They Called It Treatment
Eighteen Americans were injected with plutonium to see what it would do to a body. None of them were told.
Between April 1945 and July 1947, doctors working with the Manhattan Project injected eighteen men, women, and children with plutonium — one of the most dangerous substances ever created — to study how it traveled through the human body. The patients were never told. None gave informed consent.
How They Were Chosen
The subjects were selected from hospital wards across the country because their doctors believed they were terminally ill and would soon die anyway. They were assigned code names. Many, it turned out, were not dying at all — and lived for years, even decades, carrying the experiment inside them without ever knowing it had happened.
The word on the chart was "treatment." It was not the word for what was done.
Forty Years of Silence
The experiments were buried for decades. It was investigative reporter Eileen Welsome who pieced together the names behind the code numbers and gave the subjects back their identities, work that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and became the book The Plutonium Files.
A federal advisory committee later reviewed the Cold War human radiation experiments, and in 1995 the government issued an apology. Not a single doctor or hospital was publicly held to account.
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The defense offered at the time was that the science was valuable and the patients were dying. The patients, who were never asked, did not get to weigh in.
You've Seen the File.
The patients trusted the word “treatment.” Knowing what was actually done — and that no one was ever charged — was this science, or something else?
The Plutonium Files — Eileen Welsome
The Pulitzer-winning reporting that uncovered the experiments and named the people behind the code numbers.
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