https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
[h=1]Unethical human experimentation in the United States[/h]
This article is about U.S. medical experiments that are alleged to be unethical, non-consensual, or illegal. For the consensual, ethical, and legal use of human beings in medical research, see
Human subject research.
Particularly in the 20th century, there have been numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered
unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge,
consent, or
informed consent of the
test subjects.
The experiments include: the deliberate infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure of people to biological and chemical weapons,
human radiation experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and
torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children,[SUP]
[1][/SUP] the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities or prisoners.
Funding for many of the experiments was provided by
United States government, especially the
United States military,
Central Intelligence Agency, or private corporations involved with military activities. The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.
The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to
many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future
human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the
Church Committee and
Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975 and the 1994
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.
[h=2]Surgical experiments[/h] Throughout the 1840s,
J. Marion Sims, who is often referred to as "the father of
gynecology", performed surgical experiments on
enslaved African women, without
anaesthesia. The women—one of whom was operated on 30 times—regularly died from infections resulting from the experiments.[SUP]
[2][/SUP] In order to test one of his theories about the causes of
trismus in infants, Sims performed experiments where he used a shoemaker's
awl to move around the skull bones of the babies of enslaved women.[SUP]
[3][/SUP][SUP]
[4][/SUP]
In 1874, Mary Rafferty, an Irish servant woman, came to Dr.
Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati for treatment of her cancer. Seeing a research opportunity, he cut open her head, and inserted needle electrodes into her exposed brain matter.[SUP]
[5][/SUP] He described the experiment as follows:
When the needle entered the brain substance, she complained of acute pain in the neck. In order to develop more decided reactions, the strength of the current was increased ... her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry. Very soon, the left hand was extended as if in the act of taking hold of some object in front of her; the arm presently was agitated with clonic spasm; her eyes became fixed, with pupils widely dilated; lips were blue, and she frothed at the mouth; her breathing became stertorous; she lost consciousness and was violently convulsed on the left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes, and was succeeded by a coma. She returned to consciousness in twenty minutes from the beginning of the attack, and complained of some weakness and vertigo.
—Dr. Bartholow's research report[SUP]
[5][/SUP]
In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed
spinal taps on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents, at the Children's Hospital in
Boston, Massachusetts to discover whether doing so would be harmful.[SUP]
[6][/SUP]
From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the
San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take the
testicles out of
executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of
rams,
goats, and
boars into living prisoners. Stanley also performed various
eugenics experiments, and
forced sterilizations on San Quentin prisoners.[SUP]
[7][/SUP] Stanley believed that his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the "unfit" from reproducing.[SUP]
[7][/SUP][SUP]
[8][/SUP]
[h=2]Pathogens, disease, and biological warfare agents[/h]
A subject of the
Tuskegee syphilis experiment has his blood drawn, c. 1953
In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a California physician working at a hospital for
lepers injected six girls under the age of 12 with
syphilis.[SUP]
[6][/SUP] In 1895,
New York City pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two "idiots" (mentally disabled boys)—one four-year-old and one sixteen-year old—with
gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment. A review of the medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found more than 40 reports of experimental infections with gonorrheal culture, including some where gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children.[SUP]
[6][/SUP][SUP]
[9][/SUP][SUP]
[10][/SUP]
U.S Army doctors in the
Philippines infected five prisoners with
bubonic plague and induced
beriberi in 29 prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result.[SUP]
[11][/SUP][SUP]
[12][/SUP] In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with
cholera, which had somehow become contaminated with plague. He did this without the consent of the patients, and without informing them of what he was doing. All of the subjects became sick and 13 died.[SUP]
[12][/SUP][SUP]
[13][/SUP]
In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with
tuberculin at the St. Vincent's House orphanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent blindness in some of the children and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many of the others. In the study they refer to the children as "material used".[SUP]
[14][/SUP]
In 1909, F. C. Knowles released a study describing how he had deliberately infected two children in an orphanage with
Molluscum contagiosum after an outbreak in the orphanage, in order to study the disease.[SUP]
[6][/SUP]
In 1911, Dr.
Hideyo Noguchi of the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research injected 146 hospital patients (some of whom were children) with syphilis. He was later sued by the parents of some of the child subjects, who allegedly contracted syphilis as a result of his experiments.[SUP]
[15][/SUP]
The
Tuskegee syphilis experiment[SUP]
[16][/SUP] was a
clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in
Tuskegee, Alabama, by the
U.S. Public Health Service. In the experiment, 400 impoverished black males who had syphilis were offered "treatment" by the researchers, who did not tell the test subjects that they had syphilis and did not give them treatment for the disease, but rather just studied them to chart the progress of the disease. By 1947,
penicillin became available as treatment, but those running the study prevented study participants from receiving treatment elsewhere, lying to them about their true condition, so that they could observe the effects of syphilis on the human body. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. 28 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been
infected, and 19 of their children were born with
congenital syphilis. The study was not shut down until 1972, when its existence was leaked to the press, forcing the researchers to stop in the face of a public outcry.[SUP]
[17][/SUP]
In 1941, at the
University of Michigan, virologists
Thomas Francis,
Jonas Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with the
influenza virus by spraying the virus into their
nasal passages.[SUP]
[18][/SUP] Francis Payton Rous, based at the
Rockefeller Institute and editor of the
Journal of Experimental Medicine, wrote the following to Francis regarding the experiments:
"It may save you much trouble if you publish your paper... elsewhere than in the
Journal of Experimental Medicine. The
Journal is under constant scrutiny by the anti-vivisectionists who would not hesitate to play up the fact that you used for your tests human beings of a state institution. That the tests were wholly justified goes without saying."[SUP]
[19][/SUP]
Rous closely monitored the articles he published since the 1930s, when revival of the anti-vivisectionist movement raised pressure against certain human experimentation.[SUP]
[20][/SUP]
In 1941 Dr. William C. Black
inoculated with
herpes a twelve-month-old baby "offered as a volunteer". He submitted his research to
The Journal of Experimental Medicine and it was rejected on ethical grounds. The editor of the
Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, called the experiment "an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science."[SUP]
[21][/SUP][SUP]
[22][/SUP][SUP]
[23][/SUP] The study was later published in the
Journal of Pediatrics.[SUP]
[24][/SUP]
The
Stateville Penitentiary was the site of a controlled study of the effects of
malaria on the prisoners of
Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois beginning in the 1940s. The study was conducted by the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the State Department. At the
Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the precedent of the malaria experiments as part of their defense.[SUP]
[25][/SUP][SUP]
[26][/SUP] The study continued at Stateville Penitentiary for 29 years. In related studies from 1944 to 1946, Dr. Alf Alving, a professor at the
University of Chicago Medical School, purposely infected psychiatric patients at the Illinois State Hospital with
malaria, so that he could test experimental treatments on them.[SUP]
[27][/SUP]
In a 1946 to 1948
study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used
prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other
sexually transmitted diseases, in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs. They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's
penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures". Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study (including
orphan children). The study was sponsored by the
Public Health Service, the
National Institutes of Health and the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the
World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. The team was led by
John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the
Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States. In 2010 when the research was revealed, the US officially apologized to Guatemala for the studies.[SUP]
[28][/SUP][SUP]
[29][/SUP][SUP]
[30][/SUP][SUP]
[31][/SUP]
In 1950, in order to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the U.S. Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria
Serratia marcescens – considered harmless at this time – over the city of San Francisco. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia-like illnesses, and at least one person died as a result.[SUP]
[32][/SUP][SUP]
[33][/SUP][SUP]
[34][/SUP][SUP]
[35][/SUP][SUP]
[36][/SUP][SUP]
[37][/SUP] The family of the man who died sued the government for gross negligence, but a federal judge ruled in favor of the government in 1981.[SUP]
[38][/SUP]
Serratia tests were continued until at least 1969.[SUP]
[39][/SUP]
Also in 1950, Dr. Joseph Stokes of the
University of Pennsylvania deliberately infected 200 female prisoners with
viral hepatitis.[SUP]
[40][/SUP]
From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at the
Willowbrook State School in
Staten Island,
New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, for research whose purpose was to help discover a
vaccine.[SUP]
[41][/SUP] From 1963 to 1966,
Saul Krugman of
New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children with
viral hepatitis by
feeding them an extract made from the
feces of patients infected with the disease.[SUP]
[42][/SUP][SUP]
[43][/SUP]
In 1952, Chester M. Southam, a
Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher, injected live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy women were injected with live cancer cells without being told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it might cause cancer.[SUP]
[44][/SUP]
In 1955, the CIA conducted a
biological warfare experiment where they released
whooping cough bacteria from boats outside of
Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least 12 people.[SUP]
[45][/SUP][SUP]
[46][/SUP][SUP]
[47][/SUP]
In 1956 and 1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted on the cities of
Savannah, Georgia and
Avon Park, Florida. In the experiments, Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of infected
mosquitoes on the two towns, in order to see if the insects could potentially spread
yellow fever and
dengue fever. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths,
encephalitis, and
typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, so that they could photograph and perform medical tests on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.[SUP]
[11][/SUP][SUP]
[48][/SUP]
In 1962, 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in
Brooklyn, New York were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison, in order to "discover the secret of how healthy bodies fight the invasion of malignant cells". The administration of the hospital attempted to cover the study up, but the New York medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the
American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President.[SUP]
[49][/SUP]
From 1963 to 1969 as part of
Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases
VX and
Sarin, toxic chemicals such as
zinc cadmium sulfide and
sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents.[SUP]
[50][/SUP]
In 1966, the U.S. Army released the harmless
Bacillus globigii into the tunnels of the
New York City Subway system, as part of a field study called
A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents.[SUP]
[45][/SUP][SUP]
[51][/SUP][SUP]
[52][/SUP][SUP]
[53][/SUP][SUP]
[54][/SUP] The Chicago subway system was also subject to a similar experiment by the Army.[SUP]
[45][/SUP]
[h=2]Human radiation experiments[/h] Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of
human radiation experiments to determine the effects of
atomic radiation and
radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless.[SUP]
[55][/SUP] Most of these tests were performed, funded, or supervised by the
United States military,
Atomic Energy Commission, or various other
US federal government agencies.
The experiments included a wide array of studies, involving things like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or
conscientious objectors, inserting
radium rods into the noses of schoolchildren, deliberately releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian cities, measuring the health effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests, injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating the testicles of prison inmates, amongst other things.
Much information about these programs was
classified and kept secret. In 1986 the
United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a report entitled
American Nuclear Guinea Pigs : Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens.[SUP]
[56][/SUP] In the 1990s
Eileen Welsome's reports on radiation testing for
The Albuquerque Tribune prompted the creation of the
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments by
executive order of president
Bill Clinton, to monitor government tests. It published results in 1995. Welsome later wrote a book called
The Plutonium Files.
[h=3]Radioactive iodine experiments[/h] In a 1949 operation called the "
Green Run," the AEC released iodine-131 and
xenon-133 to the atmosphere near the
Hanford site in Washington, which contaminated a 500,000-acre (2,000 km[SUP]2[/SUP]) area containing three small towns.[SUP]
[57][/SUP]
In 1953, the
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran several studies at the
University of Iowa on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from 100 to 200
microcuries (3.7 to 7.4
MBq) of iodine-131, in order to study the women's
aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the
placental barrier. In another study, they gave 25 newborn babies (who were under 36 hours old and weighed from 5.5 to 8.5 pounds (2.5 to 3.9 kg)) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through an injection, so that they could measure the amount of iodine in their thyroid glands, as iodine would go to that gland.[SUP]
[58][/SUP]
In another AEC study, researchers at the
University of Nebraska College of Medicine fed iodine-131 to 28 healthy infants through a gastric tube to test the concentration of iodine in the infants' thyroid glands.[SUP]
[58][/SUP]
In 1953, the AEC sponsored a study to discover if radioactive iodine affected
premature babies differently from full-term babies. In the experiment, researchers from Harper Hospital in
Detroit orally administered iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants who weighed from 2.1 to 5.5 pounds (0.95 to 2.49 kg).[SUP]
[58][/SUP]
From 1955 to 1960,
Sonoma State Hospital in northern California served as a permanent drop-off location for mentally handicapped children diagnosed with cerebral palsy or lesser disorders. The children subsequently underwent painful experimentation without adult consent. Many were given irradiated milk, some spinal taps "for which they received no direct benefit." Reporters of
60 Minutes learned that in these five years, the brain of every cerebral palsy child who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied without parental consent. According to the CBS story, over 1,400 patients died at the clinic.[SUP]
[59][/SUP]
In an experiment in the 1960s, over 100 Alaskan citizens were continually exposed to radioactive iodine.[SUP]
[60][/SUP]
In 1962, the Hanford site again released I-131, stationing test subjects along its path to record its effect on them. The AEC also recruited Hanford volunteers to ingest milk contaminated with I-131 during this time.[SUP]
[58][/SUP]
[h=3]Uranium experiments[/h]
“It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work should be
classified `secret’.”
April 17, 1947 Atomic Energy Commission memo from Colonel O.G. Haywood, Jr. to Dr. Fidler at the
Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee[SUP]
[61][/SUP]
Between 1946 and 1947, researchers at the
University of Rochester injected
uranium-234 and
uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7
micrograms per kilogram of
body weight into six people to study how much uranium their kidneys could tolerate before becoming damaged.[SUP]
[62][/SUP]
Between 1953 and 1957, at the
Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. William Sweet injected eleven terminally ill, comatose and semi-comatose patients with uranium in an experiment to determine, among other things, its viability as a
chemotherapy treatment against
brain tumors, which all but one of the patients had (one being a mis-diagnosis). Dr. Sweet, who died in 2001, maintained that consent had been obtained from the patients and next of kin.[SUP]
[63][/SUP][SUP]
[64][/SUP]
[h=3]Plutonium experiments[/h] From April 10, 1945 to July 18, 1947, eighteen people were injected with plutonium as part of the
Manhattan Project.[SUP]
[65][/SUP] Doses administered ranged from 95 to 5,900
nanocuries.[SUP]
[65][/SUP]
Albert Stevens, a man misdiagnosed with stomach cancer, received "treatment" for his "cancer" at the U.C. San Francisco Medical Center in 1945. Dr.
Joseph Gilbert Hamilton, a Manhattan Project doctor in charge of the human experiments in California[SUP]
[66][/SUP] had Stevens injected with Pu-238 and Pu-239 without informed consent. Stevens never had cancer; a surgery to remove cancerous cells was highly successful in removing the benign tumor, and he lived for another 20 years with the injected plutonium.[SUP]
[67][/SUP] Since Stevens received the highly radioactive Pu-238, his accumulated dose over his remaining life was higher than anyone has ever received: 64
Sv (6400 rem). Neither Albert Stevens nor any of his relatives were told that he never had cancer; they were led to believe that the experimental "treatment" has worked. His cremated remains were surreptitiously acquired by
Argonne National Laboratory Center for Human Radiobiology in 1975 without the consent of surviving relatives. Some of the ashes were transferred to the National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository at
Washington State University,[SUP]
[67][/SUP] which keeps the remains of people who died having radioisotopes in their body.
Three patients at Billings Hospital at the
University of Chicago were injected with plutonium.[SUP]
[68][/SUP] In 1946, six employees of a Chicago
metallurgical lab were given water that was contaminated with
plutonium-239, so that researchers could study how plutonium is absorbed into the
digestive tract.[SUP]
[62][/SUP]
An eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hospital, expecting to be treated for a
pituitary gland disorder, was injected with
plutonium.[SUP]
[69][/SUP]
[h=3]Experiments involving other radioactive materials[/h] Immediately after World War II, researchers at
Vanderbilt University gave 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee what they were told were "vitamin drinks" that would improve the health of their babies. The mixtures contained radioactive iron and the researchers were determining how fast the radioisotope crossed into the
placenta. At least three children are known to have died from the experiments, from cancers and leukemia.[SUP]
[70][/SUP][SUP]
[71][/SUP] Four of the women's babies died from cancers as a result of the experiments, and the women experienced rashes, bruises, anemia, hair/tooth loss, and cancer.[SUP]
[55][/SUP]
From 1946 to 1953, at the
Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the
Quaker Oats corporation, 73 mentally disabled children were fed
oatmeal containing radioactive
calcium and other
radioisotopes, in order to track "how nutrients were digested". The children were not told that they were being fed radioactive chemicals; they were told by hospital staff and researchers that they were joining a "science club".[SUP]
[70][/SUP][SUP]
[72][/SUP][SUP]
[73][/SUP][SUP]
[74][/SUP]
The
University of California Hospital in San Francisco exposed 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to total body irradiation (100-300 rad dose) to obtain data for the military.[SUP]
[75][/SUP]
In the 1950s, researchers at the
Medical College of Virginia performed experiments on severe burn victims, most of them poor and black, without their knowledge or consent, with funding from the Army and in collaboration with the AEC. In the experiments, the subjects were exposed to additional burning, experimental antibiotic treatment, and injections of radioactive isotopes. The amount of radioactive
phosphorus-32 injected into some of the patients, 500 microcuries (19 MBq), was 50 times the "acceptable" dose for a
healthy individual; for people with severe burns, this likely led to significantly increased death rates.[SUP]
[76][/SUP][SUP]
[77][/SUP]
Between 1948 and 1954, funded by the federal government, researchers at the
Johns Hopkins Hospital inserted radium rods into the noses of 582
Baltimore, Maryland schoolchildren as an alternative to
adenoidectomy.[SUP]
[78][/SUP][SUP]
[79][/SUP][SUP]
[80][/SUP] Similar experiments were performed on over 7,000 U.S. Army and Navy personnel during World War II.[SUP]
[78][/SUP] Nasal radium irradiation became a standard medical treatment and was used in over two and a half million Americans.[SUP]
[78][/SUP]
In 1951 at Johns Hopkins,
Henrietta Lacks had been treated with a radium rod in her cervix, and 2 radium plaques placed on her skin, for a cervical tumor.[SUP]
[81][/SUP]
In another study at the Walter E. Fernald State School, in 1956, researchers gave mentally disabled children radioactive calcium orally and intravenously. They also injected radioactive chemicals into malnourished babies and then pushed needles through their skulls, into their brains, through their necks, and into their spines to collect
cerebrospinal fluid for analysis.[SUP]
[74][/SUP][SUP]
[82][/SUP]
In 1961 and 1962, ten Utah State Prison inmates had blood samples taken which were mixed with radioactive chemicals and reinjected back into their bodies.[SUP]
[83][/SUP]
The
Atomic Energy Commission funded the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology to administer
radium-224 and
thorium-234 to 20 people between 1961 and 1965. Many were chosen from the Age Center of New England and had volunteered for "research projects on aging". Doses were 0.2–2.4 microcuries (7.4–88.8 kBq) for radium and 1.2–120 microcuries (44–4,440 kBq) for thorium.[SUP]
[56][/SUP]
In a 1967 study that was published in the
Journal of Clinical Investigation, pregnant women were injected with radioactive
cortisol to see if it would cross the placental barrier and affect the
fetuses.[SUP]
[84][/SUP]
[h=3]Fallout research[/h]
Cover of the final report of
Project 4.1, which examined the effects of
radioactive fallout on the natives of the
Marshall Islands
In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of
Operation Plumbbob were later determined to have released enough radiation to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of
thyroid cancer among U.S. citizens who were exposed to
fallout from the explosions, leading to between 1,100 and 21,000 deaths.[SUP]
[85][/SUP]
Early in the
Cold War, in studies known as
Project GABRIEL and
Project SUNSHINE, researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia tried to determine how much nuclear fallout would be required to make the Earth uninhabitable.[SUP]
[86][/SUP][SUP]
[87][/SUP] They realized that atmospheric
nuclear testing had provided them an opportunity to investigate this. Such tests had dispersed
radioactive contamination worldwide, and examination of human bodies could reveal how readily it was taken up and hence how much damage it caused. Of particular interest was
strontium-90 in the bones. Infants were the primary focus, as they would have had a full opportunity to absorb the new contaminants.[SUP]
[88][/SUP] [SUP]
[89][/SUP] As a result of this conclusion, researchers began a program to collect human bodies and bones from all over the world, with a particular focus on infants. The bones were cremated and the ashes analyzed for radioisotopes. This project was kept secret primarily because it would be a
public relations disaster; as a result parents and family were not told what was being done with the body parts of their relatives.[SUP]
[90][/SUP]
