national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> you're watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook. >> itch week, and american history tv sits in on a lecture with one of the nations college professors. you can watch the class every saturday evening at eight p.m. midnight eastern. next, university of michigan history of medicine professor dr. joel howell talks about u.s. cold war radiation experiments conducted by the defense department. he explains tests that range from injections to full blown 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. all unified by the fact that they are studying the interaction of human beings and radioactivity. a very curious phenomenon of radioactivity that came, i guess, to its biggest fruition with the explosion over hiroshima and subsequently nagasaki 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 science-based war. we will talk about the development of big science. big science. lots of people. lots of investigators. lots of money. complicated systems. and we're going to talk about the cold war and ideas about national defense and national security and how that played into the radiation experiments. like all medical history, in 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. we will talk about the science 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 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 how to detect airplanes before they got there. the staff in the research laboratory noticed if you send radio waves out, they would bounce back from planes. and furthermore, 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 detect and range airplanes, and that is how we came up with the acronym radar -- radio detection and 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. they did not have civilians with expertise in the apparatus design. they did not have too much funding. this was the ad hoc manner of research in the interwar period. 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 science-based 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, that decision is likely to persist well after the war is done. the same thing happened with science. not surprising. a lot of it has to do with this guy here -- vannevar bush. he was at m.i.t. and he became

the head of the office of research and development. "the new york times" said that 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 are under criminal indictment right now. that was literally true. but the criminal indictment had 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, primarily under the military. 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. you needed people who could do the contracting, could obtain the resources. it was becoming the kind of big science that has become the norm since then. and big changes lasted well after the war was over. let's 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 airplanes and birds. you need to be a lot better at

detecting low-flying airplanes. so, they had the question -- where do we put this lab? you had this tension with government-funded 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 turns out some people in some 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. that was actually an attempt to 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. hitler wanted to invade britain. you have heard of the battle of britain. operation sea lion was supposed to smash britain's air force. germany had a lot more attack 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. the other place that was perhaps even more important had to do with submarines. the german u boats were wreaking 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 batteries, to refresh air, and when they did, airplanes could

spot them. how effective? consider this. in january 1942 without using radar, allied forces put in 8000 hours of patrol in the atlantic and managed to only find four submarines over a two-month period. the very first time a plane went 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. but radar won it. this is the slide that shows the german submarines.

you can see 1941, 1942, not a lot. then they bring in radar. and all of a sudden -- these are examples of early computers. in this case, computers mean people doing computations. eventually we did move to electronic computers. another innovation was operation research, which means using statistics and geometry to figure out the best way to find a submarine in the ocean, or the best way to organize your bomber squad so it was less likely to be shot down. vannevar bush 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 blowtorch," he 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? u.s. merchant vessels that used to take 35 weeks to be built were being built in 50 days. in 1939, 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 fuses 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. let's 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't do them any other way. there were so-called man break experiments.

people were put in a chamber. mustard gas was introduced. they were not let out until they collapsed and became unconscious, even though they might try very hard to get out. these were so-called volunteers. how voluntary were the volunteers? one person who was there said "a short explanatory talk, and if necessary, a slight verbal dressing down proved effective and there has not been a single instance in which someone failed to volunteer." makes you wonder if they really volunteered. some were prisoners and conscientious objectors. the idea being you were doing something for the war effort. if you weren't going overseas to fight, you need do something. mustard gas was an early cancer chemotherapeutic agent. there was some efficacy of treating with nitrogen mustard.

some efficacy. the patients died. however they got better for a while. when the epidemic diseases -- 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 1930's and not widely produced. there was not enough penicillin in 1940 in all of the united states to treat one patient. osrd, the organization headed by vannevar bush, not only organized 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 treat it. they knew that this was likely to be sensitive. so, in a memo from the head of the committee on medical 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. it might 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 pacific theater. you heard from ashley some of the efforts to eradicate malaria.

it was harder to treat during the war because quinine, the drug that was most effective treating malaria, came from plants that were in areas primarily occupied by our enemies. another antimalarial drug. you can see these men did not take theirs. we will come back to prisoners later on in the lecture. one famous subject in the malaria experiments was nathan leopold. leopold and loeb became a very famous cause célèbre. 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 world war came not from medicine. this is a statue titled nuclear energy. in the 1930's, scientists trying to understand pure science were trying to understand the nature of the atom, and possibly the most exciting time was the fission of the nucleus. that occurred in germany. the question arose, if energy can be derived from splitting the atom, can you make a bomb? 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 play called "copenhagen." it sets up 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 20th 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 shortly afterward, germany gave up its attempts to make a nuclear bomb.

figured that the problems in making a bomb were so great, that we would not be able to make a bomb. at one of the great historical questions about this episode, which again is very nicely set up in the play, is -- i mean, there is the question of why? did heisenberg make a math 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 didn't. making the bomb was hard. it required technical and social innovations. you had to separate the isotopes. you had to figure out a chain

reaction that could be controlled. you needed large production plants to make large quantities of material. you had to get scientists and 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 facilities specifically built for the government, like the plutonium works on the columbia river in washington state, a site to which we will return. let's turn now to events at the university of chicago, not very far from where we're sitting right here. let's return to stagg field.

stagg field, 1927. the university of chicago played 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. it fell 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. they had 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. however, in 1942, they were still in the big ten. stagg field still existed. it had squash courts under the stadium. it was on those squash courts that an event transpired that truly changed the course of history. december 2, 1942. they had all kinds of bricks laid up there on the squash courts. this is an artist's depiction of the event. fermi, a 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. finally the power went critical, proving you could have a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. the code word sent back to headquarters was "the italian navigator has landed in the new world." under the stands of stagg field at the university of chicago, we found out we actually had the capacity to build, in theory, a nuclear bomb. the 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 bomb with japan. so, here in los alamos, new mexico, in a house 7500 feet north of albuquerque was perhaps the greatest collection of nuclear physicists the world had ever seen. sometimes as many as eight nobel laureates would be sitting around dining together in the dining room. incredibly isolated. they set up hot plates because the wood stoves did not work so well. they took them from radar research, from all over the country. it cost $2 billion. they worked in complete secrecy to develop a nuclear weapon, to develop what they thought would be a nuclear weapon. they weren't sure. and finally on july 16, 1945, at ground zero, shown here in alamogordo, new mexico, the

first nuclear bomb exploded. the question -- what do we do now? this is a subject debated more now than it was then. president truman was president. he wanted unconditional surrender from japan. the emperor was not much in the mood to negotiate. meanwhile, the u.s. military was working his way across the pacific ocean. in some pretty brutal, brutal battles. iwo jima. okinawa, 12 weeks. 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, the enola gay dropped an 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. he lived on the fourth floor of 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. on august 9, we dropped another atomic bomb on nagasaki. 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 dropped, and it was so politically sensitive that they

eventually threw their hands up and said they wanted to have a discussion, wanted to put things in context, but whatever they tried lead to protests and disruptions and objections and they eventually said, we just can't do it. they show the plane with a simple plaque. 50th anniversaries are usually the most difficult. 25th anniversaries everyone still agrees. 100th anniversaries, no one remembers. 50th anniversaries are the hardest. i used to walk past this on my way to school everyday. it is more or less on the spot -- so, what we have in a sense here is the triumph of big science.

we have an atomic bomb. what should we do now? the war is over. what are we going to do about long-term control? after all, the bomb is based on laws of nature that are available to everybody. the united states proposed on-site inspections to control all uranium deposits and then we would relinquish our arsenal and scientific information. the soviet union proposed an immediate ban on the production and use of atomic weapons. the united states said the soviets were asking the united states to give up their monopoly and make every thing public before they agreed 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. mao zedong took over china. we only had a handful of 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 ii missile. this is the only one that still exists.

this is in tucson, arizona. this missile carried 600 times the destructive power that rained down on hiroshima. 600 times. there were 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. they each had keys. they had to turn their keys simultaneously for the missile to be fired. the idea was mutually assured distraction. -- destruction. the idea here was, we have overwhelming nuclear power, and if you attack us, we will attack you. kind of like, two scorpions in a 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 kubrick's best movies ever. and he had a lot of them. but it really gives you a sense 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 b-52 bomber being poised to take off and deliver unbelievable destruction was for real. i do not believe there was really a doomsday machine, but the doomsday scenario was real.

i grew up in columbus. i was there when the base was closed during the cuban missile crisis as depicted in "dr. strangelove." they had people ready to go in a b-52 to go nuke everything. this is the war room. one of my favorite lines is "there is no fighting the war with each other." what did you think of "dr. 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 atomic attack. if you happen to be bombed, do not rush right outside. do not take chances.

this is 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. 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. they look like they did in "dr. strangelove." people had fallout shelters. they kept them stocked. they had philosophical 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 do you think you're coming out to? the korean war.

it was a cold war, but it was a hot war in very many senses. we competed 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 satellite went around the globe. then another satellite, and this one had a dog in it. they sent back telemetry showing that the dog was still alive. december 6, we tried to launch a satellite from cape canaveral and it did not work. we are in this race. it is not clear we are winning. then the cuban missile crisis which comes along in 1962.

as you may 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 pause. any questions? about the cold war? about what the ethos was like? we're going to talk about the experiments. whether people were told about the experiments. the experiments done on patients, children, the

general population. we're 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 back to los alamos, back up in the mountains. people were not sure they could get enough uranium 235, and so a guy named glenn seaborg helped to develop a new element called plutonium. it was named after the planet 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.

it 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, there were women painting luminous dials on watches. women were paid to paint the dials on the watch. they had fine-grained brushes and they would put the tip in their mouth. and they would get diseases. we knew these characteristics of radium, but not plutonium. so in 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 called for help. he swished his mouth out every 15 minutes. this is very valuable stuff. we were trying to build an atomic bomb, and the stuff we could extract from his stomach could be used to build a bomb. he did not seem to have many ill effects. for a few weeks, the radiation counters would go nuts when he went into a room.

then we did not know what it did. we did not know what the health effect would be. so, we started to do a series of experiments. not at los alamos, where there was not much in the way of medical facilities, but at the university of chicago and others. at oak ridge, a 54-year-old african-american 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 top-secret. the fact that it existed was top-secret. but we wanted to see what would happen and how it would be

excreted. the experiments went on at the university of chicago. the first person was a 68-year-old man with advanced cancer of the mouth and lung and the next was a 54-year-old woman with advanced breast cancer. it was used in patients who are likely to die. the third patient had hodgkin's. we learned that the excretion was different. the fecal excretion rate was lower in humans than it was in animals. so, that was useful information in 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. similar kinds of things happened at other institutions as well.

the massachusetts general hospital took patients with brain cancer. 11 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. all of the experiments were done 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. so-called total body irradiation or whole body irradiation. they were done in some other places as well -- cincinnati, houston, baylor.

the theory was if you had cancer, you knew radiation could be used to treat cancer. maybe total body irradiation would help slow the cancer. actually, we had some pretty good evidence at this point it didn't 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? will a pilot who is flying the 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 these experiments on were the people least likely to derive any benefit from it. we knew certain kinds of cancer were sensitive to radiation.

so irradiation of those patients might help. but the symptoms would be the symptoms of cancer. and they were not very interested 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 african-american. all of them had cancer. some of them are not all that sick some of them were still ambulatory. some of them are still going to work. the radiation had some pretty serious effects. out of the 90 people who were

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. you move onto the second experiments, the experiments on children. any questions? yes? >> [indiscernible] >> the question is, was being informed full consent? that is an interesting question. not to 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 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. we will talk about sources in a 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. as a result, a plaque now sits in the hospital in cincinnati. other questions? all right. the walter e. fernald school in 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 quaker wanted to get a leg up on cream of wheat. they wanted to be able to show that their cereals were better absorbed and 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. we have done some examinations 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 boston 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, those were also funded by the 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? a quart of milk a day may not seem like a big deal, but if you do not have it, is that too much coercion? it turns out when you look at this critically, the levels of radiation they got probably did not hurt them very much or at all. but nonetheless, this raises 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. the 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 power. if there is a nuclear attack, people will be exposed to radiation. what are they worried about? when they talked to crewmembers on potential nuclear planes, they were concerned about damage 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, more easily 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. why prisoners? these are healthy men who are not going anywhere for a while.

it was also a way to give them a 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. just in 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. and the chaplain was required to 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. i got $25 for a testicular irc 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 the washington state penitentiary. it is interesting to think for a moment about the use of prisoners and human experimentation in general. the concerns about experimenting on prisoners in the 1940's and 1950's 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. by 1972, 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 african-american prisoners. almost the entire rest of the world, experiments on prisoners was seen as not appropriate. the nuremberg code said that if you are imprisoned, you cannot give your consent to extermination. we 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. it is on the columbia river. it is remote. and in 19 42, it was the site for a plutonium factory. and for many years, it was a place a lot of the ternium was made.