Unethical radiation experiments were conducted on about 600 subjects in the United States beginning in the 1940’s and running into the 1970’s 45, 89, 311. These experiments overlapped with chemical and biological weapons research and mind control experimentation. The radiation experiments were funded by a variety of government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and the CIA. Subjects did not give meaningful informed consent.
As was true of mind control and biological weapons research, radiation experiments were conducted on children and unwitting civilians. Physicians were directly involved in administering the radiation and measuring its effects. The radiation experiments are part of the historical background of psychiatric participation in mind control.
President Clinton set up a Committee to look into radiation experiments after they were described in the media in late 1993. The information had been made public in a Senate Subcommittee report produced by Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts in 1986311, but it didn’t generate any public reaction at that time. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments issued its Final Report in October, 1995.
An example of unethical radiation research is the experiment done on Ebb Cade, a 53-year old black man who was in a car accident on March 24, 1945. He was in treatment for fractures and other injuries at Oak Ridge Army Hospital when he was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium on April 10, five days before his fractures were set. The experimental protocol was to sample his blood for four hours after injection, bone tissue ninety-six hours after, and bodily excretions for 40-60 days, all to measure the plutonium levels. Bone samples were taken when his fractures were set, and also some teeth were extracted for analysis.
Data on Mr. Cade were presented at a “Conference on Plutonium” in Chicago in May, 1945 by Wright Langham of the Los Alamos Laboratory’s Health Division. Mr. Cade was given the subject number HP-12 which stood for “human product”, a code also used in radiation experiments at the University of Rochester. Ebb Cade died as a result of heart failure on April 13, 1953 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Many people were injected with plutonium, x-rayed and exposed to other forms of radiation without their informed consent. Elmer Allen and his wife Fredna, a black couple, were pleased when, in 1973, doctors offered them a free trip to New York to study why he had survived bone cancer for so long (The Dallas Morning News, December 31, 1993, page 1A). As part of the trip they were picked up by limousine in Chicago and Mr. Allen was taken to the Argonne National Laboratory while his wife went sightseeing.
Doctors at the University of California in San Francisco injected Mr. Allen with plutonium on July 14, 1947, four days before his leg was amputated for bone cancer. Mr Allen and seventeen other patients were injected with plutonium in an experiment run by the MANHATTAN PROJECT.
John Simpson311, a retired astrophysicist who worked for the MANHATTAN PROJECT commented on these plutonium injections by saying, “We should be extremely cautious about criticizing their work.” He claimed that without such experiments, “radioactive dangers would be greater throughout the world today.”
Although that claim is dubious, it misses the point even if accurate. The problem with the experiments is the lack of informed consent and the deceptive rationalizations of the physicians for their ongoing interest in Mr. Allen. These continued into the 1970’s and are serious ethical violations even if there was no physical harm to Mr. Allen from the plutonium, and even if the experiments yielded valuable information.
Other subjects were financially compensated for their participation in radiation experiments. Prisoners in Washington and Oregon state prisons were paid to have their testicles irradiated; they got $5.00 a month for the irradiation, $10.00 each time a testicle was biopsied, and $100.00 for completing the experiment. According to project director Dr. Carl Heller, the prisoners received vasectomies “to avoid the possibility of contaminating the general population with irradiation-induced mutants.”
Because of the need for vasectomies, Catholic prisoners were excluded from participating. During the experiment, which ran from 1963 to 1971, the subjects’ testicles were exposed to 600 roentgen of radiation, which is 100 times the maximum recommended dose. In 1976 a group of subjects filed suit, as a result of which the Oregon State Legislature made an award of $2,215.00. This sum was split among nine men.
Other experiments were conducted at Los Alamos (site of the MANHATTAN PROJECT); Dugway Proving Ground, Utah (site of Army LSD experiments); Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford Nuclear Facility, Richmond, Washington from 1948 to 1952. Clouds of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere and tracked as they moved downwind, often through populated areas. In one experiment code-named GREEN RUN, radioactive iodine-131 was released from the Hanford Nuclear Facility and drifted over Spokane. The cloud contained hundreds and perhaps thousands as times as much radiation as was released accidentally at Three Mile Island in 1979.
Another project run jointly by Massachusetts General Hospital and the Health Physics Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was called the Boston Project. An investigator in this Project was Dr. William Sweet, a neurosurgeon whose brain electrode experiments will be discussed in a later chapter. In 1995 testimony to the Advisory Committee, Dr. Sweet claimed that all subjects injected with uranium in the Boston Project gave informed consent. However, Boston Project subject VI was injected after he arrived at the Emergency Ward unconscious, and he died of a subdural hematoma, without being identified and without regaining consciousness.
Chapter 7 of the Final Report is entitled “Nontherapeutic Research on Children.” In 1961 researchers at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University School of Medicine gave radioactive iodine to seventy retarded children at Wrentham State School. These institutions also received CIA mind control money through MKULTRA.
Other MKULTRA institutions that injected nontherapeutic radioactive materials into children included Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT gave radioactive substances to children at the Fernald School by putting it in their food. The Advisory Committee notes that no risks of radioactivity were mentioned in the consent form signed by the parents. The consent form stated that the purpose of the experiments was “helping to improve the nutrition of our children.”
The Advisory Committee says of the nutritional claim, “This was simply not true.” (page 344).
In the 1940’s, 751 women receiving prenatal care at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee were given experimental radiation doses. Several of the children of these pregnancies died of cancer. One died of leukemia at age 5.
The radiation experiments were interwoven with research on chemical and biological weapons, and infectious diseases251. As in the radiation experiments, children were the subjects of biological experiments. It is unknown how many mentally retarded children have been injected with viruses and bacteria in North America. Dr. Saul Krugman of New York University and his staff deliberately injected severely mentally retarded children at Willowbrook State School with hepatitis virus in the 1950’s and 1960’s154.
Dr. Krugman’s research was funded by the Army Medical Research and Development Command, Department of the Army under contract DA-49-193-MD-2331. It was also sponsored by the Commission on Viral Infections, Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, Office of the Surgeon General. Additionally, it was reviewed and approved by the New York University School of Medicine Committee on Human Experimentation and the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene. The ethics of Krugman’s (1971) research were debated in The Lancet107, 153, 282.
Dr. Krugman defended the morality of the project and said that it was scientifically justified. Although to date there has been no compensation for victims of unethical biological experiments, the federal government has officially disagreed with apologists for the radiation experiments. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary announced in New York on November 19, 1996 that twelve families of victims of radiation experiments were being compensated for a total of $4.8 million (The Dallas Morning News, November 20, 1996, page 6A). The only victim still alive to receive compensation directly was Mary Jean Connell, a 74-year old woman living in Avon, New York.
The radiation experiments are part of the cultural background of psychiatric participation in mind control. Many doctors and leading academic institutions participated directly in the research. The work was conducted in the absence of any public discussion, and without guidelines or monitoring from professional Associations. Informed consent was not obtained, funding sources were not revealed, and subjects were given disinformation about the intent of the experiments by doctors.
The participation of psychiatrists, other physicians and psychologists, and leading medical schools in mind control and radiation research was not an anomaly or aberration. It was not a matter of isolated rogue doctors and the experiments were not conducted during a period with different ethical standards. Much of the research was published in professional journals, though never with acknowledgement that experiments were funded by the CIA. The radiation experiments are part of the climate and historical background for mind control experimentation.