of the same issues stood out. The number of people in the medical corps were bigger than the entire armies had been in 1939. All of a sudden you are expanding the size. You have to put people in charge. You have to figure out who is in charge, what the different units look like. Once you make that decision, likely toion is persist well after the war is done. Same thing happened with science. Not surprising. A lot of it has to do with this here banded hare Bush Vandiver bush. M. I. T. At m. I. T. And he became the head of the office of research and development. Said thatork times this made him a science czar. He knew that access to the president would give him a lot of power in organizing Scientific Research. And he used that to get the research under his umbrella as well. Roosevelt was about to shell out the medical research and put it any different unit, when you went to roosevelt and he said, you know the people you want to give that responsibility to our under criminal indictment right now. That was literally true. Hadthe criminal indictment to do with antitrust violations. It did not matter. Roosevelt said i am not giving this to people who are criminals and went instead under bush. What bush organized was a civilian organization charged with coordinating the research, under the military. It used to be able at Pretty Research labs. You wanted to do research, you got a lab, hired some people, did research. Now you had people all over the country. You had people here, people there. You need of a lot of money. Could dod people who the contracting, could obtain the resources. It was becoming the kind of big the normhat has become since then. And big changes lasted well after the war was over. Lets get back to our example of radar. What happens with radar. By 1940, it is obvious that radar works, but it needs to be a lot better. You need to be better at discriminating between is between airplanes and birds. You need to he a lot better at detecting lowflying airplanes. So, they had the question where do we put this lab . Tension with governmentfunded research. On one hand, you have people who say it ought to go equally to all of the states. Why should one state get more money than another state . On the other hand, if you are in the middle of a war or war was imminent, as it was in 1940, it in somet some people states do not have much in the way of Research Infrastructure and people in other states do. The lab that was going to study radar is set up at the Massachusetts Institute of technology, and they called it the rad lab. An attempt tolly be deceitful, to confuse people into thinking that they were studying radiation physics, which did not seem like it would be a big topic for investigation. Well, radar turned out to be terribly important. Britain. Nted to invade you of heard of the battle of britain. Operation sea lion was supposed to smash britains air force. Attack had a lot more planes than britain. But because of radar, they were able to see the planes coming and germany never did succeed in invading england, much to the surprise of many people at the time. Perhapsr place that was even more important had to do with submarines. Were wreakingoats havoc on american convoys supplying britain, later on supplying the war effort. It was hard to find them. But it turned out the subs needed to resurface to change , to refresh error, and when they did, airplanes could spot them. How effective . Consider this. In january 1942 without using forces put in 8000 hours of patrol in the atlantic and managed to only find sub four submarines over a twomonth. Period. Plane wentrst time a out with radar installed, they found four submarines and sunk one of them. It showed that organized research could make a difference. And it has been said, possibly accurately, the atom bomb ended the war. At but radar one it. At but radar won it. That shows thede german submarines. 1941, 1942, not a lot. Then they bring in radar. And all of a sudden examples of early computers. In this case, computers mean people doing computations. Eventually we did move to electronic computers. Operationnovation was research, which means using statistics and geometry to figure out the best way to find a submarine in the ocean, or the organize your bombers squad so it was less likely to be shot down. Wanted to approach the secretary of the navy. The chief of Naval Operations was so tough he was said to shave every morning with a not he and it was was not too interested in civilian ideas of how to run his navy. But with the promise that first of all the navy would be in charge of everything and the Operation Research scientist would not take credit for anything managed to convince him to use the Radar Research and it got results. What kinds of results . That usedant vessels to take 35 weeks to be built were being built in 50 days. , the u. S. Army air corps had 800 planes. By the end of the war in 1944, at the airport just down the road, they were making 5500 each year. Proximity fuse that enabled munitions to explode when they got close to the target without having to hit it changed the strategy of warfare. All of these ideas from Mathematical Science convinced people that Scientific Research was something worth funding and worth doing and would make a difference in the war effort. Lets switch now to biological research. That was physical Science Research. Poison gas. Mustard gas. One of the most dreaded weapons of the First World War. Concerns it would be used widely in the Second World War. The problem with mustard gas is it is not specific. In order to test gas masks and protective clothing, you have to do the tests on human beings. You can do them anyway. There were socalled mandrake experiments man break experiments. People were put in a chamber. Ustard gas was introduced they were not left out until they collapsed and became unconscious, even though they might try very hard to get out. These were socalled volunteers. How voluntary were the volunteers . One person who was there said a , and ifplanatory talk necessary, a slight verbal dressing down proved effective and there has not been a single institute instance in which someone failed to volunteer. Makes you wonder if they really volunteered. Prisoners and conscientious objectors. The idea being you were doing something for the war effort. If you were going overseas to fight, you need to use to somebody on. Mustard gas was an early cancer agent. Chemotherapeutic there was some efficacy of treating with nitrogen mustard. Some efficacy. The patients died. However they got better for it while. Four a while. Diseases demic what about epidemic diseases . Always a problem in wartime. What about gonorrhea. There was a federal prison where experiments were done on gonorrhea. Penicillin is discovered in the 1930s and not widely produced. There was not enough penicillin in 1940 in all of the United States to treat one patient. D, the organization headed by not only organize clinical trials, but the production of penicillin. It showed it was incredibly effective for treating venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. By the end of the war, there was enough for the army, enough for civilians. There was even enough to give to some of the allies. There was also interest in giving it to people, to see if you could prevent people exposed to gonorrhea from getting gonorrhea. This touches on the ethical issues we will get to with radiation experiments. The experiments here were at the federal prison in terre haute, indiana. They were proposing to give these men gonorrhea and see of penicillin could be used to trade it. They knew that this was likely to be sensitive. So, in a memo from the head of the committee on medical a research, it said, when risks are involved, volunteers should only be utilized as subjects, and these only after the risks have been fully explained and after signed statements of been obtained, which will prove that the volunteer offered his services with full knowledge. This is a pretty clear indication of what you need to do to do experiments on people that might hurt them. Have had wider applicability had it not been a secret memo. It is unclear who actually wrote them. In any event, the experiments were stopped after a short time, because it turned out it was more difficult than you might think to give people gonorrhea. They were not stopped totally. In another series of experiments we touched on in another class, some of the same people involved went down to guatemala and continued this experience after the war. That is another story. Malaria tremendous problem. Sicily, north africa, the theater. The pacific you heard from ashley some of eradicates to malaria. It was harder to treat during the war because quinine, the drug that was most if treating malaria, came from plants that were in areas primarily occupied by our enemies. At a bring was another antimalarial drug. You can see these men did not we will come back to prisoners later on in the lecture. Subject than me malaria experiments was nathan leopold. Leopold and loeb became a very famous cause celebre. This led to issues in the nuremberg trials, because there was the question whether prisoners could give informed consent. As important as medical research was, doctors were not the star scientists. The people who were really the most important during the second cameof Second World War not from medicine. This is a statute this is a nuclear energy. 1930s, scientists trying werederstand pure science trying to understand the nature of the adam, and possibly the most exciting time the nature possibly the and most exciting time was the fission of the nucleus. That occurred in germany. The question arose, if energy can be derived from splitting bomb . Om, can you make a no one was quite sure. You might be able to. You would need two separate isotopes. You would need uranium 235. There is a wonderful paper by copenhagen called copenhagen. It sets of this question in the early years of the war about whether or not you can make a bomb. It revolves around what we know was a true interaction between heisenberg probably the most brilliant physicist of the 20 century, including einstein and niels bohr, and it took place in copenhagen, this meeting. Heisenberg visited niels bohr. We do not know exactly what happened in that meeting. We know that they had a split. They used to be very close. And we know that heisenberg went back to germany, and we know gavely afterward, germany up its attempts to make a nuclear bomb. Figure that the problems in making a bomb were so great, that we would not be able to make a bomb. Great historical questions about this episode, which again is very nicely set mean,the play, is i there is the question of why . Make a mathor error . What if germany had been able to make a nuclear bomb . I do not think there is any doubt that they would have dropped an atomic bomb if they could on central london, but they didnt. Making the bomb was hard. It required technical and social innovations. To separate the isotopes. You had to figure out a Chain Reaction that could be controlled. You needed large reduction plans to make large quantities of material. Andhad to get scientists people in the military working together, which was not that easy. Some of the work was done in existing universities like the university of chicago. Some of it was done in facility specifically built for the government, like the plutonium works on the Columbia River in Washington State, a site to which we will return. Events at the to university of chicago, not very far from where were sitting right here. Lets return to stagg field. Stagg field, 1927. Playedversity of chicago there. Anybody know who the first person to win the Heisman Trophy was and where he went to school . Obviously, the answer is the university of chicago. Wagner. University of chicago is a Founding Member of the big ten football conference. Eventually, here, you see action taking place out on stagg field. The university of chicago is an interesting institution. I had some opportunity to spend some time there. Into disrepair. Here you see a chart that shows the library which now stands imagine this if you can. They tore down their football stadium to build a library. True story. They actually did. They also left the big ten in 1946, and they left room for another member to join the big ten, and of course in 1949, Michigan State university was admitted to the big ten. A president who famously was known to observe that when i feel like exercising, i lie down until the feeling goes away. They were not big into the intercollegiate sports scene. , in 1942, they were still in the big ten. Stagg field still existed. It had swash courts under the courts underuash the stadium. It was on those squash courts that an event transpired that truly changed the course of history. December 2, 1942. Bricksd all kinds of laid up there on the squash courts. This is an artists depiction of the event. Very famous physicist, was there to see if they could have a self sustained nuclear reaction. There were cadmium rods soaking up all of the neutrons. A very famous physicist, was there. Finally the power went critical, proving you could have a selfsustaining nuclear reaction. The code word sent back to headquarters was the italian navigator has landed in the new world. Under the stance of stagg field at the university of chicago, we found out we actually had the capacity to build, inc. , a nuclear bomb. In theory, a nuclear bomb. He story shifts to build this bomb, we had to get some really smart people and it had to be done in secret. We did not know that germany was not going to be able to make a with japan. So, here in los alamos, new mexico, in a house 7500 feet north of albuquerque was perhaps the greatest collection of hadear physicists the world ever seen. Sometimes as many as eight Nobel Laureates would be sitting around dining together in the dining room. Incredibly isolated. Plates because the wood stoves did not work so well. They took them from Radar Research, from all over the country. 2 billion. They worked in complete secrecy to develop a Nuclear Weapon, to develop what they thought would be a Nuclear Weapon. They werent sure. And finally on july 16, 1945, at aound zero, shown here in mike darda, new mexico, the First Nuclear bomb exploded. The question what do we do this is a subject debated more now than it was then. At president. Ruman was he wanted Unconditional Surrender from japan. The emperor was not much in the meanwhile,otiate. The u. S. Military was working his way across the pacific ocean. In some pretty brutal, brutal battles. Iwo jima. You 12 weeks, okinawa. We thought this was a reversal for invading japan. If we invaded japan, that was what it was going to be like. There were a lot of things that might not work. Remember, germany decided it was not going to work. We were not sure if we tried it again if it was going to work or not. In any event, the decision was made. August 6, 1945 dropped annola gay atomic bomb on hiroshima. 145,000 people dead the next day. War is hell. This is a picture of hiroshima after the bomb blast. I have a colleague who grew up in tokyo shortly after the war. Oflived on the fourth floor an apartment building. He said you could see for miles just to give you a sense of how much was wiped out. If you visit tokyo, you know the city is quite densely built now. After the war, you could see for miles. 9, we dropped another agasaki. Omb on n the picture on talk shows the city before the bomb, the picture on bottom shows the city after the bomb. And the war came to an end. The Smithsonian Institution tried to do a display that would show the enola gay, which was the plane from which the atomic bomb was trapped, and it was so politically sensitive that they eventually threw their hands up have ad they wanted to discussion, wanted to put things in context, but whatever they tried lead and to protest is disruptions and objections and they eventually said, we just cant do it. They show the plane with a very aque. \ck simple pl usuallyiversaries are the most difficult. Everyoneversary is still agrees. 100 anniversaries, no one remembers. 50th anniversaries are the hardest. Walk past this on my way to school everyday. It is more or less on the spot have in a sense here is the triumphal of big science. We have an atomic bomb. What should we do now . The war is over. What are we going to do about longterm control . Oner all, the bomb is based laws of nature that are available to everybody. The United States proposed onsite inspections to serving control alt uranium deposits and then we would relinquish our arsenal and scientific information. The soviet Union Proposed an immediate ban on the reduction in use of atomic weapons. The United States said the soviets were asking the United States to give up their monopoly make every thing public before they agree to comply. The u. S. Said the soviets were being unreasonable. Nothing happened. The cold war started. The cold war is where a lot of the radiation experiments took place. Some of them started in the Second World War, most of them in the cold war. What was the cold war all about . Europe was divided. Do not forget, the United States and the soviet union were allies. We were partners in the Second World War. We were on the same side. No longer. Took over china. Handful of a warheads. And of course, to know one surprise in 1949, the soviet union attained an atomic weapon. We got a Hydrogen Bomb in 1952. The soviets got a Hydrogen Bomb in 1953. We raced to develop more and more efficient ways of raining down destruction on each other. This is a titan 2 missile. Missile. S a titan ii this is the only one that still exists. This is in tucson, arizona. Timesissile carried six destructiveimes the power that rained down on hiroshima. 600 times. There were three little three cities. Wichita, little rock, tucson. Each one had 20 different sites. People who ran this missile were sitting underground. They did not know where the missile was targeting. The each ideas. They had to turn their keys simultaneously for the missile to be fired. The idea was mutually assured distraction. The idea here was, we have overwhelming Nuclear Power, and if you attack us, we will attack you. In aof like, two scorpions battle, each one knowing if one stings the other, they both died. And that is why i wanted you to watch dr. Strangelove. On one hand it is a comedic farce, black comedy, and i think one of Stanley Kubricks best movies ever. And he had a lot of them. Sense really gives you a of what the cold war was like. It is not a coincidence, if you notice that the very beginning of the movie, there is a disclaimer that says this is fictional and the u. S. Military says there is no way this could actually happen. But the notion of a b52 bomber being poised to take off and deliver undiluted forlievable distraction was real. I do not believe there was really a doomsday machine, but the doomsday scenario is real. I grew up in columbus. As there when the bays was when the base was closed during the cuban missile crisis as depicted in dr. Strangelove. They had people ready to go in a everything. Uke this is the war room. E of my favorite lines is there is no fighting the war with each other. Dr. Did you think of strangelove . Did you like it. This is the major riding the bomb down. This role was initially offered to john wayne, but he turned it down. So, this is a manual for survival under a atomic attack. If you happen to be bombed, and not rush right outside. Do not take chances. Real instructions. If a Nuclear Weapon is coming and you do not have anywhere to go, jump into a trench and cover yourself with drying laundry area that will protect you from the heat. People lived with this notion of, what do we do if there is a Nuclear Attack . Fallout shelters. Shown here. Dr. Look like they did in strangelove. Followed shelters. They kept him stop. They had at the goal discussions. I remember them in high school. What to do if you only have enough food and water for one family and another family wants to come and jump into your fallout shelter . I think a more realistic question is, if nuclear war really comes and you managed to get into your fallout shelter, what you think youre coming out to . The korean war. It was a cold war, but it was a veryin. Many senses many senses. On many grounds. When sputnik went up to 1957, it was a huge deal. We were supposed to be much better than the soviet union. All of a sudden they launched a satellite. Every few minutes, that globe. Te went around the then another satellite, and this one had a dog in it. They sent back a lemon tree showing that the dog was still alive. Launch a6, we tried to satellite from Cape Canaveral and it did not work. They sent back telemetry showing that the dog was still alive. We are in this race. It is not clear we are winning. In the cuban missile crisis which comes along in 1962. Recall, the United States found evidence of the soviet union putting missiles in cuba, just south of us. We said to bring them out. We put a blockade around cuba. And we danced around the question of nuclear war for some time until a deal was struck and we did not have nuclear war. So, i want to return and talk about some of the specific experiments that went on. Let me just laws. Any let me just pause. Any questions . About the cold war . About what the eagles was like the ethos was like . About theg to talk experiments. Whether people were told about the experiments. The experiments done on patients, children, the general population. Were not going to touch on soldiers being used for radiation experiments. It is a fascinating topic, but we do not have time for that. And we will talk about the actual risk as we now understand it and what people understood then about the risk. For our story, we have to go ink to los alamos, backup the mountains. People were not sure they could get enough uranium 235, and so a guy named lance seaborg helped to develop a new element called plutonium. It was named after the planets pluto. He liked the way plutonium sounded. He went on to get the nobel prize in chemistry. He was very active in arms control later in his life. Did not seem to penetrate the skin. But what if you injected it . What if the Radioactive Material was swallowed . We knew that was not good for you. In the interwar. Period,the interwar there were women painting luminous dials on watches. Women were paid to paint the. Ials on the watch they had finegrained brushes and they would put the tip in their mouth. And they would get diseases. We knew these characteristics of radium, but not plutonium. 1964, a young chemist named don mastech 1944, a young chemist named don mastick was working with plutonium. Like a lot of things in medicine, it started with a mistake. A potentially serious mistake. He got it in his mouth. He could taste the acidic taste of the plutonium. He tried to spit out everything he could. They call for help. He switched his mouth out every hisinutes he swished mouth out every 15 minutes. This is very valuable stuff. We were trying to build an anmic tom, and these atomic bomb, and the stuff we could extract from his stomach told may be used be used build a bomb. He did not seem to have many ill effects. For a few weeks, the radiation counters would go not swinney went into a room. The we did not know what it did. We did not know what the Health Effect would be. Do a series ofto experiments. Losa los alamos not at alamos, where there was not much in the way of medical facilities, but at the university of chicago and others. , a 54yearold africanamerican man was a cement worker. He was in a car accident. He was injected with 4. 7 micrograms of plutonium. He was not told he was being injected. He was not told what it was. Remember, the very word plutonium was topsecret. The fact that it existed was topsecret. But we wanted to say what would happen and how it would be excreted. Went on at the university of chicago. Ae first person was 68yearold man with advanced cancer at the mouth and long and the next was a 54yearold woman with advanced rest cancer. It was used on patients who are breastto advanced cancer. It was used in patients who are likely to die. The third patient had hodgkins. Learned that the excretion was different. The fecal excretion rate was lower in humans than it was in animals. So, that was useful information and trying to predict what would happen to people who ingested plutonium. Again, it is unclear if the people we injected with this plutonium were even told what they were being injected with. Kinds of things happened at other institutions as well. The Massachusetts General Hospital to patients with brain cancer. Patients with brain cancer, terminally ill. They were injected with uranium to see where the uranium would go in the body. One did not have brain cancer actually. They thought he did. Were done experiments without getting consent, without informing patients in order that we could continue to build bombs and take care of the people who were helping to build these bombs. The last set of experiments and i will go into a little more detail happened in cincinnati between 1960 and 1972. Socalled total body irradiation or her whole body irradiation. They were done in some other places as well cincinnati, houston, baylor. If you had cancer the theory was if you like cancer, you knew radiation could. E used to treat cancer maybe total body irradiation would help slow the cancer. Actually, we had some pretty good evidence at this point it didnt work for cancer. But the department of defense was very interested in the effects of total body irradiation. Because it there is a nuclear war and people get irradiated, are they going to be able to function . The a pilot who is flying plane be able to land the plane . Will they be able to fight . Will they be able to work . Ironically, the people they wanted to do this experiments on were the people least likely to. Erive any benefit from it we knew certain kinds of cancer were sensitive to radiation. So it radiating those patients irradiation ofo those patients might help. Symptoms would be the symptoms of cancer. And they were not very. Nterested in the effects so it might be most effective irradiating people whose cancers would not be affected by the radiation. Most of the people irradiated were poor. Most of the patients who were irradiated were africanamerican. All of them had cancer. All thathem are not sec. Some of them were still ambulatory. Some of them are still going to work. Some of them were not all that sick. The radiation had some pretty serious effects. Weref the 90 people who irradiated, 21 were dead within a month. And here this is one of many things that bothers me about this. We know when you irradiate people, they have side effects. You get nauseated. You get very nauseated. But the department of defense did not want the patients to be given medicines to reduce the nausea, because they wanted to know what the effects would be. As a matter of fact, they did not want the patients to be informed that nausea would be a side effect, because that might influence them to get nauseated. So, they were not given the basic medicines given to other people at the time to help prevent the side effects of the radiation. These experiments ended in 1972. 1972, you will remember of course, that was the day the tuskegee experiments became public. The secondto experiments, the experiments on children. Any questions . Yes . [indiscernible] the question is, was being informed full consent . That is an interesting question. Play word games, but the question is, what is meant by informed consent . As we understand it, it had not been fully articulated. There was a Supreme Court case that established a patient had the right to decide what happens to her or his own body. The memo i showed you earlier for the terre haute onvia eriments suggest to 1942 gonorrhea experiment suggests that in 1942, they thought that something very much like informed consent was absolutely essential. Clearly that was not being followed here. A will talk about sources in little bit. One of the questions is, how do you know if someone had informed consent . Some of the physicians claimed they got informed consent, but there is not documentary evidence of it. There was a lawsuit, by the way. Sitsresult, a plaque now in the hospital in cincinnati. Other questions . All right. E. Fernan school in school infernald boston. This was an experiment on breakfast food in which children were given breakfast food to see how that food would be absorbed. The rationale for this was that leg up onted to get a cream of wheat. They wanted to be able to show that their cereals were better absorbed and betters read better spread throughout the body. I am not making this up. How did they get them to do this . Here is an excerpt from a letter. Letter to parents, 1953. Examinationssome in connection with the Nutritional Department of the Massachusetts Institute of technology, with the purpose of helping to improve the nutrition of our children. I will point out just like some of the letters in the tuskegee experiments, asking the men to come in for a spinal puncture, but you had at the top of the letter, the names of the institutions. Here, the Massachusetts Institute of technology, a very well respected, highly regarded institution. The blood samples are taken after one test meal which consists of a special breakfast containing a certain amount of calcium. And if you sign up for this, you get to be a member of the science club. And if you are a member of the science club, you get additional privileges. You get a quart of milk daily. You get to go to a baseball game and to the beach. Nothing in here that says we are going to give you radioactive tracers. This was back to what we talked about with the willowbrook experiments. I may have not have mentioned, funded by theo military. Can children give informed consent . This was not a great institution, by the way. Did parents really feel like they had some sort of choice . Notart of milk a day may seem like a big deal, but if you do not have it, is that too much coercion . Atturns out when you look this critically, the levels of radiation they got probably did not hurt them very much or at all. , this raisesss questions about whether it is appropriate to do experiments on institutionalized children without informing either them or their parents. Any questions about the fernald experiments . Ok. So, this is the cold war. We are interested in radiation. The idea of Nuclear Power is a very big. Hope is we will soon have Nuclear Powered airplanes. Quite seriously being discussed. And pilots flying Nuclear Powered airplanes are going to be exposed to a lot of radiation. Who else will be exposed to radiation . Spaceflight. People are going to space. Nasa is interested. People who work with nuclear a nuclearif there is attack, people will be exposed to radiation. What are they worried about . Crewmemberslked to on potential nuclear planes, damagere concerned about to what was, in those kinder, gentler years, referred to as the family jewels. Testicles. Those cells, those are the cells you would expect to be more likely hit by the nuclear radiation, and this could create chromosomal damage and potential problems for your progeny down the road. Testicles also have the advantage that they can again, than other body parts, can be more easily irradiated than other parts of the body. So, in oregon state and Washington State prisons, there were a series of radiation experiments done to determine the effects of radiation on testicles. These are healthy men who are not going anywhere for a while. Them aalso a way to give chance to pay back to society for what they have done. The experiments in oregon were overseen by an extremely prominent endocrinologist. In machine was made to irradiate the testicles. The men were asked to lie on their stomach. The testicles were placed in warm water. They were hanging down. And they would be irradiated. This would be followed by biopsies and then by a vasectomy. Case the radiation caused chromosomal damage, they did not want these men to be having any children. They knew the Atomic Energy commission, who sponsored this research, new it was sensitive. They do not want it to be public information. They did a psychiatric consultation. To the chaplain was required verify that the men in question were not roman catholic. If they were roman catholic, they were not to have the vasectomy. They were paid . 25 a day. Irct 25 for a testicular and another 25 for a vasectomy at the end of the experiment. 25 in those days was roughly equivalent to 200 dollars today. For those of you in the audience, just contemplate for 200 with you would have a testicular biopsy or vasectomy, and if i am reading your facial expressions correctly, i think the answer is no. So, there was another series of radiation experiments that went on. They were stopped in 1970. Probably because of the changing environment. The administrators were concerned that prisoners could not fully consent. Similar experiments were done in theton state Washington State penitentiary. It is interesting to think for a moment about the use of prisoners and human experimentation in general. About experimenting on prisoners in the 1940s and 1950s were not the same ones we would have today. The main concern was that they would not be adequately punished. If you are in a medical experiment, you would get special privileges. You would get to go in the hospital. You would get better food. If you were in prison, you were supposed to be punished for your crimes. It was affirmed in the american journal of medical associations. It 90 of the subjects of phase one drug trials came from prisons. That was when you had a new drug and you just want to try it out and see what happens and gradually increase the dose, not as a treatment for disease, but to determine the toxic effects. The prisoners were seen as being privileged perhaps not surprisingly, they tended on average to be more white than africanamerican prisoners. Almost the entire rest of the experiments on prisoners was seen as not appropriate. Code said that if you are imprisoned, you cannot give your consent to extermination. He came up with the tuskegee experiments that kennedy had for only one day. Prisoner experiments. Any questions about the prisoner experiments . This is hanford, washington. It is a lovely town on the Columbia River. It is remote. Site for a was the plutonium factory. For many years, it was the place where a lot of plutonium was made. It was picked for a couple of reasons. One is there was ready access to fresh water for cooling, the Columbia River. Second reason is it was out of the way. If you are making plutonium, topsecret, he wanted to be a secret. Here is a billboard. Silence means security. Another sign, loose talk is a Chain Reaction for espionage. This is how they advertised themselves. Richland is near hanford. A new day in the old frontier. Unioncall the soviet exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949. How do we know what the soviet union was doing . Radiationcause the spreads over the world and we can pick up evidence of radioactivity here. How do we interpret that . It is hard. Whatnted to figure out radiation was like when it was put into the atmosphere. How did it come down . Where did it come down . How could you detect it . What better way to find out what that is like sent to intentionally release radiation from a plantlike hanford . These are the green run experiments because the fuel used was young, green. Started releasing radioactivity into the atmosphere so they could study how, when, and where it came down. Because this was topsecret, they are not bothering to tell the people in the area that we will be putting a lot of radiation into the atmosphere. There were problems. The weather was not what they expected or desired. They got more exposure at local sites. We now know drinking milk from cows that graze in contaminated pastors a main source of exposure for children. The radiation lands on the field. The cows eat grass. The children drink the milk. If they had known, they might not have done it. When they checked how it spread, they did so with considerable secrecy. To be animald husbandry specialists from the department of agriculture going out on the farms and checking cows. If you are a spy, the thinki you think about taking on a false persona. This is in the United States. You have somebody working for the Atomic Energy commission claiming to be an animal checking expert accounts. It is unclear how much damage was done, how may people were injured. Was morear there radiation released from the normal operation of the plants. Times as much80 radiation by accident. There is an enormous sense of trust and person mistrust and personal violation that comes from this. Here is a cartoon. You see people surrounded by fumes, skeletal. It says it is reassuring to know if we were in any kind of danger, our government would let us know right away. You lose enormous trust when you start dumping radiation into the field. Youre also using the entire population as your experimental subjects. This was done not only at hanford, it was done in a number of other places. There were Nuclear Explosions thatsed in the atmosphere impacted holy sites for the pueblo indians who lived in close relationship to the land. This was done in the southwest. Concern andme observations that the spanish and native american residents in the areas tended to find themselves more often downstream of the releases than others. The four i transition to how we know about this and how these extremes cant like, any questions about the experiments . Before i transition to how we know about this and how these experiments came to light, any questions about experiments . How many of you knew about these before the class . Wordofmouth or reading about them . Ok. They were topsecret. There were early reports and rumors some americans had been injected with plutonium. The congressional report in 1986 was called Americas Nuclear guinea pigs. It was written in fairly bland, congressional language. A journalist by the name of Eileen Wilson working for the albuquerque tribune wrote about the story the way journalists write about stories like this, which is to say she got names and faces. Stories are more compelling when there is an actual Person Associated with them. I mentioned a few names of people. She wrote some incredible stories. She has a wonderful book out called the plutonium files. We started to find out more about these with the book that came out of the commission. This is the thick book. This is from the Advisory Committee on human radiation experiments. It was created in january of 1994. President bill clinton ordered all federal agencies to comb their files and make them public. He said, i want all the information about these radiation experiments out there. As a result, a ton of stuff was declassified. One of the things that happened as a result of this book and commission was those declassified documents are now publicly available. Lots of people have gone through them and written about them. Was made up of historians, philosophers, lawyers, radiologists, physicists, even a private citizen. They were deluged with inquiries of people who wondered if something had happened to them or their loved ones. One of the Staff Members typing this shared with me his father was at hanford in this period. He wondered what was going on. They held lots of hearings. There were lots of groups that felt aggrieved. Convicts,conflicts mothers, people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The grappled they grappled with how you differentiate between wrongness of actions and blame. It is one thing to say it is wrong. It is another to say who is to blame. They were asked to decide who should receive monetary damages. Who deserves money for this . Who was wrong enough that the government ought to pay . They came up with a shortlist. They were criticized for that. The report was released. President clinton apologized on october 3, 1995. I dontvening news, think it was even mentioned the 1995,also on october 3, the jury came down with the verdict in the o. J. Simpson trial. An example of bad timing to release a report. Quaker independent we settle for 1. 5 million independently settle for 1. 5 million. Ofs is a tremendous job policymaking research. You may have noticed some of what i am telling you has not been quite as Crystal Clear as it might be. That is because the nature of Historical Research as many of the records of what happened are incomplete. We just dont know. Some are contradictory. Some things we dont have protocols for. You asked about informed consent. We dont know for many of these experiments. Maybe because it was being done in more time. Maybe it has it was topsecret. Maybe because nobody bothered to write it down. What we are doing here is dicey and maybe we dont want to keep records, and maybe we need to lose these records. We dont know. Committee did as good a job as they possibly could a finding out as much as they could about this. A fundamental question the grappled with is how we make retrospective judgments. How do we assess what people did in the past from our own process perspective . Taking informed consent as an examples ofot of informed consent were not articulated until after this time. It was not fair to go back and say they did not do things the way we would have done them. The committee did come up with a method of making retrospective judgments that i think makes a lot of sense. First of all, they said there are certain basic ethical stand the test of time and place. They pointed out all of those Ethical Principles have exceptions. Then they said there are certain policies for Government Departments or agencies. You ought to follow the policies of wherever you are working. The problem here is if the policies are secret, how do you know about them . Finally, they said there are the rules of professional ethics that people need to Pay Attention to. They did conclude, and i agree, that it is not ok to just use people because they are dying. Some of the rationale for the plutonium experiments and total body irradiation experiments and other injections was these people are dying, and we might as well get some information from them. Being ill and hospitalized does not justify using people as mere means to the ends. You still have to respect them as people. Lessons fromkey these radiation experiments . I have only scratched the surface. I hope you will go and read more about them. Jonathan marino is a wonderful book on the history of human radiation with more detail. Is medicine,ssons the quest for knowledge has to be looked at in a specific social, economic context. It cannot be understood if you take it out of context. These radiation experience started in the context of a world war and continued in the context of the cold war which turned hot on occasion, which was characterized by secrecy, which was characterized by fear these weapons could be used against us. Some of the features that came out of these experiments continue to this day. The pension for largescale research, bigresearch, for the idea that if you want to do a big project that you can get ,overnment funding to do huge big protocols. Even smaller scale protocols have a lot to do with the era this comes out of, the idea of doing studies that go across several different hospitals. People got used to the idea they ought to be funded to do research. Many institutions such as the university of michigan and others are built on this notion that people doing science, physics, and medicine should get funding. Should get the funding they need to do the research. One of the casualties of these experiments is trust. Theref nobody got hurt, are not very many people who think it is a good idea to give children radioactive oatmeal without telling anybody were to release radiation from a plutonium plant to see what happens. Even if at the end of the day, nobody got hurt, i think it impedes the kind of trust that helps to bind society together. I tried to give you a sense of the radiation experiments, what happened, what some of the consequences were. We have a few minutes. Let me ask if there are any questions or comments. No . Ok. Thank you all for your attention. We will see you monday at the medical Science Building 2. Thank you very much. [applause] join us each saturday evening at 8 00 and midnight eastern for classroom lectures from across the country on different topics and eras of american history. Or downloadbsite them from itunes. Now you can keep in touch with Current Events from the Nations Capital using any phone anytime with cspan radio on audio now. Every weekday, listen to a recap of the days events on washington today. You can also hear audio of the Public Affairs programming beginning noon eastern. Longdistance or phone charges may apply. Next, ag up commemorative ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the june 17, 1864, washington arsenal explosion that killed 21 women. Many of the victims were young, impoverished irish immigrants. The youngest to die was 12 years old. This ceremony takes place at the Congressional Cemetery next to a monument for the victims dedicated less than a year after the accident. The event runs about 30 minutes