and i really hope that you will go and read more about them in books like eileen wellsome's book.jonathan marino has a book on the experiments, the human irradiation experiments. it has a lot more detail. one of the lessons is that medicine and the quest for knowledge has to be looked at in the specific social, and economic context. it just can't be understood if you take it out of the context. these radiation experiments started in the context of a world war, and continued by and large in the context of a cold war, which turned quite hot on occasion. which was characterized by secrecy, which was characterized by fear that these weapons could be used against us. nonetheless, some of the features that came out of these experiments continue to this day. the penchant for large-scale research, for big research, for the idea that if you want to do a big project, that you can get government funding to do huge, big protocols. even smaller scale protocols have a lot to do with the era that this comes out of. the idea of doing studies that go across several different hospitals, for example