Reference
- Radiation ExposureRadiation exposure occurs any time electromagnetic rays or fast-moving particles interact with living tissue. Ionizing radiation is particularly damaging to tissue; examples include x rays, gamma radiation, and fast-moving subatomic particles such as neutrons. Biological damage caused by exposure to ionizing radiation ranges from mild tissue burns to cancer, genetic damage, and ultimately, death.
While radiation in the form of heat, visible light, and even ultraviolet (UV) light is essential to life, the word radiation is often used to refer only to those emissions that can damage or kill living things. Such harm is specifically attributed to radioactive particles as well as the electromagnetic rays with frequencies higher than visible light (UV, x rays, gamma rays). Harmful electromagnetic radiation is also known as ionizing radiation because it strips atoms of one or more of their electrons, leaving highly reactive ions called free radicals, which can damage tissue or genetic material.
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Perspectives
The Treatment
The Treatment is the story of one tragedy of medical research that stretched over eleven years and affected the lives of hundreds of people in an Ohio city. Thirty years ago the author, then an assistant professor of English, acquired a large set of little-known medical papers at her university. These documents told a grotesque story. Cancer patients coming to the public hospital on her campus were being swept into secret experiments for the U.S. military; they were being irradiated over their whole bodies as if they were soldiers in nuclear war. Of the ninety women and men exposed to this treatment, twenty-one died within a month of their radiations. Martha Stephens's report on these deaths led to the halting of the tests, but local papers did not print her charges, and for many years people in Cincinnati had no way of knowing that lethal experiments had taken place there. In 1994 other military tests were brought to light, and a yellowed copy of Stephens's original report was delivered to a television newsroom. In Ohio, major publicity ensued--at long last--and reached around the world. Stephens uncovered the names of the victims, and a legal action was filed against thirteen researchers and their institutions. A federal judge compared the deeds of the doctors to the medical crimes of the Nazis during World War II and refused to dismiss the researchers from the suit. After many bitter disputes in court, they agreed to settle the case with the families of those they had afflicted. In 1999 a memorial plaque was raised in a yard of the hospital.
Contested Medicine
In the 1960saUniversity of Cincinnati radiologist Eugene Saenger infamously conducted human experiments on patients with advanced cancer to examine how total body radiation could treat the disease. But, under contract with the Department of Defense, Saenger also used those same patients as proxies for soldiers to answer questions about combat effectiveness on a nuclear battlefield. a Using the Saenger case as a means to reconsider cold war medical trials, "Contested Medicine" examines the inherent tensions at the heart of clinical studies of the time. Emphasizing the deeply intertwined and mutually supportive relationship between cancer therapy with radiation and military medicine, Gerald Kutcher explores postOCoWorld War II cancer trials, the efforts of the government to manage clinical ethics, and the important role of military investigations in the development of an effective treatment for childhood leukemia. Whereas most histories of human experimentation judge research such as SaengerOCOs against idealized practices, "Contested Medicine "eschews such an approach and considers why SaengerOCOs peers and later critics had so much difficulty reaching an unambiguous ethical assessment. KutcherOCOs engaging investigation offers an approach to clinical ethics and research imperatives that lays bare many of the conflicts and tensions of the postwar period.
Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
This book describes in fascinating detail the variety of experiments sponsored by the U.S. government in which human subjects were exposed to radiation, often without their knowledge or consent. Based on a review of hundreds of thousands of heretofore unavailable or classified documents, this Report tells a gripping story of the intricate relationship between science and the state.Under the thick veil of government secrecy, researchers conducted experiments that ranged from the mundane to such egregious violations as administering radioactive tracers to mentally retarded teenagers, injecting p...
Hole in the Head
This book tells the story of Vertus Hardiman and nine other young children who were severely irradiated as part of a medical experiment in Lyles Station, Indiana, in 1927.
Online Government Sources
- Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments - Executive SummaryThe Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (stock number 061-000-00-848-9), the supplemental volumes to the Final Report (stock numbers 061-000-00850-1, 061-000-00851-9, and 061-000-00852-7), and additional copies of this Executive Summary (stock number 061-000-00849-7) may be purchased from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office.
- Human Radiation ExperimentsAlthough these experiments did provide information on the retention and absorption of radioactive material by the human body, the experiments are nonetheless repugnant because human subjects were essentially used as guinea pigs and calibration devices.
- HUMAN RADIATION STUDIES: REMEMBERING THE EARLY YEARSI undertook an effort to identify and catalog historical documents on radiation
experiments that had used human subjects. The Office of Human Radiation Experiments coordinated the Department’s search for records about these experiments. An enormous volume of historical records has been located. Many of these
records were disorganized: often poorly cataloged, if at all; and scattered across
the country in holding areas, archives, and records centers.
Online Articles from the Library
- The Buchenwald touch. (U.S. nuclear radiation experimentation on humans)Energy Sec Hazel O'Leary has bravely sought full disclosure of the experimentation, which took place in various sites from 1950 through the seventies. The callous secrecy with which defenseless civilians were victimized gives rise to fears about more recent secret horrors.
- Judging the Past: The Case of the Human Radiation ExperimentsOur reluctance to measure the morality of past practices is more than a nagging problem for moral theorists. The legitimacy of retrospective moral judgment has fundamental implications for how practices and institutions should be viewed, and judged, now.
- The women radium dial painters as experimental subjects (1920–1990) or what counts as human experimentationThe case of women radium dial painters — women who tipped their brushes while painting the dials of watches and instruments with radioactive paint — has been extensively discussed in the medical and historical literature. Their painful and abhorrent deaths have occupied the interest of physicians, lawyers, politicians, military agencies, and the public. Hardly any discussion has concerned, however, the use of those women as experimental subjects in a number of epidemiological studies that took place from 1920 to 1990. This article addresses the neglected issue of human experimentation in relation to the radium dial painters. Although women’s medical examinations have been classified as simple, routine measurements of radiation burden on the body and presented as a great offer to humanity, for more than fifty years those women had been repeatedly used as experimental subjects without proper consent. I argue that through this case it becomes obvious that the issue of defining what counts as human experimentation shifts from an epistemological to a serious ethical and political question, concerning the making of scientific knowledge while issues of gender related to this process are also discussed.
Streaming Media
- The Plutonium FilesBetween 1945 and 1947, a series of experiments at four hospitals around the country involved injecting plutonium or other radioactive elements into a total of 30 humans to study the effects. In Oak Ridge in April of 1945, doctors injected an African-American man named Ebb Cade without his consent.