The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome. It is a history of United States government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning series Welsome wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune.Book review, The New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 341:1941–1942, December 16, 1999. . Book Review, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 76, Number 3, Fall 2002, pp. 637–638.
Overview The experiments began in 1945, when Manhattan Project scientists were preparing to detonate the first atomic bomb. Radiation was known to be dangerous and the experiments were designed to ascertain the detailed effect of radiation on human health. Most of the subjects, Welsome says, were poor, powerless, and sick.
From 1945 to 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium by Manhattan project doctors. Ebb Cade was an unwilling participant in medical experiments that involved injection of 4.7 micrograms of plutonium on April 10, 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.Moss, William, and Roger Eckhardt. (1995). "The human plutonium injection experiments." Los Alamos Science. 23: 177-233.DOE Openness (June 1998). Human Radiation Experiments: ACHRE Report. "Chapter 5: The Manhattan district Experiments: the first injection". Washington, D.C. Superintendent of Documents US Government Printing Office. This experiment was under the supervision of Harold Hodge.AEC no. UR-38, 1948 Quarterly Technical Report Other experiments directed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission continued into the 1970s. The Plutonium Files chronicles the lives of the subjects of the secret program by naming each person involved and discussing the ethical and medical research conducted in secret by the scientists and doctors. Albert Stevens, the man who survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human, four-year-old Simeon Shaw sent from Australia to the U.S. for treatment, and Elmer Allen are some of the notable subjects of the Manhattan Project program led by Joseph Gilbert Hamilton.
Subjects The following table lists subjects of the experiments by their subject names. 17 out of 18 have been identified in The Plutonium Files.
Patient number and biographical information at time of injectionNameDate injectedDate of deathSurvival timeAge at deathCause of deathWeight of injected Pu-239 (microgram)HP-12, 55-year-old manEbb Cade194519538 years63Heart failure4.7CHI-1, 68-year-old manArthur Hubbard194519455 months68Cancer of chin, lungs6.5CAL-1, 58-year-old manAlbert Stevens1945196620.7 years79Heart disease0.75 + 0.2 (Pu-238)HP-1, 67-year-old manAmedio Lovecchio1945196014.2 years81Bronchopneumonia4.6HP-2, 48-year-old manWilliam Purcell194519482.4 years50Brain disease5.1HP-3, 48-year-old womanEda Schultz Charlton1945198337.2 years85Acute cardiac arrest4.9HP-4, 18-year-old womanJean Daigneault194519471.4 years20Cushing's syndrome4.9HP-5, 56-year-old manPaul Galinger194519465 months57Bronchopneumonia5.1CHI-2, 56-year-old womanUna Macke1945194617 days56Breast cancer94.9CHI-3, Young adult maleUnknown194519466 monthsUnknownLikely Hodgkin's Disease94.9HP-6, 44-year-old manJohn Mousso1946198438 years82Natural death5.3HP-7, 59-year-old womanEdna Bartholf194619469 months60Pulmonary failure6.3HP-11, 69-year-old manHarry Slack194619466 days69Bronchopneumonia6.5HP-8, 41-year-old womanJanet Stadt1946197529.7 years71Unknown6.5HP-9, 64-year-old manFred Sours194619471.2 years65Bronchopneumonia6.3CAL-2, 4-year, 10-month old boySimeon Shaw194619478 months5Bone cancer2.7 + radio-cerium and yttriumHP-10, 52-year-old manDaniel Nelson1946195710.9 years63Heart disease6.1CAL-3, 36-year-old manElmer Allen1947199144 years80Respiratory failure.006 (Pu-238)
In Nashville, pregnant women were given radioactive mixtures. In Cincinnati, some 200 patients were irradiated over a period of 15 years. In Chicago, 102 people received injections of strontium and caesium solutions. In Massachusetts, 73 children were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive tracers in an experiment sponsored by MIT and the Quaker Oats Company. In none of these cases were the subjects informed about the nature of the procedures, and thus could not have provided informed consent.
In the book these stories are interwoven with details of more well-known radiation experiments and accidents. These include accounts of U.S. soldiers deliberately exposed to nuclear bomb blasts, families who lived downwind from atomic tests, radiation exposure in the Marshall Islands and the Japanese Lucky Dragon trawler caught in the fallout from the Castle Bravo test in 1954.
The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome's book. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them. Following the report, Clinton declared that the experiments, "failed both the test of our national values and the test of humanity". Two hours afterward, the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case was issued, and much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere.
Jonathan D. Moreno was a senior staff member of the committee. He wrote the 1999 book Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, which covers some of the same ground as The Plutonium Files.
See also Acres of Skin Experimentation on prisoners Ruth Faden Harold Hodge Plutopia Unethical human experimentation in the United States
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