I recommend adding human radiation experiments to the list. That one is outstanding because it involved very huge number of personnel, and because of the utterly minuscule backslash when it was declassified. edit: this is a good starting point:
It is basically a fact that government can do anything like this, and you wouldn’t know. You can’t either dismiss or confirm the claims of conspiracies without relying on actual evidence; all attempts to do so are a fallacy of trying to come up with some solution when correct solution is not available.
It is basically a fact that government can do anything like this, and you wouldn’t know.
The funny thing (well, maybe not so funny) is that this can hold true for years even when clues are virtually sitting in plain sight, just waiting for someone to join the dots.
For example, of the experiments on that Wikipedia list, I’m most familiar with those Eugene Saenger & co-workers at the University of Cincinnati carried out: administering half-body & total-body irradiation to cancer patients between 1960 & 1971. Between those years Saenger et al. actually published 4 articles about what they did in scientific journals, the first of which appeared in Science! (The references are below to show I’m not making that up.)
The Science article mentions that its two subjects were “patients receiving therapeutic irradiation of the whole body for malignancies”, references a paper presented at a 1961 Conference on Total Body Irradiation at the university, and explicitly acknowledges support from “contract DA-49-146-XZ-029 of the Defense Atomic Support Agency”, a Department of Defense agency. However, this paper wouldn’t have raised red flags for contemporary readers. It implies (most likely falsely) that the irradiation was a normal treatment.
If a sufficiently knowledgeable & careful reader had read the next paper, however, they would’ve noticed something odd. That paper reported results from 7 patients, once again acknowledged support from a DASA grant, and referenced a 1963 technical report by Saenger for that DoD agency. The wrinkle is that all seven patients are listed as having either carcinoma or sarcoma, but (according to pages 66 & 73-75 of a later paper criticizing Sanger) existing research had already indicated that total body irradiation didn’t work adequately for solid tumours like carcinomas & sarcomas. This ought to have been a tip-off that the irradiation wasn’t really about treating patients. (Not to mention that neither the Science paper nor this newer paper discussed the therapeutic effect of the irradiation on the patients’ cancers. Instead they focused on finding potential biomarkers for acute radiation exposure.)
So the papers published about these particular experiments in 1963 & 1966 had enough information to show where they were taking place, who was running them, that they were (partly) funded by the DoD, that they involved irradiating cancer patients, and that this irradiation wasn’t for the subjects’ benefit. Yet the research wasn’t publicly exposed as dodgy until 1971, and then only because a reporter writing a book interviewed Saenger and Saenger’s tongue apparently proved too loose.
H. K. Berry, E. L. Saenger, H. Perry, B. I. Friedman, J. G. Kereiakes, Carolyn Scheel (October 1963). “Deoxycytidine in Urine of Humans after Whole-Body Irradiation”, Science, 142, 396-398.
A. J. Luzzio, B. I. Friedman, J. G. Kereiakes, E. L. Saenger (January 1966). “Specific proteins in serum of total-body irradiated humans”, The Journal of Immunology, 96, 64-67.
I-W. Chen, J. G. Kereiakes, B. I. Friedman, E. L. Saenger (August 1968). “Radiation-Induced Urinary Excretion of Deoxycytidine by Rats and Humans”, ″Radiology″, 91, 343-348.
L. A. Gottschalk, R. Kunkel, T. H. Wohl, E. L. Saenger, C. N. Winget (November 1969). “Total and Half Body Irradiation: Effect on Cognitive and Emotional Processes”, ″Archives of General Psychiatry″, 21, 574-575.
I recommend adding human radiation experiments to the list. That one is outstanding because it involved very huge number of personnel, and because of the utterly minuscule backslash when it was declassified. edit: this is a good starting point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments_in_the_United_States
It is basically a fact that government can do anything like this, and you wouldn’t know. You can’t either dismiss or confirm the claims of conspiracies without relying on actual evidence; all attempts to do so are a fallacy of trying to come up with some solution when correct solution is not available.
The funny thing (well, maybe not so funny) is that this can hold true for years even when clues are virtually sitting in plain sight, just waiting for someone to join the dots.
For example, of the experiments on that Wikipedia list, I’m most familiar with those Eugene Saenger & co-workers at the University of Cincinnati carried out: administering half-body & total-body irradiation to cancer patients between 1960 & 1971. Between those years Saenger et al. actually published 4 articles about what they did in scientific journals, the first of which appeared in Science! (The references are below to show I’m not making that up.)
The Science article mentions that its two subjects were “patients receiving therapeutic irradiation of the whole body for malignancies”, references a paper presented at a 1961 Conference on Total Body Irradiation at the university, and explicitly acknowledges support from “contract DA-49-146-XZ-029 of the Defense Atomic Support Agency”, a Department of Defense agency. However, this paper wouldn’t have raised red flags for contemporary readers. It implies (most likely falsely) that the irradiation was a normal treatment.
If a sufficiently knowledgeable & careful reader had read the next paper, however, they would’ve noticed something odd. That paper reported results from 7 patients, once again acknowledged support from a DASA grant, and referenced a 1963 technical report by Saenger for that DoD agency. The wrinkle is that all seven patients are listed as having either carcinoma or sarcoma, but (according to pages 66 & 73-75 of a later paper criticizing Sanger) existing research had already indicated that total body irradiation didn’t work adequately for solid tumours like carcinomas & sarcomas. This ought to have been a tip-off that the irradiation wasn’t really about treating patients. (Not to mention that neither the Science paper nor this newer paper discussed the therapeutic effect of the irradiation on the patients’ cancers. Instead they focused on finding potential biomarkers for acute radiation exposure.)
So the papers published about these particular experiments in 1963 & 1966 had enough information to show where they were taking place, who was running them, that they were (partly) funded by the DoD, that they involved irradiating cancer patients, and that this irradiation wasn’t for the subjects’ benefit. Yet the research wasn’t publicly exposed as dodgy until 1971, and then only because a reporter writing a book interviewed Saenger and Saenger’s tongue apparently proved too loose.
H. K. Berry, E. L. Saenger, H. Perry, B. I. Friedman, J. G. Kereiakes, Carolyn Scheel (October 1963). “Deoxycytidine in Urine of Humans after Whole-Body Irradiation”, Science, 142, 396-398.
A. J. Luzzio, B. I. Friedman, J. G. Kereiakes, E. L. Saenger (January 1966). “Specific proteins in serum of total-body irradiated humans”, The Journal of Immunology, 96, 64-67.
I-W. Chen, J. G. Kereiakes, B. I. Friedman, E. L. Saenger (August 1968). “Radiation-Induced Urinary Excretion of Deoxycytidine by Rats and Humans”, ″Radiology″, 91, 343-348.
L. A. Gottschalk, R. Kunkel, T. H. Wohl, E. L. Saenger, C. N. Winget (November 1969). “Total and Half Body Irradiation: Effect on Cognitive and Emotional Processes”, ″Archives of General Psychiatry″, 21, 574-575.