Human Nuclear Guinea Pigs

(Originally published in Carotec Health Report Feb 2018).

The information in this article is not easy to process. Even the most cynical among us doesn’t really want to accept the fact that during the Cold War physicians and scientists, in conjunction with the military, prestigious universities and private businesses, conspired to conduct secret radiological, chemical and biological experiments on unsuspecting Americans.

This is fact.

President Bill Clinton made an apology, of sorts, after a commission he created issued a report, documenting then denying any real responsibility for secret government experiments on American citizens. You may not remember hearing much about it because the report was released and Presidential apology made on the same day that the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced. What a coincidence.

On the gravestone of one of the victims reads: “One of America’s Human Nuclear Guinea Pigs.”

The inscription had special meaning to Elmer Allen’s family because he was part of a secret experiment that identified him only as CAL-3. Mr. Allen, a black man born in 1911, had an accident that damaged his leg while working as a railroad porter; he sought medical help over the years due to frequent pain and the fact his leg didn’t heal well. Mr. Allen was told he had bone cancer, in his leg, and that his leg would have to be amputated. Mr. Allen then became the unwitting victim of a radiation experiment when in a San Francisco, California Hospital doctors plunged a syringe full of plutonium in his left calf, on July 18, 1947. Three days after injecting his calf, doctors urged Mr. Allen to amputate his leg, telling him this was protocol for bone cancer.

Eileen Welsome, intrepid journalist whose reporting spurred President Clinton’s Committee, discovered the identity of CAL-3, as Mr. Allen. Ms. Welsome wrote a series of articles, earning her the Pulitzer Prize and later published The Plutonium Files. Ms. Welsome discovered the identity of Mr. Allen, about a year after he died, and contacted his surviving family.

Being unable to work as a porter, or do any physical labor, Mr. Allen moved his family back to Texas, where he continued to be monitored, under this experiment. Ms. Welsome spoke to Joe Speed, a good friend of Mr. Allen, who told her “He (Mr. Allen) told me they put a germ cancer in his leg. They guinea-pigged him. They didn’t care about him getting well. He told me he would never get well.”

The irony is that Mr. Allen’s physician in the small town of Italy, Texas collected samples of Mr. Allen’s tissues and sent them to government scientists at Argonne National Labs outside of Chicago, Illinois, for the experiment, all the while writing in Mr. Allen’s medical records that he was a “paranoid, schizophrenic.”

Sadly, no one believed Mr. Allen’s suspicions, even though he was brought to Rochester, NY and Chicago, IL for further testing, on the pretense that he had a “very serious cancer” and they wanted to know “why he lived so long.”

Could it be any clearer why the Allen family made that inscription on his gravestone?

Plutonium is “lethal,” “the most poisonous chemical known,” “one of the most toxic substances on Earth,” and “one of the most potent cancer producing chemicals.” It’s galling that plutonium was injected into eighteen individuals without their consent: they were guinea pigs, as family of Mr. Allen inscribed on his gravestone.

CAL-1 was later discovered to be Albert Stevens, who was a 58-year-old white man in 1945. Mr. Stevens was from Northern California and painted houses for a living. Mr. Stevens complained of stomach pain, getting medical attention at the University of California at San Francisco, which unknown to him and the rest of the world, was a hot bed of plutonium experimentation. Mr. Stevens was told he had stomach cancer and was injected with a lot of plutonium—446 times the amount of radiation exposure a typical person gets in a lifetime. Surgeons removed part of his stomach and other organs, but, it was later “learned” that Mr. Stevens didn’t have cancer: he was later diagnosed as having an ulcer.

For almost 12 months after his injection and surgery, Mr. Stevens dutifully collected his urine and feces, which was picked up weekly by “government scientists.” Mr. Stevens was an important guinea pig: scientists used his “excreta” to learn how plutonium excretes from the body, according to a formerly secret report titled “A Comparison of the Metabolism of Plutonium in Man and the Rat.”

Mr. Stevens was never told about the “uh-oh” of a misdiagnosis, and he and his family lived for years under the terror that cancer was in the family. Medical records show that Mr. Stevens had degeneration in the lumbar region of the spine and several degenerated disks, which may as well have been caused by plutonium. Mr. Stevens died in 1966, at the age of 79 from cardio respiratory failure, but government experiments didn’t end there.

In 1975, Mr. Steven’s son was contacted by a government scientist who asked for permission to examine his father’s ashes to “carry out a series of studies.” Mr. Steven’s son sent the remains to Argonne National Labs, but, never received them back.

Of the 18 subjects in the CAL experiments, 3 were black and 15 were white. Mr. Allen, CAL-3, was the only subject to be injected into the muscle. Others were injected in the veins, which was significant to the study because how plutonium excretes from muscular infiltration, also, was noted in “The Rat and Man” study.

This hideous chapter of secret experiments was brought back to public interest and ours by Professor Lisa Martino-Taylor’s Behind the Fog (2018), who uncovered new details about other Cold War in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, as well Minneapolis, MN and Calgary Canada.

We do not sell Behind the Fog—it is available at bookstores or on the Internet for sale.

Professor Martino-Taylor discovered massive aerial spraying of radioactive “chemicals” throughout St. Louis, and targeted areas in low-income housing projects. Professor Martino-Taylor’s discoveries add to the knowledge of how we, as Americans, are nothing more than guinea pigs in the eyes of the military-industrial-scientific complex.

Before we address what happened in St. Louis, there are a few disgusting examples of experimentation that should be told, which do make plain that no typical American was safe—men, women and children of all races were targeted, meaning regular folk.

In one well publicized study at the Fernald State School, which was originally called the Massachusetts School for Feeble Minded, children were fed radioactive Quaker Oats cereal, under the guise of a nutritional study. Professor Martino-Taylor refers to this as an “embedded” study, where a phony reason is offered as a cover for the “real” study: in this case, children, parents and caregivers were told that the children were getting nutritionally enriched food but in fact they got radioactive laced food; and, urine and feces were collected and analyzed in secret never telling the children, parents or their caregivers what the actual study purpose was.

Ms. Welsome describes Fernald as a place for troubled and mentally challenged boys. An example of the socially troubled was young Gordon Shattuck whose mother had 21 other children by age 36 and whose father was an alcoholic. Gordon Shattuck was typical among the “troubled” boys, who was transferred to foster homes and became a ward the state. The director of Fernald was a medical doctor, of all things, and Gordon recalls being told by him, “You’re a state boy, Gordon. Nobody wants you. You’re gonna die down here.” Gordon escaped a few times, after being subjected to maltreatment, including rape by one of the staff members.

Imagine the surprise to Fernald boys when scientists from M.I.T. created the “Science Club,” where selected boys would participate in a nutritional study which would get them out of Fernald for a few days. The Science Club boys got to go to Fenway Park for baseball, received Mikey Mouse watches and armbands, and were taken to Christmas parties at MIT.

A Smithsonian.com article published on March 8, 2017 by Lorraine Boisoneault explains: “The boys didn’t find out the whole story about their contaminated cereal for another four decades. During a stretch between the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Harris, a professor of nutrition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led three different experiments involving 74 Fernald boys, aged 10 to 17. As part of the study, the boys were fed oatmeal and milk laced with radioactive iron and calcium; in another experiment, scientists directly injected the boys with radioactive calcium.”

Ms. Boisoneault writes how this experiment came to be: “At the time, scientists were eager to conduct experiments concerning human health, and the booming breakfast cereal industry meant there was big money to be made or lost. As a result, brands like Quaker wanted science on their side. They’d been locked in competition with another hot breakfast cereal—Cream of Wheat, made with farina—since the early 1900s. And both of the hot cereal companies had to contend with the rise of sugary dry cereals, served with cold milk and a heaping portion of advertising. To make matters worse for Quaker, a series of studies suggested high levels of phytate (a naturally occurring cyclic acid) in plant-based grains—like oats—might inhibit absorption of iron, whereas farina (Cream of Wheat) didn’t seem to have the same effect. The market for cereal products was booming—in the post-WWII years, Quaker’s sales grew to $277 million. Nutrition was high in the minds of buyers of the era, especially since the Department of Agriculture produced its first dietary guidelines in 1943, including oatmeal as an ideal whole grain. Television advertisements from the 1950s highlighted Quaker Oats’ nutritional content as a selling point. In a bid to refute the research that unfavorably compared Quaker with Cream of Wheat, Quaker decided to do experiments of its own. So Quaker supplied the cereal, MIT received funding for their research, and the school, presumably, provided free breakfast and entertainment for its students. In the three experiments, the boys at Fernald ate oats coated with radioactive iron tracers, milk with radioactive calcium tracers (radioactive atoms whose decay is measured to understand chemical reactions happening in the body), and were given injections of radioactive calcium. The first two experiments’ results were encouraging to Quaker: Oatmeal was no worse than farina when it came to inhibiting absorption of iron and calcium into the bloodstream. The third experiment showed that calcium entering the bloodstream goes straight to the bones, which would prove important in later studies of osteoporosis.”

After the Fernald experiments were exposed by the Boston Sunday Globe, 70 former Fernald students sued and were given $50,000 to $65,000 each in 1995. Quaker Oats refused to apologize.

If vulnerable boys weren’t safe, neither were pregnant women.

Professor Martino-Taylor writes that Professor Paul Hahn, a protégé of Robley Evans, who was involved in the Quaker Oats study, somehow managed to have 820 poor and pregnant white women from Nashville Tennessee be in a radiation study, even though Hahn was not a medical doctor. The pregnant women didn’t know the true nature of the study. The Tennessee Department of Health, The U.S. Public Health Service and the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored Hahn’s study which used radioactive iron, supplied by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Martino-Taylor explains “the female patients who were at various stages of pregnancy were administered radioactive iron during their first pre-natal visit. Radioactive ‘cocktails’ which patients were instructed to drink were prepared in Hahn’s physics laboratory and delivered to a clinic for ingestion experiments. On subsequent visits blood tests were performed on the women to determine how much radioactive iron had been absorbed by the mother, and at birth the infant’s blood was tested to determine how much iron had been absorbed by the baby. Evidence indicates that the women neither gave nor were aware that they were subjected to radiation experiments. A physician’s assistant involved in the study later testified that ‘We did not decide that we would not inform (the women). We simply felt … it was unnecessary.’”

One of the women in the Vanderbilt experiment named Helen Hutchison was given the “cocktail,” and had a normal delivery: she and her baby daughter, Barbara, had no health issues after birth. Five days after birth, mother and daughter were discharged from the hospital, but, several months later, Helen’s faced swelled so much “you could draw a line right through the middle of my face,” as reported by Ms. Welsome. Helen’s hair fell out and she tired easily. Helen had two miscarriages and lost so much blood during the second one she needed sixteen transfusions—she suffered from pernicious anemia. Helen’s daughter, Barbara, has an immune system disorder and skin cancer; at age 11 she had swollen lymph nodes under her arms. Helen remembers Barbara being tired, all the time, as a child, needing a nap after getting home from school.

“Many of the mothers and children exposed to the radioactive iron developed strange afflictions that were similar to those described by Helen Hutchison and her daughter. They lost their teeth and hair. They developed bizarre rashes, bruises, strange blood disorders and anemia—and cancer,” Ms. Welsome writes in the Plutonium Files.

At least four children of mothers from Vanderbilt experiments died of cancer. One of the mothers gave birth to a girl who passed away at 5 years old from lymphatic leukemia; another gave birth to a boy who died at age 11 from lymphosarcoma; another gave birth to a boy who died of liver cancer at age 11; and, the last woman who took her cocktail in the 13th week of gestation, gave birth to a girl who died at age 11 from a synovial sarcoma in her thigh which spread to her lung.

Hideous is an apt word to describe the nightmare visited upon those experimented in the very personal, direct “studies” described above.

Professor Martino-Taylor discovered that St. Louis, Missouri, her hometown, had one of the most extensive open air experiments waged upon citizens, many poor. St. Louis was one of three cities identified by the DOD as having “analogs” to key Soviet metropolitan areas. The “rationale” was this: in the event of a war with Soviet Union, the DOD wanted to know what would happen if cities similar to “key” areas in the Soviet Union were attacked. The “logic” was that there was a need to release radioactive substances in St. Louis, Minneapolis and Winnipeg to determine just how damaging it would be if the Soviet Union attacked; and, how our weapons would work against Moscow and Leningrad.

The DOD did not tell this plan to the public, let alone, the fact that the DOD was considering the annihilation of civilians in the Soviet Union: “What is particularly striking in the SAC (Southern Air Command) study is the role of population targeting. Moscow and its suburbs, like the Leningrad area, included ‘population’ targets… so did all the other cities recorded… In other words, people, as such, not specific industrial activities, were to be destroyed,” as quoted by Professor Martino-Taylor.

But, of course, they didn’t tell local mayors and health officials of their plans, instead, Brigadier General William Creasy of the Army Chemical Center in Maryland convinced local officials that the testing was a series of meteorological studies “that would help the military determine whether smokescreens could be used to hide U.S. cities from possible enemy attack.” General Creasy added that it would be necessary “to make periodic releases within the city of an invisible cloud of small dust particles which would be sampled over a wide area.” Army officials assured local mayors that what they planned to release, zinc-cadmium sulfide (ZaCdS), was “completely harmless” according to Professor Martino-Taylor.

As early as the 1800s, it was known that cadmium should not be inhaled and Professor Bernie Gerstein at Iowa State University said “Those people (the Army) should have known that there was no way that anyone should be exposed to any cadmium compound unnecessarily,” according to Professor Martino-Taylor.

The DOD released and then measured zinc-cadmium-sulfide (ZaCdS) compounds and engaged in “penetration studies” inside residences and buildings, throughout St. Louis, Minneapolis and Winnipeg. The military used cars and trucks, as well as placed emitting devices on rooftops, to release zinc-cadmium in targeted areas.

The St. Louis “experiment” had 163 crew members who “released” zinc-cadmium sulfide (as well as other unknown substances) throughout a 17-mile radius, usually at night between 8pm and 5 am. Weather conditions were assessed, wind direction and velocity measured, using weather balloons, prior to release. Generators were used to “spray a finely milled luminescent dust throughout the area,” and officials recorded an increase “in the initial size of the plume” right after spraying the materials into the air, according to Professor Martino-Taylor. If that wasn’t bad enough, after releasing the material, a “low trajectory free flight balloon (was) released from the location during tracer dispersal to further define the local wind direction,” according to Professor Martino-Taylor. Most of the crew members did not know what they were releasing, let alone the risks they undertook.

As an aside, there are curious aspects to one of the key areas heavily targeted by the DOD. The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, an American architect, also designed the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Center. The Pruitt-Igoe complex had 33 buildings, each 11 stories high, “appearing harsh and cold from the outside, were modern and clean inside, although residents complained of leaky windows that allowed dust in their living spaces,” according to Martino-Taylor.

Yamasaki also designed a Department of Defense building which housed records that burned to the ground. Professor Martino-Taylor writes that Yamasaki included fire walls and a sprinkler system in his design but the “DOD balked.” The resulting building, supposedly a secure place to store important government documents, became a tinder box, forever burying countless secrets because there were no “copies.”

Scores of records, including records kept for these experiments, were scorched in this fire. More than 22 million military service records, as well as documents from other government agencies, also were destroyed. Professor Martino-Taylor documented the fact that even the FBI deemed the fire suspicious.

The release of zinc-cadmium-sulfide left unknown health problems for many residents. Because many records were subsequently destroyed, it is not easy for researchers to piece together a credible analysis of just how badly the health of residents was affected, especially because many of the housing projects, such as Pruitt-Igoe were later destroyed, and residents were dispersed. The early death and high incidence of disease among marginalized communities may be correlated to experimentation of this sort: at the very least, spraying them with radioactive chemicals surely didn’t help them one iota.

What’s unknown to most is how the Manhattan project, which was the name for the group that brought us nuclear weapons and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, didn’t just disband after the creation and release of atomic weapons. It was on August 6, 1945 that the U.S. Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and a few days later, Nagasaki was hit by “Fat Man.” The devastation was spectacular: within one year 150,000 to 200,000 people died, after the initial immediate deaths nearing 80,000 people.

Professor Martino-Taylor explains “The world reeled in utter shock. Indeed, the harsh sanctions against Japan were an ugly foreshadowing of a tactical shift as the newest weaponry came to be aimed squarely at civilians. Almost immediately after the bombs were dropped Japan became a veritable laboratory for the U.S. military and RWEG scientists, as Louis Hempelmann, Robley Evans, and other military scientists landed on Japanese soil to measure, calculate, and collect health data related to the blast’s shocking effects. Although the military’s top brass issued a false statement to the public that no harm was incurred to human life beyond the initial blast, Japanese officials and Manhattan Project’s Louis Hempelmann knew differently, as the death rates in Japan continued to climb.”

We must mention the superficial praise bestowed upon President Eisenhower’s “warning” about prospective dangers of the “military-industrial-complex,” made in his farewell address on January 17, 1961. President Eisenhower’s Presidential term was from 1953 to 1961 and he was a military officer rising to the rank of 5 star general and the President of Columbia University.

In his address, President Eisenhower stated that America “annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations…. (warning that) In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Potential?

Ignored by most who glowingly praise President Eisenhower’s address were his pointed remarks how the Federal government may well take over private and academic research, “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. (Emphasis added.)

To the hundreds of thousands of Americans experimented upon, without their consent or knowledge, the prospect of “scientific technological elite” using them as lab rats doesn’t seem like something to be watchful of, but, rather a reality coldly visited upon them.

Was President Eisenhower’s “warning” a cryptic confession of guilt or a revelation of the method gloat as to what the “scientific technological elite” did to typical Americans? Or, just political triangulation by a grandfatherly former five-star general, designed to satisfy concerns about the obviously increasing power of the military industrial complex?

No matter, this hallow warning, considering what government actually did prior, during and would do after Ike’s term, is creepily disturbing.

Professor Martino-Taylor and Ms. Welsome both write how the scientists conducting the experiments were concerned about secrecy and, liability, in the event word got out to what they were doing.

Remarkably, of all the studies conducted in so many vast areas of the country, there were virtually no whistleblowers. Professor Martino-Taylor writes that in 1952, before massive studies were going to take place, Congress passed a bill which “absolved private contractors involved inhuman-subject studies that resulted in injury to the subjects, of all legal liability. The law virtually created a sanction-free zone across North America and blocked legal recourse for victims.”

How secrets were kept so tightly and how the military industrial complex literally took over academia and medicine is well explained by Professor Martino Taylor: “The military industrial complex that took root during World War II in partnership with both the atomic bomb and radiological weapons projects, ‘transformed the relationship of government and the defense industry and created the symbiotic partnership that exists today’ (Barnet 1972). The powerful military-industrial entity was able to push academia off of its deeply rooted independent moorings and draw elite research partners into what became the military-industrial-academic complex, thereby dramatically boosting Pentagon resources. The resultant hybridized entity derived power from professional pacts of secrecy, and expanded what Eviatar Zerubavel calls a ‘conspiracy of silence,’ where “each conspirator’s actions are symbiotically complemented by the others’… (and the) pressure toward silence gains momentum as the number of those who conspire to maintain it increases the longer it lasts, and when the very act of denial is itself denial” (Zerubavel 2006).

The money trail from government, especially the military, to academia is astronomical.

What has been revealed to us is shocking but realize that because of the “black budget,” let alone “embedded studies” where a fake study is actually a secret one, what we are told has to be quite low.

Microsoft news (MSN) reported that the U.S. Government top universities got billions of dollars in 2015, and these billions account for most of the money these universities spent on “research and development,” which accounts for $68.8 billion in twenty universities that MSN identified. The top recipient in 2015 was Johns Hopkins University: “Johns Hopkins University received nearly $2 billion from the U.S. government in 2015, more than double second-place University of Washington. Yale University rounds out the top 20, receiving approximately $480 million in federal funds in 2015.” The article explains “With $2.0 billion in federal R&D funding in 2015, Johns Hopkins University is the largest university research partner of the federal government. One of the major centers of innovation on campus is the Applied Physics Laboratory. Established in 1942, the APL has provided the Department of Defense with research in missile defense, space, and weapons systems. The DOD funds 40% of Johns Hopkins annual R&D spending, compared to the 14% average for all universities. NASA funds account for 11% of the school’s R&D expenditure, compared to the 4% average.”

These staggering sums reported by MSN are a snapshot of what all universities get every year, not to mention the black budget.

One must wonder, also, about if the mantra that universities are bastions of “liberals” which hate America and the military, given the fact that the military industrial complex literally runs all major institutions.

Could it be that the clownish politically correct movements spawning from universities are themselves a psyop to distract typical Americans? And, to drown out reasonable voices of criticism of the corporatist-military-industrial-state?

Talking about the military industrial complex and money reminds us of one of the most unreported stories of the past 17 years: how much money is “missing” from military coffers. Many know that on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense made an announcement that America may be at war “with itself.” Referring to the “Pentagon bureaucracy,” Secretary Rumsfeld said that $2.3 trillion was missing from the Pentagon and this was a matter of “life and death.” We know what happened the day after, putting this important revelation far away from public curiosity.

Fast-forward to December 11, 2017, and it is being reported that $21 trillion is missing from all places, the Department of Defense and Urban Housing. Professor Skidmore and former assistant secretary of Housing Catherine Fitts did a study documenting the fact that there are unaccounted trillions of dollars.

Professor Skidmore teamed up with Ms. Fitts after hearing her say that was $6.5 trillion “missing” from the Department of Defense in fiscal 2015. Professor Skidmore couldn’t believe what he heard, saying “Maybe she meant $6.5 billion and not 6.5 trillion. So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion.”

Professor Skidmore and Ms. Fitts collaborated and found that from the period 1998-2015, $21 trillion dollar is unaccounted for—specifically in “undocumented adjustments.” Forbes writer Laurence Kotlikoff is virtually alone among “establishment” media who writes “Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.”

We mention these trillion-dollar transgressions in light of ridiculous statements made by the most uninformed who dare say that the military is somehow lacking sufficient funds to “protect us.” So tellingly ironic is the fact that Professor Skidmore and Ms. Fitts found $21 trillion missing in two agencies which resulted in public housing for the “poor” that were actual military radioactive experiments, in St. Louis, MO.

The latest propaganda assault on Americans is that our so called “entitlements” are to blame for government insolvency when the same government talking heads ignore the fact that trillions are lost. Adding insult to injury is that we, the regular people, paid into these programs—and should receive what we are owed.

What the hell is going on in the so called greatest country in the world, when typical Americans are targeted by million dollar a year salaried talking heads for sins committed by government elites?

When we reflect to President Clinton’s Commission—and his half-baked apology—we can’t help but share a bit of the stories of experiment subjects and their families who travelled to testify before this commission.

Imagine their excitement to be able to speak at a commission, appointed by a glib tough talking young President who promised to correct historic wrongs. The speakers were not compensated for time or travel expenses or document copying expenses because the commission wanted their words to be “neutral.”

Atomic bombs dropped on the Marshall Islands were devastating to the island and people, bringing one person to testify, through an interpreter, said, “The only thing we knew is what we were observing and that the children that were born were like animals and they weren’t children at all.” Residents saw the “vast increase in illness and disease following the years of atmospheric testing on their tropical atolls,” Ms. Welsome writes.

There are so many other shocking testimonials from others who were experiment subjects that we will not describe here, but, what shouldn’t be surprising to readers is how this Presidential Commission was unfazed.

Ms. Welsome in Plutonium Files captures the sellout perfectly:

“Despite hundreds of intentional releases of radioactive material that took place over population centers without the public’s knowledge, the Advisory Committee did not recommend that such releases be banned. Instead, the group advised that an independent panel review any proposed releases in the future to make sure the secrecy was being maintained for bona fide national security reasons and that measures were taken to reduce risk. Along similar lines, the committee also did not advocate that classified research with human subjects be outlawed. ‘Important national security goals,’ the group wrote, ‘may suffer if human subject research projects making unique and irreplaceable contributions were foreclosed.’ Instead, the panel urged the Clinton administration to develop regulations so that subjects of future classified research would be protected, adequately informed, and the documents declassified as soon as possible. (The Federal Government did subsequently develop new rules for classified research).

The panel also failed to lay rest the long-standing and bitter controversy involving the atomic veterans; it simply chastised the military for not keeping accurate records and urged that epidemiological tables used in compensating victims be updated. The Advisory Committee was aware that the federal government has spent millions on questionable dose reconstructions and by comparison, pennies on veterans. But instead of issuing a strong statement that would help correct this grave injustice, the panel merely urged the government to determine whether existing laws were being administered in ways that ‘best balance allocation of resources between compensation to eligible atomic veterans and administrative costs, including the costs and scientific credibility of dose reconstruction.

“Although (committee member) Ruth Faden had pledged to leave the record ‘irrefutably straight,’ the panel left the historical record in some ways, murkier than ever. Not surprisingly, its findings were a great disappointment to the experimental subjects and their families. Jerry Mousso, the nephew of the one of the Rochester NY plutonium patients, said, ‘I guess the government really won. All the culprits that planned and executed this thing got away with it.’ Brenda Weaver, the Hanford woman whose daughter was born without eyes, observed ‘A book has been opened, a page read, and then it’s been closed.’ Fred Boyce, one of the Fernald boys who participated in the Science Club, said, ‘For them to turn around and say that a little apology is enough… is just beyond belief.’ And finally, Ron Hamm, who was exposed as a fetus to radiation when his mother was given the radioactive iron cocktail at Vanderbilt University, spoke for many when he said, ‘I do feel betrayed and I feel abused by this committee’s report’.” (Emphasis added.)

We will never know the full extent of all experiments done, given the fact that not all documents have been released, and many were destroyed in the raging fire, noted by Professor Martino-Taylor.

Our concluding thoughts are that every American child should be taught what happened in these tragic experiments, and that the public should be vigilant enough to prevent this from ever happening again. The opposite happened—it is up to us to retell this story. Should we have memorials of these tragedies so they may never happen again?

In 2018, we face so many health assaults, without our consent, which may be part of some grand racket to profit from our growing toxic burden. There are so many to name—from pesticides, herbicides and GMO in our food supply—to fluoride, lead, chlorine, and other contaminants in water—cadmium in “chemtrails”, mercury amalgam fillings, electro-magnetic pollution, especially with new 5G technology, and more we don’t know about.

We say this not to discourage but for all readers to be aware of what is happening to us—we need to focus on real problems instead of manufactured crisis and divisions. We need to heal ourselves, our neighbors and planet.