for years, before the wall came down. and she said, "it still amazes me when i read history books about the history that i live, the history i made. i read these history books, and they say the wall fell and it gave us our freedom." she said, "we fought for our freedom, and then the wall fell." and she's right. and so i would like to bring that understanding, that there was this peaceful revolution and that it mattered and that it was causal into the historiography, that the people on the ground fighting for their freedom and then the wall fell. >> so before i bring this session to a close, which i'm sure that we'll all continue the discussion, i should mention that i was negligent at the beginning. i meant to mention that many of you noticed that james wilson was supposed to be on this session. james has just published a

terrific book on the end of the cold war, the triumph of improvisation. james also works for the state department, the historical office. and he's actually a leader of a team working on ukrainian-russian crisis. so he did not feel comfortable leaving that to come up. we should feel comfortable that he's at work, solving international crises while we figure out what's missing from the historiography. but in any event, we all missed having james here. with that, let me thank our panelists who are wonderful. i really want to thank them, because i had insisted they speak for 10 to 12 minutes each. fortunately, as is my life, they ignored me completely, and i think we all benefited from it tremendously. so thanks very much.

this weekend on the c-span networks. friday night on c-span, native american history. then on saturday, live all day coverage from the national book festival science pavilion. saturday evening from bbc scotland, a debate on scotland's upcoming decision on whether to end its political union with england. sunday, q & a with judge robert katzmann, chief justice of the second circuit court of appeals. he shares his approach to interpreting laws passed by congress. on c-span 2, friday at 8:00 p.m., "in depth" with former congressman ron paul. then on saturday, all day live coverage of the national book festival from the history and by gravy pavilions. speakers, interviews. sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern, "afterwards" with william burrows talking about his book, "the asteroid threat." on c-span3 friday, a nasa

documentary about the 1969 apollo 11 moon landing. saturday, on the civil war, general william tecumseh sherman's atlanta campaign. sunday night, a look at election laws and supreme court case of bush versus gore. find our television schedule at c-span.org and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us at 202-626-3400. on twitter, use the hash tag c123. or e-mail us at comments@c-span.org. like us on facebook. follow us on twitter. next, university of michigan history professor, joel howell, talks about human radiation experiments conducted by the pentagon from the end of world war ii through the cold war. professor howell described some of the tests, ranging from plutonium injections to full-body radiation exposure. this is a little more than an hour.

>> so we're going to be talking today about the radiation experiments. and by the radiation experiments, i mean experiments that were done in and around the second world war and during the cold war, very -- a fairly heterogenous set of experiments, more heterogenous done by lots of different people and lots of different places. but all unified by the fact that they're studying the interaction of human beings and radioactivity. very curious phenomenon of radioactivity, that came -- i guess to its biggest fruition with the explosion hiroshima and subsequently nagasaki in august of 1945. now before we can talk about the experiments, in order to make sense of them, we need to talk a little bit about the context in which they were done. what we're going to talk about is first of all the war itself, second world war. we're going oh to talk about how it was a science-based war. we're going to talk about the

development of big science. big science. lots of people, lots of investigators, lots of money. complicated system. 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're going to talk first about the physical science research and then about the medical research. there was some small poorly funded poorly organized research going on. and the example i'm going to use is the story about some military research designed to figure out where an airplane is. now, 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 wouldn't know they were coming. and so one of the biggest military problems was how to detect airplanes before they got there. and in the 1930s, a staff member at the naval research laboratory noticed that if you send radio waves out, they would bounce back from planes. and furthermore, if you looked at how long it took them to bounce back from the plane, you could figure out about how far away they were. in other words, he used radio to detect and range airplanes, and that's how he came up with the acronym r.a.d.a.r. radio detection and ranging. r-a-d-a-r. now, the discovery of radar was very uncoordinated.

people didn't talk to each other. it was done in a naval research laboratory and the only way that the army even found out that it existed is that somebody from the army happened to go and visit the naval research laboratory. they didn't reach out to civilians who had expertise in how to design a radar apparatus. they didn't have much funding. and this was fairly typical of the ad hoc manner of research in the interwar period. the second world war, of course, starts in 1939. starts in europe. the united states doesn't international 1941. from the outset, people knew that the second world war was going to be a science-based war. that science was likely to determine who won and who lost. and one of the questions that arose is then how do you organize the pursuit of science in war time. now, we've talked about this before with the question of how to organize the medical corps.

and a lot of the same issues apply. the medical corps, you'll remember, at the height of the second world war, the number of people in the medical corps was bigger than the entire army had been in 1939. so if all of a sudden you're expanding the size, how do you organize it? you've got to put some people in charge, you've got to figure out how you're going to decide who is in charge and what the different units look like. and then once you've made that decision, that decision is very likely to persist well after the war is gone. so you create structures that then continue. well, the same thing happened for the organization of science. not surprising. a lot of it had to do with this guy here. vanderveer bush. bush's grandfather had been a whaling captain. he was one of the early pioneers of concepts that we now call computing. he made a mechanicel california version of what we now have as a computer. he was the dean at m.i.t.

and he became head of the office of scientific research and development, osrd. the "new york times" said this made him the science czar. he knew that access to the president was going to give him a lot of power in organizing scientific research. and he used that to get the medical research under his umbrella, as well. roosevelt was about to show out the medical research and put it into a different unit, when he went to roosevelt and he said, you know, the people that you want to give that responsibility to are under criminal indictment right now. well, that was literally true. but the criminal indictment had to do with antitrust violations and hmos in washington, d.c. didn't matter. roosevelt said, i'm not giving this to people who are criminals. and it went instead under bush. now, what bush organized was a civilian organization. it was charged with coordinating

the research, primarily funded by the military. and what they learned how to do there was to operate big scientific research. used to be people had pretty simple research labs. you wanted to do research, you had a lab, you hired some people, you did research. now suddenly you have people all over the country. you have people here, you had people there, needed a lot of money. needed people who could organize the contracts, who could do the financing, who could obtain the resources. it was starting to become the kind of big science that has now become the norm since then. and, again, the changes that were made lasted well after the war was over. so let's get back to our example of radar, what happens with radar. well, by 1940, it's obvious that radar works, but it could be a lot better. you need to be better at discriminating the difference between airplanes and birds. you need to be better at picking up low-flying or fast-moving airplanes. and so the government decided to fund a research laboratory.

and, again, they confronted the question of where do we put this lab? we've talked earlier about the tension with government-funded research. on the one hand, you've got people who say it ought to go equally to all the states. why should one state get more money than another state? on the other hand, if you're in the middle of a war or if a war is eminent as it was in 1940, it turns out that people in some states don't have much in the way of research infrastructure, and people in other states do. and so the lab that was going to study radar was set up at the massachusetts institute of technology. and they called it the rad lab, r-a-d. rad lab. that was actually an attempt to be deceitful, trying to confuse people into thinking they were studying radiation physics, which in 1940 didn't seem like it was going to be a big topic for investigation. well, radar turned out to be

terribly important. i'll give a couple different examples. you've heard of the battle of britain. hitler wanted to invade britain, operation sea lion in 1940 was supposed to smash britain's air force, germany had a lot more attack planes than britain had defense planes. but by using radar, they were able to see the planes coming, use their fighters effectively, and as you know, germany, in fact, never did succeed in invading england, much to the surprise of many people at the time. the other place where it 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. they emitted confusing sonar signals. it was hard to find them. it turned out the subs needed to surface to take in fresh air and recharge batteries. and when they surfaced, airplanes with radar could see them up to five miles away. how effective?

consider this. in january and february of 1942, without using radar, allied forces put in 8,000 hours of patrol in the atlantic, and managed to only find four submarines to attack. over a two-month period. the very first night a plane went out with radar installed, they found four submarines and they sunk one of them. so it's that kind of effectiveness of radar that made its importance grow over the course of the war. 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. a few more examples of the kinds of big physical science research. sorry, this is the slide that

shows the monthly german submarines. between 1941 and '42, not a lot and then they bring in radar and all of a sudden it goes up. these are examples of early computers. in this case, computers means people who are doing computation. eventually we then move to electronic computers. another innovation was operations research. which meant 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 would be unlikely to get shot down. social engineering, as well. vanderveer bush wanted to approach the secretary of the navy. the chief of naval operations was so tough, he was said to, quote, shave every morning with a blow torch and wasn't interested in civilians' ideas about how to best run his navy. however, the success of the operation together with the

promise that first of all the navy would be in charge of everything and second of all the operations of research scientists wouldn't take credit for anything managed to convince him to use operations research and the radar and it got results. other 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 an airport just down the road, they were making almost 5,500 each year. proximity fuse that enabled munitions to explode when they got close to their target without actually having to hit it changed the entire strategy of warfare. so all of these research ideas from mathematics and the physical sciences convinced

people that scientific research was something worth funding and worth doing and that it would make a difference in the war effort. so let's switch now to biological research that went on during the war. that's physical science research. poison gas. mustard gas. one of the most dreaded weapons of the first world war. concerns that it was going to be used widely in the second world war. the problem with mustard gas is that it's species-specific. so in order to test gas masks, in order to test protective clothing, you have to do the experiments on human beings. you can't do them on anybody else. so lots of experiments were done using mustard gas. there were so-called man break experiments which were designed to see how long it would take a man to break. people were put into a chamber, the mustard gas was introduced

and they weren't 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, quote, occasionally there have been individuals or groups who did not cooperate fully. a short ex planetary talk and if necessary a slight verbal dressing down as always proved successful. and there's not been a single instance in which somebody refused to volunteer. which makes me wonder if they really were volunteering. some of the people who were used were prisoners and conscientious objecto objectors. the idea there being you owed something to the war effort if you weren't going overseas to fight, you needed to do something at home. now, mustard gas, as many of you know, actually has a dual use. it was an early cancer chemotherapeutic agent. and there were experiments done at yale which showed some efficacy of treating cancer with

mustard. some patients died but got better for a while. however, these were secret results and they couldn't be published. what about epidemic diseases? always a problem in war time. gonorrhea. this is the federal prison in indiana where experiments were done on gonorrhea. penicillin was discovered in the 1930s. it was not widely produced. in 1941, there wasn't enough penicillin in the united states to treat even one patient. in 1942, there was enough to treat one. osrd, the organization headed by vanderveer bush organized not only clinical trials, but also the production of penicillin. controlled protocols showed it was incredibly effective for treating very nearial disease like syphilis and gonorrhea. and by the end of the war, there was enough for the army, there

was enough for civilians, there was even enough to give to some of our allies. there was also interest in using it to see if you could prevent people who had been exposed to gonorrhea from getting gonorrhea. and this touches on the complexity of the ethical issues we're going to get to with the radiation experiments. the experiments were proposed here at the federal prison inter haughty, indiana. they were proposing to give these men gonorrhea and see if penicillin could be used to treat it. but they knew this was likely to be sensitive. so in a memo from the head of the committee on medical research, which was part of the office of scientific research and development, ann richards said, when any risks are involved, volunteers only should be utilized as subjects. and these only after the risks have been fully explained and after signed statements have been obtained which shall prove that the volunteer offered his services with full knowledge.

now, 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. so it's unclear who actually read them. in any event, the experiments at terre haute were stopped because it turned out it was more difficult than you might think to give people gonorrhea. they were not stopped totally. and in another series of experiments that we touched on in another class, some of the same people involved in the united states went down to guatemala and continued these experiments after the war. but that's another story. malaria. tremendous problem. in sicily, north africa, the pacific theatre, and you heard from ashley about some of the efforts to eradicate malaria during the war and afterwards. some people thought it was the biggest medical problem of the war. it was harder to treat during the war, because chi nine, the

drug most effective for treating malaria, came from plants that were primarily in areas occupied by our enemies. at am brain was another anti ma layerial drug. as you can see, these men did not take their at abreen. experiments were done using prisoners. we'll come back to prisoners later on in the lecture. one famous subject for the malaria experiments was nathan leopold who had kidnapped somebody at the university of chicago, and became a very famous cause celeb. this image was on the malaria war in the stateville prison in illinois. and this led to issues in the neuron berg trials, because there was a question of whether or not prisoners could give informed consent. but as important as medical research was, doctors were not the star scientists. the people that really were the most important for the research

in the second world war came from not medicine, but physics. this is a statue at the university of chicago by henry moore entitled nuclear energy. dan kevin list has a wonderful book called "the physicists" that talks about physics during and after the war. in the 1930s, scientists trying to understand pure science were trying to understand the nature of the atom and probably the most exciting scientific news in 1939 was the fishening of the uranium nucleus and that happened in germany. the question then arose, if there is energy that can be derived from splitting the atom, can you make a bomb? nobody was quite sure. it might be possible. you needed to be able to separate isotopes. you needed to get uranium 235

from the much more abundant 238. there is a wonderful play called "copenhagen" by maikel he will train. any of you seen or read copenhagen? it's a great play. it sets up this question of the early years of the war and whether or not you could make a bomb. it revolves around what we know was a true interaction between highsen berg, probably the most brilliant physicist of the 20th century, and i'm including einstein in that generalization and neil's bore. it took place in copenhagen, this meeting. highsen berg came and visited bore. we don't know exactly what happened in that meeting. we know they had a split. they used to be very close. and we know that highsenberg went back to germany and we know that shortly afterwards, germany gave up its attempts to make a nuclear bomb.

figured that the problemses in making a bomb were so great that we wouldn't be able to make a bomb. and one of the great historical questions about this episode, which again is very nicely set up in the play, is -- i mean, it's to speculate why. what happened. that highsenberg make a math error or did he question whether or not it would be a good idea? and a really horrible thing to speculate on is suppose germany had been able to make a nuclear bomb. i mean, they were dropping bombs on central london. as the war wound down, i don't think there's any doubt if they had an atomic bomb they would have dropped an atomic bomb if they could on central london. but they didn't. making the bomb was hard. required technical and social innovations. you had to separate the isotopes. you had to figure out if a chain reaction could be controlled. you needed to have large

production plants to make large quantities of material. you had to get scientists and people in the military working together, which wasn't that easy. some of the work was done at existing universities, like the university of chicago. some of it was done in facilities specifically built for the government like a plutonium works on the columbia river in washington state near hanford, washington, 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 turn to stag field. this is stag field in 1927. 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. jay ber wanger won the heisman at the university of chicago. the university of chicago is a founding member of the big ten football conference. they eventually -- here we see some action taking place out on stag field. the university of chicago is an interesting institution. i had the opportunity to spend some time there. the stadium fell into disrepair, and here you see a chart which shows the joseph regin stein library. imagine this if you can. they tore down their football stadium to build a library. true story. they also left the big ten in 1946. and it left room for another member to join the big ten to make up the full complement of ten. of course, in 1949, michigan state university was admitted to the big ten. so the university of chicago --

left, michigan state came in. they had a president who was known to observe, when i feel like exercising, i lie down until the feeling goes away. so they were not big into the intracollegiate sports scene. however, in 1942, they still were in the big ten and stag field still existed. it had squash courts under the stadium. and it was on those squash courts that an event transpired that truly changed the course of history. december 2nd, 1942. they had all kinds of bricks laid up there in the squash courts. this is a artist's depiction of the event. there were no photographers present. we don't have any photographs.

fairme, very famous physicist was there, to see if they could have a self-sustained nuclear reaction. there were cadmium rods soaking up all the neutrons. they gradually pulled up the cadmium rods. have a self sustaining nuclear reaction. the code ward that was sent back to headquarters was, the italian navigator has landed in the new world. so under this -- under the stands of stag field at the university of chicago, found out we actually had the capacity to build, in theory, a nuclear bomb. the story then shifts. in order to build this bomb, we needed to get some really, really smart people, and it had to be done in secret. because we didn't know that germany was not going to be able to make a bomb.

or japan. and so here in los alamos, new mexico, at an altitude of 7,500 feet north of albuquerque was gathered the greatest collection of nuclear physicists the world has ever seen. sometimes as many as eight noble laureates will be sitting around dining together in the dining room. it's incredibly isolated. they clicked on hot plates, because the wood stoves didn't work so well. they took these physicists from the radar research, they took them from all over the country. they were part of a system that cost them eventually about $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 the 16th, 1945, at ground zero shown here in alma guardo, new mexico, the first nuclear bomb exploded.

the question, what do we do now? this is a subject that's been debated a lot more now, i think, than it was then. president truman was president, and he had seen what happens -- what had happened in world war i. he wanted unconditional surrender from japan. the emperor wasn't much in the mood to negotiate. meanwhile, the u.s. military was working its way across the pacific ocean. in some pretty brutal battles. the iwo jima. four weeks, 30,000 casualties. okinawa, 12 weeks, 50,000 u.s. casualties, 90,000 japanese troops, 100,000 civilians. we thought this was going to be a rehearsal for invading japan.

that if we invaded japan, that's what it was going to be like. we also weren't sure if the bomb would work consistently. it went off once. you could spend a whole course talking about the development of the atomic bomb. there were a lot of things that might not work. remember, germany had decided it wasn't going to work. so we weren't sure if we tried it again if it was going to work or not. in any event, the decision was made, and on august the 6th, 1945, the inola guy dropped an atomic bomb on hiroshima. there were 350,000 people alive hiroshima on the 5th of august. 140,000 of them were dead the next day. this is a picture of hiroshima after the bomb blast. of a colleague who grew up in tokyo shortly after the war, he

was born shortly after the war. and he lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building. and he said you could see for miles, just to give you a sense of how much was wiped out. i mean, if you had been to tokyo, you know that the city is quite densely built now. but after the war, he said you could see for miles. on august 9th, we dropped another atomic bomb on nagasaki. the picture on top shows nagasaki before the bomb. the picture on the bottom shows nagasaki after the bomb. and the war came to an end. on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima, the smithsonian institution attempted to do a display in which they would show thein hola gay, which is the airplane from which the bomb was dropped. and it was so politically charged and so politically sensitive that they eventually threw their hands up and said --

they wanted to have an interpretive exhibit. they wanted to have a discussion of what was going on. they wanted to put things in context. but whatever they tried ran into protests, and disruptions and objections. and they eventually said we just can't do it. and so they simply showed the plane with a very simple factual plaque and no other discussion. 50th anniversaries are usually the toughest. 25th anniversaries, everybody still agrees with the original intents. 100th anniversaries, nobody is left so there is nobody there who can complain who said i was there. 50th anniversaries are hard. this statue, by the way, was put up on the 25th anniversary of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. i used to walk past this on my way to school every day. it's more or less on the spot where this reaction took place. so what we have in a sense here is the triumph of big science. we spent $2 billion, and we had

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 the laws of nature, which are available to everybody. the united states proposed a comprehensive evaluation, on-site inspections to control all uranium deposits and then we would relinquish our arsenal and scientific information. the soviet union imposed an immediate ban. the united states said the soviets were asking the united states to give up their monopoly and make everything public before they agreed to comply. the u.s. said the soviets were being unreasonable, nothing happened, and 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 in the cold war. what was the cold war all about?

europe was divided. now don't forget that the united states and the soviet union were allies. we were partners in the -- we were on the same side. no longer. tung took over china. we had only a hand of warheads and only a few long range missiles. and of course to no one's surprise in 1949, the soviet union obtained an atomic weapon. we got a hooij 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. this is the culmination that came along a little later. this missile, which you can see is no longer functional, there is a girder covering the outlet. this still -- this is the only one that still exists outside of

tucson, arizona. this missile carried 600 times the destructive power of the bomb that landed on hiroshima. 600 times. there are three cities, wichita, little rock and tucson. each one of them had 18 different sites. people who ran this missile were sitting underground. they didn't know where the missile was targeting. they had keys, they each had to turn their keys simultaneously for the missile to be fired. b-52s went overhead. the idea here was mutual destruction. the idea here was, we've got overwhelming nuclear power and if you attack us, we'll attack you. kind of like if somebody said two scorpions in a bottle, each knowing if one stings the other they both die.

and that's why i wanted you to watch dr. strange love. because dr. strange love, on the one hand, it's a comedic farce, black comedy,in one of stanley cubic's greatest movies ever. he had "clockwork orange", et cetera. but it really gives you a sense of what the cold war was like. it's not a coincidence that if you notice at 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 b-52 bombers being poised to take off and overfly russia and deliver unbelievable destruction was real. i don't think there really was a doom's day machine, but it was a doom's day scenario. i personally grew up in columbus, mississippi, which is the home of a strategic air command base.

and i was there when the base was closed during the cuban missile crisis, as is depicted in "dr. strange love." they closed the base. and that's real. and people sat at the end of a runway ready to jump no a b-52 and go nuke everything. this is the war room, one of my favorite lines is "there's no fighting in the war room, gentlemen." what did you guys think of "strange love?" did you like it? glad you watched it? it's great. this is, of course, major tj king kong riding the bomb down. this is a role originally offered to john wayne, but he turned it down. well, this affected the way people lived. and, again, we're going to get to the experiments in a second. this is a manual for survival under atomic attack. if you happened to be bombed, don't rush right outside. don't take chances. this is a real -- illustration. if you're -- if the nuclear

weapon is coming and you don't have anywhere to go, jump into a trench and cover yourself up with drying laundry. that will protect you from the heat. so people lived with this notion of what do we do if there is a nuclear attack? fallout shelters. shown here. and reflected in dr. strange love, of course, the idea there is people will go underground and survive forever. people had fallout shelters and they kept them stopped. and we had ethical discussions. i remember in high school, what do you do if you have only got 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 a nuclear war really comes and you manage to get into your fallout shelter, just what do you think you're coming out to when you finally come out? the korean war. there were -- this was a cold war, but it was a very hot war

in many very real sense. senses. we competed on many grounds. when sputnik went up in october 1957, it was a huge deal. the soviet union was supposed to be a backward state, we were supposed to be much better than them, and all of a sudden they launched a satellite. and every 90 minutes, that satellite was coming around the globe. and the next thing, they announced another satellite. and this one had a dog in it. and they sent back telemetry showing that the dog was still alive. and so we decided we're going to launch a satellite too. and on december the 6th, we tried to launch a satellite from cape canaveral, only it didn't work. so we're in this conflict with the soviet union. it's not entirely clear that we're winning. finally, the last part of the cold w cold war ethos i want to mention is the cuban missile crisis which comes along in 1962. as you may recall, the united

states saw evidence of the soviet union putting missiles in cuba, just south of us. we said bring them out. we put a blockade around cuba. and we danced around the question of nuclear war for some time until eventually a deal was struck and we did not have a nuclear war. so i don't want to talk about specific experiments that went on once you have a sense of what life was like. but let me just pause. any questions thus far about the cold war, what life was like during the cold war? what the ethos was like? okay. we're going to talk about experiments. some of the things we're going to talk about are informed or not. were people told what the experiments were all about or not? we're going to talk about experiments done on patients. on children. on the general population.

we are not going to touch on soldiers being used for radiation experiments. that's a fascinating topic. it's just -- we don't have time for that. it's a whole another topic. and we're going to talk about both the actual risk as we now understand it and what people understood then about the risk. but our story, we have to go back to los alamos. up in the mountains. people weren't sure they could get enough uranium 235, and so a guy named glen see boring, who is a native of michigan helped to derive a new element called plutonium. plutonium was named after the planet pluto. now, it should have been pollute yum, if you think about it. but he just liked the way plutonium sounded better. so that's why we call it plutonium. see boring went on to get the noble prize and chancellor at berkeley, very active in arms control later in his life. of now, what were the health

effects of this plutonium thing? it didn't seem to penetrate the skin. but what about if you ingested it? what if the radioactive material was swallowed? we knew that was not good for you, because in the interwar period, there were women who were painting luminous dials on watches. if you have a glow in the dark watch in those days, it had radium on it, and so these women were paid to paint the dials on the watch. and they had very fine-grain brushes, and they would put the brush in their mouth to get the tip just exactly right and then they would paint the wash and swallow the radian and get a bunch of not so good diseases. so we knew that ingesting plutonium was probably dangerous. we knew what the characteristics were of radium but not of plutonium. so in 1944, in room d-119, a 23-year-old chemist by the name of don mastic, promising young

graduate of berkeley, was working in los alamos with plutonium. like so many things in medicine, this started with a mistake. potentially pretty 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, and he swished his mouth out every 15 minutes. did it 12 times. they pumped his stomach, they trite to extract as much out as possible. this is very valuable stuff. this is all the plutonium in the world. we're trying to build an atomic bomb and the stuff we could extract from his stomach may be what we need for the bomb. he didn't seem to have any horrible ill effects, except for many weeks thereafter, if he walked into a room and just blew across the room, the radiation counters would go nuts, go off the scale. but we knew that he wasn't going to be the first person to invest plutonium.

and we didn't know what it did. we didn't know what the health effects were. so we started to do a series of experiments. not at los alamos where there really wasn't very much in the way of medical facilities. but at oak ridge, at rochester, at the university of chicago. and at others. first patient was at oak ridge. 53-year-old african-american man was a cement worker named ebb cade. he was in a car accident. he was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. he wasn't told that he was being injected. he wasn't told what it was. the 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.

experiments went on to the university of chicago. first person was a 68-year-old man with an advanced cancer of the mouth and lung and the next was a 55-year-old woman with breast cancer. so here they were trying, it would appear, to pick patients who were likely to die. the third was a young man with hodgkin's. the last two got 95 micrograms. remember, the first guy got 4.7 micrograms. the last two got 95 micrograms. that's a whole lot more. and we learned that the ex creation was different. that the fecal ex creation 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's unclear if the people who 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, termnally ill, injected with uranium. one didn't actually have brain cancer. they thought he did. he actually had some bleeding into his brain. so all these 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 -- i'll 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 other places, as well, houston, baylor, memorial, and new york. the theory was, if you had con

certify, we knew that radiation could be used to treat cancer. maybe irradiating your whole body. total body irradiation, would help slow the cancer. actually, we had some pretty good evidence at this point that it didn't work. for the cancer. but the department of defense was very interested in the effects of total body irradiation. because if there is a nuclear war, and people get irradiated, are they going to be able to function? will a pilot who is flying a plane be able to land the plane? will they be able to fight if there's -- will they be able to work? ironically, the people they wanted to do this experiment on were precisely the people who were least likely to derive any benefit from it. we knew that certain kinds of cancer were sensitive to

radiation. so irradiating those patients might expect to help them. but then the side effects of the radiation would be the side effects of the cancer and the department of defense wasn't particularly interested in the effects of radiation on people with metastatic cancer. they wanted to know what the effects of cancer were on a healthy 23-year-old pilot. and that could be best studied by irradiating people whose cancers were not going to respond to the radiation. most of the patients who were irradiated were poor. most of the patients who were irradiated were african-american. all of them had cancer. some of them weren't all that sick. some of them were still ambulatory. some of them were still going to work. and the radiation had some pretty serious effects. out of the 90 people who were irradiated, 21 of them were dead

within a month. and here's what's -- the -- there are many things that are bothersome about this. we know when you irradiate people, you get side effects. you get nauseated. you get very nauseated. but the department of defense didn't want the patients to be given medicines to reduce the nausea, because they wanted to know what the effects would be without the medicines to reduce the nausea. as a matter of fact, they didn't even want the patients to be informed that nausea might be a side effect, because that might influence them to get nauseated. so these patients were not even given the basic medicines that were given to other people at the time. to help prevent the side effects of the irradiation. these experiments -- let's say ended in 1972. 1972 is the date you'll remember. of course, that's when the tuskegee experiments became public. that's when a lot of things

happened. we'll move on in a second to radiation experiments on children. any questions about these radiation experiments? yes. >> was this before informed consent? >> the question is, was this before informed consent. >> that's a very good question. and it raises all sorts of issues. not to play word games, but the question is what is meant by informed consent. and the notion of informed consent as we now understand it hadn't really been fully articulated, although there is the court case of 1914 of schaumburg versus new york hospital, established a patient has the right to decide what happens to his or her own body. the memo that i showed you earlier for the terre haute gonorrhea experiment suggested in 1942, the head of the

committee on medical research thought that something very much like informed consent was absolutely essential. clearly, that was not being followed here. we'll talk about sources in a little bit. but one of the questions is how do you know if somebody had informed consent? what we have in some of the physicians claimed they got informed consent. but there's not documentary evidence of it. there was a lawsuit, by the way, and as a result of this, a plaque now sits in the hospital in cincinnati. other questions. all right. the walter e. ferdinand school in boston. research funded by the national institutes of health, the atomic energy commission and quaker oats. this was an experiment on

breakfast food. in which children were given breakfast food with radioactive iron and calcium 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'm not making this up. how do they get them to do this? here's 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 want to point out that just like we saw if you'll remember in some of the letters in the tuskegee experiments, asking the men to come in for a spinal puncture, which you had up at the top of the letter the names of institutions like the

tuskegee institute or the alabama state board of health. here, 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 a science club. and if you're 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 and to some outside dinners. nothing in here that says we're going to give you radioactive tracers. all right. this raises all sorts of questions similar to the ones we talked about with the willow brook experiments. the willow brook experiments, by the way, i think i might not have mentioned, were also funded in part by the military, the armed forces were interested in a vaccine. and that's why they funded some of those experiments.

this raises questions. first of all, can children give informed consent? are parents being coerced? if your child -- this was not i your child -- this was not a great institution by the way. this was not a place you really wanted to be. did parents really feel like they had any sort of choice? a quarter of milk a day may not seem like a big deal but if you don't have it is this too much coercion. it turns out that when you look at this critically the levels of raid craigs they got probably didn't hurt them at much or at all. nonetheless this raises questions about whether it is appropriate to do experiments on institutionalized children without informing either them for their parents. any questions about the fernal

experiments? okay. will the's move to oregon. so this is the cold war and we're into radiation. the idea of nuclear power is very big. the hope is that we will soon have nuclear powered airplanes quite seriously being discussed. pilots who have flying nuclear powered airplanes will be exposed to a lot of rayiatidiat. who else, space flight. 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 talk to potential crew members on nuclear planes they were especially concerned about

what was as a euphemism refer to as the family jewels. testicles contain rapidly dividing cells. thus, if there's radiation exposure, those are cells that you would expect to be more likely to be hit by the radiation. this could produce chromosomal problems for you down the road. testicles also have the advantage in that they can more easily than some bod ilily orga can be irradiated without having to radiate the entire body. so in the washington state prisons between 1963 to 1973 there were experiments done to determine the radiation on testicles. these were healthy men who weren't going anywhere for a

file. also a way for them to pay back to society for what they've done. the experiments in oregon were over seen by extremely prominent man. men were asked to lie on their stomach, testicles were placed in warm water so they would hang down and then they would be irradiat irradiated. this will be followed by biopsies and a veriesectomy. the recruitment was purely by word of mouth suggesting that they knew that the atomic energy commission who was sponsoring this research saw it as sensitive and didn't want it to be too public. there was a loose and informal psychiatric violation and a consultation with the chaplain. the chaplain was required to certify that the men in question

were not roman kcatholic becaus if they were roman catholic they were not to have one. there was no benefit to these men in terms of their health. they did get money. they were paid .25 cents a day. $25 for a testic yule ar byulea vasectomy. if i'm reading your facial expressions correctly, i'm guessing the answer for you is no. so these were another set of radiation experiment that's went on in the prisons. they were stopped in 1970 because of changing environment. the administrators were concerned that prisoners could not fully consent. that's a valid concern.

similar experiment wers were don the washington state penitentiary. it's interesting to think for a moment about the use of prisoners in human experimentation in general. the concerns about experimenting on prisoners in the 1940s and 50s were not the same as the ones we might have today. the main concern was that they wouldn't be adequately punished. if you were in a medical experiment you get special privileges. you get to go to the hospital. you will get better food. it was confirmed in the american medical association as a legitimate way of doing experiments. by 1972 91% came from phase 1 drug trials. the experiments on prisoners

were seen as being a privilege, perhaps not surprisingly tended to be more white than african prisoners. they were way out of touch with the entire rest of the world. the entrepreneidea is if you're you can't make a free choice about what you're doing. eventually prison experiments in the united states became n nonexiste nonexistent. prisoner experiments -- think question about the prisoner experiments. this is hanford, washington.

it's a lovely town on the columbia river. it's remote and in 1942 it was the site for a plutonium factory. for many years it was the place where plutonium was made. it was picked for a couple of reasons. one, access for fresh water from the river. here is a billboard. don't talk. silence means security. another sign loose talk to chain reaction from espionage. this is how they advertise it.

you're called tat soviet union exploded its first bomb in 1945. how did we know what they are doing? we know because radiation put in the atmosphere spreads all over the world and we can pick it up here. how do we interpret that? that's hard. we wanted to figure out what radiation is like when it was put in the atmosphere. how did you it come down? where did it come down? how detect it. what better way than to release radiation in hanford. they started releasing radioactive it in the atmosphere so they could study how, when,

where it came down because this is top secret, they are not bothering to tell the people if the area that oh, by the way we'll be putting a lot of radiation into the atmosphere. there were problems. the weather wasn't what they expected or desired. they got more exposure at localites. we hoe that cows drinking from contaminat contaminated pastures to see how the radiation spread around. they did so with considerable secre secrecy. they pretended to be anal specialists from the department of agriculture to check tit. this is in your backyard in the

united states. you've got somebody working for the atomic energy commission wanting to check in your house. it's unclear how much damage was actually done. how many people were actually injured. it's also clear that there was probably more radiation released from the normal operations of the plants from 1944 to 1947 they released radiation by another it you see surrounded by fu fuel and if we were in any kind of danger our government would let us know right away. you're also now using the entire

population as your experiment subjects. this was done in a number of places not only hanford. there were nuclear explosions released to the atmosphere that impacted holy sites for the peblo indians who live in very close relation to the land obviously done in the south west. there was some concern and some observations that the spannic a, spanish and native-americans tended to be more often down stream in the releases than the others. before i transition to how we know about this and how these experiments came to life, how questions about the experiments? how many of you knew about these experiments before this lass? word of mouth or reading about them. >> word of mouth. >> word of mouth. >> in another history class.

>> okay. >> how do we know about this. >> if they were top secret and they were top secret. there were early reports and rumors that some americans had been injected with plutonium. a congressional report in 1986 was called america's nuclear guinea pigs. written in brand congressional la language. a journalist wrote about the story and got names and faces. i mentioned a few people here. she wrote some incredible stories and has a wonderful book out called the plutonium files. but really we started to find out a lot more about these with

the book that came out of a commission. this was the rather thick book fro. it was created in january of 1994. president bill clinton ordered all federal agencies and a ton of tough was declassified. those documents are now publically available. lots of pep have got to them and written about them . he wethey were en, people wonded

what was going on. they held lots of hearings. there were lots of groups of people who felt aggrieved. veterans, convicted, mothers. people in the wrong place at the wrong time. they gaple with attention of how do you make judgments and differentiate between wrngness of actions. it's one thing to know. they were asked to decide who should receive monetary damages. who deserves money for this that the government ought to pay. they came up with a fairly short list. they were criticized for that. the report was released and president clinton apologized on

october the 3rd. also on october the 3rd, 1995, the jury came down with the verdict in the oj simpson trial. so it's an example of bam release the report. now this is a wonderful book. really a tremendous report. you may have noticed that some of what i'm telling you magt not be as crystal clear and that is because many of the records what happened are incomplete. we just don't know. some are contradictory. some things we don't have protocols for. you asked about informed

consent. we don't know. many because it was being done in war time. maybe because it was top secret maybe because nobody bothered to write it down. maybe because what we're doing here and maybe we need to lose these records. thi i think the committee did as pch as they possibly could about feigneding out about this. afundamental a afundamental argument is how do we assess what happened in the past. a lot of the concepts of informed consent were not well articulated. it's not fair to go back and say well, we didn't do things the

way they done them. the committee did come up with a method of making retrospecti ir. there are certain ethical principals that stand the test of tame and place. all of those are then they heed doct doctor. the problem here is that if the policies are secret, how do you know about them? huh? 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's not okay to just use people because they are dying. some of the rationale for some of the plutonium experiments and

radiation experiments and other injections was that these people are dying and we mine as well get information from them. being ill and hospitalized did not justify that. you still have to respect them as people. so what are key lesson from the radiation experiments. i've only scratched the surface. i hope you will good and read more about them it. jonathan moreno has a wonderful book on it. one of the lessons is the medicine and the request for knowledge has to be looked at it the in a specific political, economic, social context. these radiations experiments

started in the context of a cold war and ended up in aer which with a care with the fear that these weapons could be used against us. nonetheless some of the features that koim out of tcame out of t experiments. the idea if you wanted to do a big project you could get government funding it do big pro oe cots. even smaller studies that go against several hospitals. people got used to the idea that they ought to be funded it do researches are built on this

notion that people doing science and medicine should get the funding they need to do the research. one of the casualties of these experiments is trust. even if nobody got hurt there aren't very many people who think for example that it's a good idea to give children radioactive oatmeal without telling everybody or 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. what i tried to do was give you results of the radiation experiments and what happened. we got just a few minutes. let me see if there are any questions or