Radiation -- Toxicology -- Research -- United States. |
Human experimentation in medicine -- United States. |
Radiation victims -- United States. |
Informed consent (Medical law) -- United States. |
Radiation -- Physiological effect -- Research -- Moral and ethical aspects -- United States. |
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Summary
When the vast wartime factories of the Manhattan Project began producing plutonium in quantities never before seen on earth, scientists working on the top-secret bomb-building program grew apprehensive. Fearful that plutonium might cause a cancer epidemic among workers and desperate to learn more about what it could do to the human body, the Manhattan Project's medical doctors embarked upon an experiment in which eighteen unsuspecting patients in hospital wards throughout the country were secretly injected with the cancer-causing substance. Most of these patients would go to their graves without ever knowing what had been done to them. Now, inThe Plutonium Files, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome reveals for the first time the breadth of the extraordinary fifty-year cover-up surrounding the plutonium injections, as well as the deceitful nature of thousands of other experiments conducted on American citizens in the postwar years. Welsome's remarkable investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American history. She gives a voice to such innocents as Helen Hutchison, a young woman who entered a prenatal clinic in Nashville for a routine checkup and was instead given a radioactive "cocktail" to drink; Gordon Shattuck, one of several boys at a state school for the developmentally disabled in Massachusetts who was fed radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; and Maude Jacobs, a Cincinnati woman suffering from cancer and subjected to an experimental radiation treatment designed to help military planners learn how to win a nuclear war. Welsome also tells the stories of the scientists themselves, many of whom learned the ways of secrecy on the Manhattan Project. Among them are Stafford Warren, a grand figure whose bravado masked a cunning intelligence; Joseph Hamilton, who felt he was immune to the dangers of radiation only to suffer later from a fatal leukemia; and physician Louis Hempelmann, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the plan to inject humans with potentially carcinogenic doses of plutonium. Hidden discussions of fifty years past are reconstructed here, wherein trusted government officials debated the ethical and legal implications of the experiments, demolishing forever the argument that these studies took place in a less enlightened era. Powered by her groundbreaking reportage and singular narrative gifts, Eileen Welsome has created a work of profound humanity as well as major historical significance.
Reviews: (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a deeply shocking and important expos, Welsome takes the lid off the thousands of secret, government-sponsored radiation experiments performed on unsuspecting human "guinea pigs" at U.S. hospitals, universities and military bases during the Cold War. This riveting report greatly expands on Welsome's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 articles in the Albuquerque Tribune, which told how 18 men, women and children scattered in hospital wards across the country were injected with plutonium by U.S. Army and Manhattan Project doctors between 1945 and 1947. As Welsome demonstrates, the scope of the government's radiation experimentation program went much further. She documents how, between 1951 and 1962, the army, navy and air force used military troops in flights through radioactive clouds, "flashblindness" studies and tests to measure radio-isotopes in their body fluids. Additionally, she reveals that cancer patients were subjected to total-body irradiation, and women, children, the poor, minorities, prisoners and the mentally disabled were targeted for radio-isotope "tracer" studies, frequently without their consent and in some cases suffering excruciating side effects and premature deaths. In 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary launched a campaign to make public all documents relating to the experiments, which had been kept secret. Welsome cogently argues that O'Leary's efforts resulted in a Republican vendetta that led to her ouster. Written with commendable restraint, this engrossing narrative draws liberally on declassified memos, briefings, phone calls, interviews and medical records to convey the enormity of the irradiation program and the bad science behind the flawed and dangerous testsÄand to document the government's systematic cover-up. Anyone who cares about America's history, moral health and future should read this book. 8-city author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A fierce exposÇ of governmental duplicity and dangerous science. A decade ago Welsome, a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune, happened upon a reference in an air force report to a nuclear waste pile that contained the carcasses of several animals that had been used in testing the effects of radiation. The report hinted that animals were not the only subjects. Intrigued, Welsome began to sift through a mountain of official documents, discovering that, from 1945 to 1947, 18 unsuspecting civilians----men, women, and even children scattered in quiet hospital wards across the country----had been injected with plutonium to test the effects of radioactive materials on the human body. Such testing formed part of a federal program that employed, in the words of a government film narrator, "every angle and every gadget we can to find out what really happens when an atomic bomb kicks out fiercely at the world around it." In a tour de force of investigative reporting, Welsome tracked down some of these subjects; and she weaves their stories into a larger narrative, one that tells the story of US government Cold War medical experimentation as a whole. Much of this testing, it appears, was unnecessary--after all, the government had thousands of preexisting subjects, the Japanese victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of it, Welsome suggests, was done at the behest of US atomic scientists at Los Alamos, N.M., who were worried about their own health. Those physicists, as scientist Arthur Compton wrote, "knew what had happened to the early experimenters with radioactive materials. Not many of them had lived very long." Neither did many of those 18 victims, and neither did thousands of soldiers and civilians exposed to atomic-bomb blasts in the deserts of the Southwest, all in the name of delivering the world from Communism. The literature on the official crimes of the Cold War era is large and growing. Welsome's stunning book adds much to that literature, and it makes for sobering reading. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Journalist Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her exposeof the secret experiments conducted by the "bomb doctors" of Los Alamos, who injected 18 patients with plutonium without their knowledge or consent during the cold war. Some died soon after. Others lived for decades in pain and ill health, which they passed on to their descendants in the form of birth defects. Welsome's aggressive research and courageous reporting coincided with the release of classified documentation of thousands of other cases involving the deliberate yet clandestine exposure of civilians, prison inmates, and military personnel to high levels of radiation. As a result, President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was established, but its shocking disclosures and the subsequent public outcry flashed by too quickly and inconsequentially to take root in our national consciousness. So now, in this reportorial tour de force, Welsome presents the entire harrowing story of the catastrophic consequences of the atomic weapons establishment's almost unimaginable hubris and immorality. As skilled in rendering science comprehensible as she is in articulating the ethical issues involved, Welsome is also an accomplished profiler. Her portraits of medical officers who were so desperate to understand how radiation and plutonium affected the body they broke the Hippocratic oath as well as every other law of decency are chilling, and her dramatic and compassionate depictions of the mothers, children, and blue-collar workers these monsters tortured--people who were, for the most part, poor, uneducated, and sick--are unforgettable, the fabric, one would think, of nightmares, and every bit of it true. Welsome has compiled a staggering and invaluable chronicle of the most ghoulish and appalling aspects of the creation of the atom bomb, an undertaking that has put every human being at risk, and with which we have yet to even begin to come to terms. --Donna Seaman
Choice Review
Plutonium, an element discovered in 1940, quickly found use in atomic weaponry manufacture, before its health effects had been better understood. To build its own database, the Manhattan Project's medical staff began developing relevant information, all of which had been maintained as secret for some 50 years. When Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary in 1993 ordered declassifying old Atomic Energy Commission health-related secret documents, some of them revealed the tests. Among them, and by far the most disturbing, were those performed on unsuspecting patients. Indeed, small numbers of atomic workers had been deliberately and unknowingly (to them) put at risk. These declassified documents provided the sources for science reporter Welsome's well-written coverage of this sorry topic. In an easily readable narrative, she traces the program's tragic history from its accidental beginnings in 1944 at Los Alamos through tests up to the mid-1970s elsewhere in the US, experiments in which victims in limited numbers were unwittingly exposed to plutonium. She details her information sources and includes a serviceable index. All levels. J. G. Morse; Colorado School of Mines
Library Journal Review
Here's another work of fact that reads like fiction: to see whether radioactive materials caused cancer, Los Alamos scientists secretly injected hospital patients with plutonium. Welsome won a Pulitzer and many other awards for breaking the story. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.