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Original Title:	The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
ISBN:	0385319541 (ISBN13: 9780385319546)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction Writers (2000)

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

Eileen Welsome

Paperback | Pages: 592 pages

Rating: 4.23 | 407 Users | 41 Reviews

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When the vast wartime factories of the Manhattan Project began producing plutonium in quantities never before seen on earth, scientists working on the  top-secret bomb-building program grew apprehensive. Fearful that plutonium  might cause a cancer epidemic among workers and desperate to learn more about what it could do to the human body, the Manhattan Project's medical doctors embarked upon an experiment in which eighteen unsuspecting patients in  hospital wards throughout the country were secretly injected with the cancer-causing substance. Most of these patients would go to their graves without ever knowing what had been done to them.

Now, in The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome reveals for the first time the breadth of the extraordinary fifty-year cover-up surrounding the plutonium injections, as well as the deceitful nature of thousands of other experiments conducted on American citizens in the postwar years.

Welsome's remarkable investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American history. She gives a voice to such innocents as Helen Hutchison, a young woman who entered a prenatal clinic in Nashville for a routine checkup and was instead given a radioactive "cocktail" to drink; Gordon Shattuck, one of several boys at a state school for the developmentally disabled in Massachusetts who was fed radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; and Maude Jacobs, a Cincinnati woman suffering from cancer and subjected to an experimental radiation treatment designed to help military planners learn how to win a nuclear war.

Welsome also tells the stories of the scientists themselves, many of whom learned the ways of secrecy on the Manhattan Project. Among them are Stafford Warren, a grand figure whose bravado masked a cunning intelligence; Joseph Hamilton, who felt he was immune to the dangers of radiation only to suffer later from a fatal leukemia; and physician Louis Hempelmann, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the plan to inject humans with potentially carcinogenic doses of plutonium. Hidden discussions of fifty years past are reconstructed here, wherein trusted government officials debated the ethical and legal implications of the experiments, demolishing forever the argument that these studies took place in a less enlightened era.

Powered by her groundbreaking reportage and singular narrative gifts, Eileen Welsome has created a work of profound humanity as well as major historical significance.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Title	:	The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
Author	:	Eileen Welsome
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 592 pages
Published	:	October 20th 2010 by Delta (first published 1999)
Categories	:	History. Nonfiction. Science. Health. Medicine. Politics

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Ratings: 4.23 From 407 Users | 41 Reviews

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

Although very long and filled with a lot of medical jargon...this book talks about the secret medical experiments that were done here in the United States and else where during the Cold War. It's pretty crazy and quite scary!!!

Outstanding book on a subject that will make you uncomfortable, make you very angry, and make you question authority, especially if its the federal government. So well written factually and a tribute to those who were victims. I will never forget this book.

DNF at 26%. May finish one day.

Wow. We really did inject unsuspecting Americans with plutonimium to study the health effects of radiation. This book lays it all out, going through fifty years of documents, and interviewing survivors and their family members. If you ever question the need for human subjects projection in medical research, read this book.

Written with understanding offered to a non-technical reader, this book is the culmination of one journalists exploration into the shadowy world of Americas secret nuclear program. Eileen Welsome brings the detail and history of Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb but uses a fresh, engaging voice.The chapter Im currently reading tells of earliest observations to radiation health concerns. Women working in New Jersey in the early twentieth century who painted the dials of radium watches



One of the first emotions this book elicits from readers is indignation and shock that physicians and government agencies could let the kind of experiments described in this book occur, and the treatment the patients received. This book will no doubt attract significant attention because of the radiation experiments described, but the book seems be more about the prevailing attitudes of physicians and scientists towards patients and research at the time. The activities that take place in the