by Pulitizer prize winning journalist Eileen Welsome who uncovered this stuff quite by accident.
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0385314027.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIlitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,32,-59_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpgOne of the nastiest secrets was an experiment designed to determine how much plutonium a human could safely handle. In that experiment, conducted in the mid-1940s, 18 people -- 17 American adults and one Australian child -- were injected with plutonium without their knowledge or consent. Although the scientists defended it as necessary to ensure the safety of workers in the nuclear-weapons program, they also realized that it could create a public-relations nightmare if the story ever leaked.
When a congressional committee uncovered evidence of the experiment in the 1980s, there was indeed public outrage and disbelief that our government could conduct an experiment that seemed akin to what the Nazis did in World War II. Yet the outrage never translated to action, and the experiment slowly faded from the public consciousness. Then, six years ago, reporter Eileen Welsome unearthed one new, vital fact about the experiment -- the names of the people injected with plutonium -- and struck a national nerve.
In November 1993, The Albuquerque Tribune published her series, giving names and faces to people known until then only by numbers assigned them by the government. With that simple step of transforming bureaucratic numbers into flesh and blood -- a step that took her years of research to accomplish -- Welsome touched off a firestorm of protest and activity that finally penetrated the cloak of secrecy surrounding the experiments.
Now Welsome, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting, has used that information to tell a cautionary tale of secrecy run amok. Welsome piles on detail to show how doctors used their patients as guinea pigs. The result is a remarkably detailed history of a hitherto hidden world.
http://www.post-gazette.com/books/reviews/19991121review372.aspOr Listen to this amazing interview:
Wednesday, May 5th, 2004
Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed Radioactivity to Thousands of Americans
In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon-fed oatmeal laced with radioactive isotopes. In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium. At a Tennessee clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails" containing radioactive iron, as part of their regular treatment.
No these are not acts of terrorism by common criminals.
These are just some of the secret human radiation experiments that the U.S. government conducted on unsuspecting Americans for decades as part of its atom bomb program. In a gruesome plot that spanned 30 years, doctors and scientists working with the US atomic weapons program, exposed thousands of unwilling and unknowing Americans to radiation poisoning to study its effects.
For years, the experiments by the U.S. government and the identities of their human guinea pigs were covered up. Then after a six-year investigation, investigative reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered the names of 18 people who were injected with plutonium in the 1940s without their knowledge by federal government scientists. In 1993, she published her finding in The Albuquerque Tribune and later received the Pulitzer Prize for her work.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/05/1357230
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