| View Larger Image | The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War | Paperbackby Eileen Welsome (Author)
| List Price: | $16.95 | |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Delta | | Edition: | 1st Edition | | Page Count: | 592 Pages | | Publication Date: | October 10, 2000 | | Sales Rank: | 263,295rd |
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along with their morning oatmeal....In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors....At a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails"--in truth, drinks containing radioactive iron--as part of their prenatal treatmen....In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors embarked on a human experiment that was as chilling as it was closely guarded: the systematic injection of unsuspecting Americans with radioactive plutonium. In this shocking exposé, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome reveals the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of American men, women, and even children to nameless specimens with silvery radioactive metal circulating in their veins. Spanning the 1930s to the 1990s, filled with hundreds of newly declassified documents and firsthand interviews, The Plutonium Files traces the behind-the-scenes story of an extraordinary fifty-year cover-up. It illuminates a shadowy chapter in this country's history and gives eloquent voice to the men and women who paid for our atomic energy discoveries with their health--and sometimes their lives. |
Amazon.com Review
As World War II reached its climax, the U.S. push to create an atomic bomb spawned an industry the size of General Motors almost overnight. But a little-understood human dilemma quickly arose: How was all the radiation involved in building and testing the bomb going to affect the countless researchers, soldiers, and civilians exposed to it? Government scientists scrambled to find out, fearing cancer outbreaks and worse, but in their urgency conducted classified experiments that bordered on the horrific: MIT researchers fed radioactive oatmeal to residents of a state boys' school outside Boston; prisoners in Washington and Oregon were subjected to crippling blasts of direct radiation; and patients with terminal illnesses (or so it was hoped) were secretly injected with large doses of plutonium--survivors were surreptitiously monitored for years afterward. It was these plutonium guinea pigs that set journalist Eileen Welsome on her decade-long search to expose this grisly chapter of America's atomic age, a feat that would earn her the Pulitzer Prize. In the impressively thorough and compelling Plutonium Files, Welsome recounts her work with a reporter's gift for description, characterizing early radiation researchers as "a curious blend of spook, scientist, and soldier," tirelessly interviewing survivors and their families, and providing social and political context for a complex and far-reaching scandal. Perhaps most damning is that not only did these cold-war experiments violate everything from the Hippocratic Oath to the Nuremberg Code, Welsome reveals, they were often ill-conceived, inconclusive, and repetitive--"they were not just immoral science, they were bad science." --Paul Hughes |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 23 reviews)
|
Fascinating content, dry & unappealing style by endsleigh (CA)  2 Stars
September 03, 2009
Obviously, the material presented in this book is at once fascinating and terrifying. The author deserves praise for tackling the subject in a methodical and exhaustive fashion.
Unfortunately, however, I found the book dry and unappealing in its writing style. The experimental subjects were far from adequately humanized: rather than present details of their lives in a rich, engaging fashion, the author chose to frame them in a more sanitized, objective fashion. Oddly, the author also made very little of the lack of consent, which - of course - is a crucial aspect of the immorality of what was done. Hence, I came away from each anecdote with a rather weak, merely intellectual sense of the wrongs that had been done, rather than with strong intellectual & visceral feelings reflecting the moral & physical horrors that were perpetrated.
Although the author presents important research that should not be lost or forgotten, I would rather have read either a more richly authored version, or a much-abridged version in this author's style.
I'm glad I checked this book out of the library rather than bought it for my library.
| |
We need more of this! by Very Horny (New England)  5 Stars
November 17, 2004
A friend maintains that "very few conspiracies don't get found out".. this is definitely true in this case, but how many other experiments have been done on children, perhaps wards of the state in numerous states using private agencies subcontracting with state child care agencies that we might never hear about?
Of particular interest is the Fernald school chapter, where MIT researchers befriended vulnerable kids and traded "friendship" and "caring" for doses of irradiated milk the kids were made to drink without their knowledge or consent in Massachusetts.
| |
Skeletons in the closet 5 Stars
December 08, 2000
This book is scary to say the least. It is well researched and details what is a practice probably still going on today in experiements we do not know about. I was particularly troubled by the Fernald school, where unwanted kids were befriended by MIT researchers who took them on trips and gave them presents in return for the kids drinking radioactive milkshakes. Was some of this done to generate data for use in bringing the first commercial microwave to market by Raytheon?I was a guinea pig of sorts growing up in state child care and years later was confronted in an interview with what i suspect was a NSA employee as to whether i knew what " a controlled experiment is". As a young child, a former Pentagon official befriended me and tracked me,keeping files for research purposes over a 20+ year period.Whitey Bulger is alleged to have been a participant in the MK Ultra experiments involving LSD.I strongly recommend this and Jonathan Harr's "A Civil Action" to anyone!
| |
Plutonium Files (not x-files) by T.W Trotter (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)  4 Stars
November 22, 2000
The release of Eileen Welsome's book "THE PLUTONIUM FILES- America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War" in paperback will hopefully make this important book more accessible to the general public. Detailing the effort of the US government to test the effects of Plutonium and other radioactive substances on people, the book outlines first the creation and evolution of the nuclear program that created the need for such testing, and then the US government's attempt to conduct such testing on its own citizens without their knowledge or informed consent. On strictly a superficial level there is much here which will attract the "x-files" crowd: Super-secret installations, eccentric scientists and far-fetched experiments on unsuspecting citizens. The kind of information that makes conspiracy theorists sit back from their computers in darkened little rooms, pump their fist in the air and utter that now-hackneyed phrase: "The truth is out there" Fortunately for the reader, Welsome assiduously avoids such sensationalism and instead draws a largely compassionate picture of the US government's program and of the people who perpetrated it and who participated in it. Welsome's well structured and organized account of the growth of the plutonium testing programs involving critically ill persons across America during the Cold War years teems with information and insight, yet it manages to treat victim and perpetrator alike with a measure of respect and empathy that places this book well above the level of the standard "Shocking Expose". To her great credit Welsome goes beyond merely packaging the results of her extensive research and alarming discoveries in a "tell-all" book. Certainly, THE PLUTONIUM FILES introduces information which, by its nature is bound to shock and disturb many, but the book also addresses the too-often forgotten issue of context: Was what happened acceptable by the standards of the time in which it occurred? In addressing this question Welsome probes more deeply into her subject, examining the duality, the moral dichotomy, inherent in the decision to implement this program. In a time when the world was still dealing with the results of a devastating world war and the possibility of another seemed likely the need for answers had an immediacy which could be ignored only at the world's peril. Hard decisions had to be made and extraordinary measures taken; Welsome is clearly cognizant of this as she assess each program and as she examines and balances the need against the action and its end result, the author treats the reader to some of her best analysis. The Plutonium Files- America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is certainly an important book; one which adds a significant chapter to the recorded history of the growth of atomic science. Despite its scientific topic and exhaustive sourcing the books narrative is direct and engaging, its organization straightforward and its conclusions informed and objective. A book that is well worth its price, Welsome's book would be a great Christmas present for everyone from an avid historian to the omni-present x-files fan; who will find much in here to confirm their most exotic fears. Overall an excellent book for which the author has received two much deserved awards.
| |
Just Amazing by Heather Furtek (Lindenhurst, IL USA) 5 Stars
November 21, 2000
This book was completely amazing. First, you want to be appalled {as well you should} with the amount and type of experiments that were carried out {radioactive cocktails for pregnant women!!}. How could anyone do this to another person?? Then, you think of the people in your own life who have gotten bone marrow transplants, or radiation treatment for cancer. It gets harder to hold the original doctors as evil monsters. Don't misunderstand me - informed consent is a must. How do you inform them of outcomes that are absolutely unknown - how do you start to know?I thought a lot about this book as I read it, and continue to think about it now that I'm done. I'm sure there must be a middle ground between what they did, and what needed to be done. It is riveting and amazing.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans
by Jonathan Moreno (Author)
Undue Risk is an unprecedented and chilling history of the use of human subjects in atomic, biological and chemical warfare experiments by the U.S. government from World War II to the present. Jonathan Moreno, a senior researcher on the president's special commission, goes where few researchers have gone before, exploring secret government documents which reveal a plethora of government experiments. He exposes startling details of experiments like those involving the exposure of soldiers to...
| 
| The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor
by Ken Silverstein (Author)
Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science. While he was working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David’s obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his backyard garden shed.
Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the U.S. government and from industry experts. Following blueprints he found in an outdated...
| 
| Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element
by Jeremy Bernstein (Author)
When plutonium was first manufactured at Berkeley in the spring of 1941, there was so little of it that it was not visible to the naked eye. It took a year to accumulate enough so that one could actually see it. Now so much has been produced that we don't know what to do to get rid of it. We have created a monster. The history of plutonium is as strange as the element itself. When scientists began looking for it, they did so simply in the spirit of inquiry, not certain whether there were...
| 
| Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
by Svetlana Alexievich (Author), Keith Gessen (Translator)
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and...
| 
| In the Name of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation
by Andrew Goliszek (Author)
Science, as Andrew Goliszek proves in this compendious, chilling, and eye-opening book, has always had its dark side. Behind the bright promise of life-saving vaccines and life-enhancing technologies lies the true cost of the efforts to develop them. Knowledge has a price; often that price has been human suffering. The ethical limits governing use of the human body in experimentation have been breached, redefined, and breached again---from the moment the first plague-ridden corpse was heaved...
|
|
|
