Ten Government Experiments the Public Wasn't Told About

In March 1945, a 53-year-old cement worker named Ebb Cade was badly hurt in a car accident and taken to the Army hospital at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the secret city of the Manhattan Project. On April 10, doctors injected him with plutonium. His broken bones were not set until five days later, when bone samples were taken, and 15 of his teeth were extracted and sampled for plutonium. He was never expected to benefit, and one physician later said Cade gave no consent.

Cade was one of 18 people injected with plutonium between 1945 and 1947 at hospitals in Tennessee, New York, Chicago and California. The goal was to measure how the body takes up and excretes the new element, data used to set safety limits for bomb workers. In California, Albert Stevens, a 58-year-old thought to be dying of stomach cancer, was injected in May 1945. He turned out to have a benign ulcer. He lived about 20 more years, apparently never told what had been done, and his accumulated radiation dose is believed to be the highest known in any human.

The story broke through reporter Eileen Welsome of the Albuquerque Tribune, who won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for her stories about the patients. In January 1994, President Clinton created an advisory committee to investigate human radiation experiments.

In late September 1950, a Navy ship cruising off San Francisco released clouds of bacteria into the fog drifting toward the city. The aim was to learn how a biological attack would spread through a major American port. The Army chose microbes it believed were harmless, Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii, and tracked them at dozens of monitoring points. It concluded that nearly all of the city's 800,000 residents had breathed them in.

Within weeks, doctors at Stanford's hospital saw something unusual: 11 patients with rare, serious urinary tract infections caused by Serratia. Ten recovered. One, an older man named Edward Nevin who was recovering from prostate surgery, did not. His doctors were puzzled enough to write the cluster up in a medical journal. The test was secret, so they had no reason to connect the two.

The public learned of the San Francisco test, and many others like it, only in 1977, when the Army disclosed its open-air testing program at Senate hearings. Nevin's family sued the government in 1981. The courts ruled against them, mainly because they could not prove the test bacteria were what killed him, and the Supreme Court declined to overturn the rulings. The Army maintained that any link was coincidental.

During World War II, the military feared that Germany or Japan might use poison gas, and it wanted to know how American troops and their protective gear would hold up. About 60,000 enlisted men took part in secret tests involving mustard gas and similar agents. Many were sworn to secrecy, and their exposures often went unrecorded. The program was not declassified until 1993.

A 2015 NPR investigation found that some of these experiments sorted soldiers by race. Black, Japanese American and Puerto Rican troops were tested to see whether they reacted differently to the agents, with white soldiers used as comparison groups. In one 1944 study, 39 Japanese American soldiers and 40 white soldiers were exposed to mustard and lewisite over 20 days. Japanese American troops were apparently used as stand-ins for the enemy. More than 100 tests took place on an island off Panama.

The secrecy did lasting damage. Because the men received no follow-up care and were bound to silence, many could not explain their injuries to doctors or prove them to the government. The VA now recognizes dozens of testing sites and presumes exposure for veterans who served at them, but for many of the men, that recognition came too late.

In the early morning of December 3, 1949, workers at the Hanford plutonium plant in eastern Washington deliberately released roughly 8,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131 into the air. The test was an intelligence project. The Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission and General Electric wanted to learn how to detect a plutonium plant from its emissions, knowledge that could be used to monitor the Soviet bomb program.

The name came from the fuel. Uranium was normally left to cool for 90 to 100 days before processing, which let much of its short-lived radioactivity fade. For the Green Run, it was processed after only 16 days, and the filters that usually captured most of the iodine were not used. The plan called for specific weather, but conditions did not cooperate, and officials went ahead anyway. The plume lingered near the plant for days. Readings on vegetation reached as much as 400 times the limit considered permissible at the time, and aircraft tracked the release more than 100 miles away.

There is no sign that anyone warned the families living downwind. The release stayed classified until 1986, and the presidential advisory committee that later reviewed it concluded the test did not follow Hanford's own safety practices of 1949.

The Walter E. Fernald State School outside Boston housed children labeled feeble-minded, many of them from poor families, in spartan conditions. So when researchers invited some of the boys to join a Science Club, membership was a prize. It came with extra milk, parties, outings and trips to Red Sox games.

The club was a recruiting tool for nutrition research led by scientists from MIT. In 1946, 17 boys received radioactive iron. From 1950 to 1953, 57 boys ate breakfasts of cereal and milk laced with radioactive calcium, so researchers could trace how minerals were absorbed. A research fellow sponsored by the Quaker Oats Company took part.

The letters sent to parents never mentioned radioactivity or any risk, and suggested the project would benefit the children. One 1953 letter treated a parent's silence as consent. When the presidential advisory committee reviewed the studies in the 1990s, it judged the doses low and any harm to the boys extremely unlikely. It still called the work morally troubling, because consent was incomplete and the subjects were institutionalized children with few choices; one boy who objected was pressed to take part. Former members sued, and in 1998 a federal court approved a $1.85 million settlement with MIT and Quaker Oats.

In 1953 the Army staged mock biological attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis and Winnipeg, Canada. Local officials were told the work involved invisible smokescreens. In reality, the Army was releasing a fine fluorescent powder, zinc cadmium sulfide, chosen because it could be tracked under ultraviolet light and behaved in the air much like bacteria would. The goal was to learn how a germ weapon would spread through a real city.

The program grew. Over the 1950s and 1960s the Army used the powder in tests at St. Louis, Minneapolis, Corpus Christi, Fort Wayne and 29 other urban and rural sites in the U.S. and Canada. In St. Louis, according to later accounts, it was released from rooftop blowers and vehicles in crowded neighborhoods. Under a program called the Large Area Concept, which began in December 1957, planes released it along lines hundreds of miles long, and particles were detected as far as 1,200 miles away.

Residents learned of the tests long afterward, and public alarm in the early 1990s led the Army, and then Congress, to seek an independent review. A 1997 National Research Council report concluded the recorded exposures were very unlikely to have made anyone sick. Some residents and researchers remain unconvinced, and the EPA classifies cadmium sulfide as a probable human carcinogen.

For twenty years, the Army Chemical Corps ran a classified human research program at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. According to the Defense Department, about 7,000 soldiers took part. They were tested with more than 250 substances, including nerve agents such as sarin and VX in low doses, mustard agents, irritants, and drugs meant to incapacitate an enemy rather than kill, among them BZ, LSD and PCP.

The men were technically volunteers, and many signed consent forms. But an Army investigation later criticized the recruiting and consent process in ways that suggested possible coercion, and the soldiers were often given little information about what they were taking or what the long-term effects might be. When press reports exposed the program in 1975, it was shut down that September, and lawmakers questioned why so little had been done to follow up on the volunteers' health.

The veterans pushed for answers for decades. In 2009 a veterans group and several former test subjects sued the Army and the CIA. A federal judge ruled in 2013 that the Army has a continuing duty to tell test subjects about new information affecting their health, and in 2015 an appeals court held that the Army must also provide them with medical care.

In the 1960s, the Pentagon ran a series of tests under an umbrella effort called Project 112, meant to measure how chemical and biological weapons would affect American forces. The best-known part was Project SHAD, short for Shipboard Hazard and Defense. Its purpose was to see how well crews could detect and survive an attack at sea, and how agents would spread through a ship.

Navy ships, Army tugboats, Marine Corps aviation units and an Air Force squadron all took part. One vessel, the USS George Eastman, was specially fitted for the work. The VA estimates that about 6,000 service members were involved, and most of the participants later identified served aboard the ships.

For decades, the tests were classified, which left veterans with health problems unable to learn what they had been exposed to. In 2000 the Defense Department began declassifying records, and from 2002 it published fact sheets on individual tests. Congressional hearings followed that fall, and a 2002 law required the Pentagon to share the information with the VA. A 2007 Institute of Medicine study found no clear evidence of specific long-term health effects, though some veterans remain convinced otherwise.

In 2005, while researching the Tuskegee study, Wellesley College historian Susan Reverby went through the archived papers of John Cutler, a U.S. Public Health Service doctor. She found records of something far worse: experiments in Guatemala in which American researchers deliberately infected people with sexually transmitted diseases.

Between 1946 and 1948, with U.S. government funding, researchers exposed about 1,300 people to syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid. The subjects included prisoners, soldiers, psychiatric patients and sex workers, people with little ability to refuse. None gave informed consent. The aim was to test whether penicillin and other methods could prevent infection. Only about half of those exposed are recorded as receiving any treatment, and 83 deaths are recorded, though it is unclear how many the experiments caused.

Reverby made her findings public in 2010. On October 1 of that year, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized to Guatemala. A presidential bioethics commission reviewed more than 125,000 pages of records and in 2011 published a report titled Ethically Impossible, describing grave violations of ethics. Lawsuits by victims and their families have so far failed to win compensation.

In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began a study in Macon County, Alabama, working with the Tuskegee Institute. It enrolled 600 Black men, most of them poor sharecroppers: 399 who had syphilis and 201 who did not. The men were never told they had syphilis. They were told they were being treated for bad blood, a local term for a range of ailments, and were given free medical exams, meals and burial insurance. The real goal was to watch the disease progress without treatment.

By 1943, penicillin had become the standard cure for syphilis. The men were not offered it, and researchers took steps to keep them from getting treatment elsewhere. Some of the men died while the study went on, and some of their wives and children were infected. The study continued for 40 years.

It ended because Peter Buxtun, a former Public Health Service employee, refused to let his objections drop. He gave information to Associated Press reporter Jean Heller, whose story ran in July 1972. Within months, a federal panel declared the study ethically unjustified, and it was shut down. A 1974 settlement paid $10 million, and Congress passed a law requiring review boards for research on human subjects. On May 16, 1997, President Clinton formally apologized to the survivors.