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

Journal of Public Health Policy,  2002  by Levy, Barry S

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Eileen Welsome. The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. ix + 580 pp. $26.90 cloth.

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is investigative journalism at its best. The book, written by Eileen Welsome, describes, in part, 18 unsuspecting patients who were injected with cancer-causing plutonium, their fate, and the 50-year cover-up by the U.S. government of these experiments. It also describes many other deceitful experiments conducted on Americans since World War II. Drawing on many recently released documents that were declassified by the U.S. Department of Energy, Welsome, a previous recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, details these secret medical experiments and their consequences over a period from the 1930s to the 1990s.

For example, she provides detailed descriptions of a Tennessee woman who was given a radioactive "cocktail" during a routine prenatal care visit; a developmentally disabled Massachusetts boy who was given radioactive oatmeal; and an Ohio woman with cancer who was given experimental radiation treatment as part of research to help military planners gather information on how to win a nuclear war.

The book also describes physicians and scientists who, far from being unaware of the dangers of radiation, debated at the time of these experiments their legal and ethical implications. The book begins with a very apt quote from Thomas Paine in Common Sense (1776): "The long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. . . ."

In the epilogue, Welsome concludes that: thousands of Americans were exploited as laboratory animals in government-funded radiation experiments; many physicians and scientists routinely violated patients' trust and were deceitful in carrying out these experiments; although most experiments were tracer studies that administered small amounts of radioactive materials, no dose can he considered to be absolutely safe; and some studies resulted in cancer and other serious effects. She ends by stating that unnecessary secrets and vast distances still exist between the people inside and outside the fences of government nuclear facilities.

This book is highly recommended, especially for those with an interest in nuclear issues and those responsible for assuring that research on human subjects is conducted in an ethical and responsible manner.

BARRY S. LEVY

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