U.S. human radiation experiments

Beginning in 1945, scientists working for the Manhattan Project injected plutonium into 18 hospital patients to learn how the body absorbs and excretes it. The first, Ebb Cade, was a construction worker injured in a car crash and treated at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. None of the patients was told what was being done. Over the next three decades, studies sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, the military and other agencies fed radioactive iron to pregnant women at Vanderbilt, gave radioactive tracers in oatmeal to boys at the Fernald School in Massachusetts, irradiated the testicles of prisoners in Oregon and Washington, and exposed cancer patients in Cincinnati to whole body radiation.¹²

The motive was the atomic age itself: officials needed to know how much radiation workers and soldiers could safely absorb, and radioisotopes were a powerful new medical tool. Records were kept secret partly to avoid embarrassment and lawsuits. In 1993 reporter Eileen Welsome named the plutonium patients in the Albuquerque Tribune, and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary opened the files. President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported in 1995 that the government had sponsored about 4,000 radiation experiments, most of them harmless, but that some had wronged their subjects, and Clinton formally apologized.¹³⁴