The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), now known as UR Medicine, is located in Rochester, New York, is a medical complex on the main campus of the University of Rochester and comprises the university's primary medical education, research and patient care facilities.
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.
Plutonium-238 is a radioactive isotope of plutonium that has a half-life of 87.7 years.
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.
The demon core was a sphere of plutonium that was involved in two fatal radiation accidents when scientists tested it as a fissile core of an early atomic bomb. It was manufactured by the Manhattan Project, the U.S. nuclear weapon development effort during World War II. It was a subcritical mass that weighed 6.2 kilograms (14 lb) and was 8.9 centimeters (3.5 in) in diameter.
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.
Eileen Welsome 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.
Alvin Cushman Graves was an American nuclear physicist who served at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war, he became the head of the J (Test) Division at Los Alamos and was director or assistant director of numerous nuclear weapons tests during the 1940s and 1950s. Graves was severely injured in the 1946 laboratory criticality accident in Los Alamos that killed Louis Slotin, but recovered.
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.
Human subject research legislation in the United States can be traced to the early 20th century. Human subject research in the United States was mostly unregulated until the 20th century, as it was throughout the world, until the establishment of various governmental and professional regulations and codes of ethics. Notable – and in some cases, notorious – human subject experiments performed in the US include the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, human radiation experiments, the Milgram obedience experiment and Stanford prison experiments and Project MKULTRA. With growing public awareness of such experimentation, and the evolution of professional ethical standards, such research became regulated by various legislation, most notably, those that introduced and then empowered the institutional review boards.
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.
Ebb Cade was a construction worker at Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and was the first person subjected to injection with plutonium as an experiment.
Rochester General Hospital, an affiliate hospital of Rochester Regional Health, is a 528-bed tertiary care hospital, located in Rochester, New York. Rochester General Hospital has been serving the residents of the Rochester Region and beyond since 1847. Rochester General Hospital offers primary medical care and a broad range of specialties. Rochester General Hospital's medical staff includes over 1,000 primary care physicians and specialists, many of whom have offices at the hospital and throughout the community.
Unity Hospital, an affiliate hospital of Rochester Regional Health, is a 471-bed community hospital in Greece, New York. After a four-year renovation in 2014, Unity is now the only Monroe County hospital to feature all private patient rooms and free parking. Unity offers a broad range of specialty centers, including the Golisano Restorative Neurology & Rehabilitation Center; the Charles J. August Joint Replacement Center and the August Family Birth Place. The hospital is also a New York State-designated Stroke Center.
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.
