Against Their Will by Allen M. Hornblum

Author:Allen M. Hornblum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

Regardless of whether clinical trials during the Cold War were designed to learn more about radiation or the nature of disease, institutions holding impaired and orphaned children often became the epicenter for the investigational studies. The Manhattan Project and the extraordinary campaign to build the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II touched off a frenetic effort to learn the secrets of a new science and weapon that had never existed before. Decades earlier, scientists had known that radiation was dangerous; close proximity to X-rays by early investigators had confirmed their threat, and most knew that women who ingested liquid radium while painting watch dials were subject to early and painful deaths. Now, during the last years of the war, Manhattan Project doctors raised the alarm about potential problems. Enriched uranium and plutonium were necessary for the project’s success, but they were both problematic from a health standpoint. As one scientist counseled his colleagues, plutonium even at low doses should be regarded as “extremely poisonous.” Additional research was needed, and that required human experimentation.

For example, in medical journal articles assessing thyroid activity, the subjects of the research were often described as those “institutionalized for mental inadequacy,” “mental defectives,” “juvenile delinquents,” and “abnormal children.” For example, one study measuring thyroid activity in children using radioactive iodine (I–131) at the dawn of the Cold War in 1949 incorporated both “normal” and “abnormal” children. Not surprisingly, the abnormal group formed the majority of the subjects and consisted of a cross-section of children including a “cretin,” a “pituitary dwarf,” and others who were said to possess characteristics of “mongolism” and “gargoylism,” terms that eugenicists decades earlier had helped to popularize.64 For example, a month-old infant described as a “mongolian idiot” was presumed to be one of the first with that malady to be injected with radioactive iodine. The research was conducted at the University of Michigan Medical School and funded in part by the American Cancer Society.

Radioactive studies were conducted on even younger subjects. At the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in 1954, Dr. Van Middlesworth experimented on seven newborn boys—“six Negroes” and “one Caucasian”—just two and three days old and weighing between seven and nine pounds.65 Middlesworth believed that no such studies had been reported on newborns. Realizing that “the use of radiation in the very young organism is open to some question,” he decided to consult a local group of advisors. The group—a radiologist, a radiation physicist, two internists, two pediatricians, a physiologist, and a pathologist—decided that injecting I–131 into newborns was acceptable and “not expected to be harmful.” Middlesworth stated that he described the procedure to the mothers of the infants and received their consent. Whether mothers—African American or white—in the South in the early 1950s understood anything about radiation uptake studies and the half-life of certain atomic particles is another issue. Doctors were hopeful, however, that the exercise would “prove useful in the diagnosis of thyroid abnormalities in infants” in the future.66

Just a year later, doctors at a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.