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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.3 (2002) 637-638



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Book Review

The Plutonium Files:
America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War


Eileen Welsome. The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. New York: Dial Press, 1999. ix + 580 pp. Ill. $U.S. 26.95; $Can. 39.95 (0-385-31402-7).

At five hundred pages, The Plutonium Files is a large book on a large subject: the thousands of government-sponsored human radiation experiments that took place from the mid-1940s through the early 1970s. The book follows up on Eileen Welsome's earlier 1993 series of articles for the Albuquerque Tribune that recounted the experiences of several patients who in the 1940s unknowingly received injections of a highly toxic radioactive substance, plutonium, from physician-researchers sponsored by the Manhattan Project. Previous reports of governmental sponsorship of human radiation experiments without adequate subject consent, such as the 1986 congressional investigation that resulted in the "Markey Report," had not aroused significant national popular interest—but Welsome's articles did, probably because she provided individual names and stories. Subsequently, Hazel O'Leary, then secretary of the Department of Energy (the successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission and the Manhattan Project), expressed outrage, and President Clinton created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to investigate the past and make recommendations for present and future federally sponsored human subject research. ACHRE's Final Report of 1996 and its appendices document not only the plutonium injections, but also thousands of other experiments and atmospheric trials involving radiation. Had Welsome's articles, which garnered her a Pulitzer Prize, not caught the attention of Hazel O'Leary, it is plausible that ACHRE might never have been created.

Welsome's Plutonium Files and ACHRE's Final Report cover similar terrain in terms of the radiation experiments and atmospheric exposures; their approaches, however, differ markedly in several respects. Final Report, while careful in its handling of sources, limits its historical analysis to the recovery and presentation of past facts: what, who, when, and where concerning the kind of experiments and trials, patient consent forms or waivers, governmental directives, and so forth. Though not as encyclopedic as Final Report, Plutonium Files does note, often in detail, the major toxic experiments and atmospheric releases. What it provides that Final Report does not are many personal stories about the patients/subjects, those who experimented with them, and leaders of the bureaucracy of the Manhattan Project and its successor agencies. Welsome follows several experimental subjects—most of whom thought they were patients receiving therapy—and some of their investigators, from the record of their initial involvement to their deaths or current situations. She writes these accounts deftly, letting the inherent poignancy of the subjects' words and situations speak for themselves.

The book's last section, which Welsome titles "The Reckoning," carries the story forward to 1999 to include some follow-up on the Clinton administration's responses, including litigation brought by subjects against the government, and ACHRE's Final Report itself. Here and elsewhere, Welsome does not mince words in her assessments of official behaviors. If this section were to claim a hero in [End Page 637] addition to some of the surviving experimental subjects, it would not be ACHRE, whose Final Report Welsome judges on several counts to be "disappointing and timid" (p. 487). Nor would it be the universities that provided academic homes for the researchers: the chapter describing their post-ACHRE behavior is entitled "Whitewashes, Red Herrings, and Cold Cash." Instead, Welsome praises the courage of Hazel O'Leary, who incurred the wrath of the nuclear weapons establishment with her opposition to continued atmospheric nuclear testing and who was determined that the government "come clean" about its past, and of Clinton for backing O'Leary.

 



Robert Martensen
University of Kansas

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