Eileen Welsome | |
---|---|
Born | March 12, 1951 |
Occupation | Journalist, Author |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Texas at Austin |
Genre | Journalism |
Notable works | The Plutonium Files |
Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting (1994), Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction (2000) |
Eileen Welsome (born March 12, 1951) [1] is an American journalist and author. She received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1994 while a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune for a 3-part story titled "The Plutonium Experiment" published beginning on November 15, 1993. [2] She was awarded the prize for her articles about the government's human radiation experiments conducted on unwilling and unknowing Americans during the Cold War. [3] [4] Welsome also has received a George Polk Award, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Gold Medal, the Heywood Broun Award, as well as awards from the National Headliners Association and the Associated Press. [3] In 1999, Welsome wrote the book The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War . [5] In 2000, Welsome received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and the PEN Center USA West Award in Research Nonfiction for The Plutonium Files. [6]
Welsome began her career in journalism as a reporter for the Beaumont Enterprise. She also worked for the San Antonio Light and the San Antonio Express-News before joining The Albuquerque Tribune staff in 1987. Welsome graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980 with a Bachelor of Journalism degree. [3]
Louis Alexander Slotin was a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project. Born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Slotin earned both his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Manitoba, before obtaining his doctorate in physical chemistry at King's College London in 1936. Afterwards, he joined the University of Chicago as a research associate to help design a cyclotron.
Strong Memorial Hospital (SMH) is an 886-bed medical facility, part of the University of Rochester Medical Center complex, in Rochester, New York, United States. Opened in 1926, it is a major provider of both in-patient and out-patient medical services. Attached to Strong is the 190-bed Golisano Children's Hospital, which serves infants, children, teens, and young adults aged 0–21.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1994.
The Albuquerque Tribune was an afternoon newspaper in Albuquerque, New Mexico, founded in 1922 by Carlton Cole Magee as Magee's Independent. It was published in the afternoon and evening Monday through Saturday.
The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was established in 1994 to investigate questions of the record of the United States government with respect to human radiation experiments. The special committee was created by President Bill Clinton in Executive Order 12891, issued January 15, 1994. Ruth Faden of The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics chaired the committee.
Joseph Gilbert Hamilton was an American professor of Medical Physics, Experimental Medicine, General Medicine, and Experimental Radiology as well as director (1948–1957) of the Crocker Laboratory, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hamilton studied the medical effects of exposure to radioactive isotopes, which included the use of unsuspecting human subjects.
Serge Schmemann is a French-born American writer and member of the editorial board of The New York Times who specializes in international affairs. He was editorial page editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, the erstwhile global edition of The New York Times, from 2003 until its dissolution in 2013. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Associated Press and was a bureau chief and editor for The New York Times.
George Bliss was an American journalist. He won a 1962 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for the Chicago Tribune and was associated with two others:
Harold Carpenter Hodge (1904–1990) was a well-known toxicologist who published close to 300 papers and five books. He was the first president of the Society of Toxicology in 1960. He received a BS from Illinois Wesleyan University and a PhD in 1930 from the State University of Iowa, publishing his first paper in 1927. He received a number of honors and awards during his career.
Since the discovery of ionizing radiation, a number of human radiation experiments have been performed to understand the effects of ionizing radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body, specifically with the element plutonium.
Albert Stevens (1887–1966), also known as patient CAL-1 and most radioactive human ever, was a house painter from Ohio who was subjected to an involuntary human radiation experiment and survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with 131 kBq of plutonium without his knowledge because it was erroneously believed that he had a terminal disease.
The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome. It is a history of United States government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning series Welsome wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune.
Numerous experiments which were performed on human test subjects in the United States in the past are now considered to have been unethical, because they were performed without the knowledge or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have been performed throughout American history, but have become significantly less frequent with the advent and adoption of various safeguarding efforts. Despite these safeguards, unethical experimentation involving human subjects is still occasionally uncovered.
A criticality accident occurred on December 30, 1958, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the United States. It is one of 60 known criticality events that have occurred globally outside the controlled conditions of a nuclear reactor or test, though it was the third such event that took place in 1958 after events on June 16 at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and on October 15 at the Vinča Nuclear Institute in Vinča, Yugoslavia. The accident involved plutonium compounds dissolved in liquid chemical reagents; within 35 hours, it killed chemical operator Cecil Kelley by severe radiation poisoning.
Harriet A. Washington is an American writer and medical ethicist. She is the author of the book Medical Apartheid, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. She has also written books on environmental racism and the erosion of informed consent in medicine.
Lou Kilzer was an American investigative journalist and author and a two time Pulitzer Prize Winner.
Clarence Chancelum Lushbaugh Jr. was an American physician and pathologist. He was considered an expert in radiological accidents and injuries, as well as a pioneer in radiation safety research, and he is known for his controversial research involving human subjects.
Donald Francis Mastick was an American chemist who worked at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory. As part of Project Alberta, he was part of the planning and preparation for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. Mastick is known for a lab incident in 1944 when he accidentally ingested a small amount of plutonium, traces of which remained detectable in his body decades later. After the incident, he worked for the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory and the Atomic Energy Commission.
Louis Henry Hempelmann Jr, was an American physician who was the director of the Health Group at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war he was involved in research into radiology. A paper he published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1949 warned of the dangers of using fluoroscopes to measure the size of children's feet.
Robert Spencer Stone was a Canadian-American physician who served as head of the Health Division of the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project. He oversaw experiments in which test subjects were injected with radioactive materials such as plutonium in order to measure their metabolism and excretion.