Content note: this article quotes outdated terms for people with mental disabilities as used in their original context. I don’t use this language offline nor do I condone using it in the comments.
That said, here’s your third MOS today.
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Whenever I hear someone argue that the free market will figure shit out with no guidance or regulations, I like to remind them of a thing I call “history.” Leaded gasoline. Denying cigarettes cause cancer. And the time that some MIT researchers fed radioactive cereal to mentally handicapped children.
Oh, you hadn’t heard about that last one?
Today’s Moment of Science… the Radioactive Breakfast Club.
As still happens in nutrition circles, in the mid-1940s, a rumor had spread that a component of oatmeal hindered nutrient absorption. This stoked fears of potential for a loss of sales. The oat people just couldn’t have that, there were raisins waiting to be disguised as chocolate chips, damnit. The study was run by MIT and largely funded by Quaker Oats with the hope of proving that they were just as nutritious as their mushy wheat based competitors.
So they had to find willing, hungry, compliant people to feed simply absurd amounts of cereal and oatmeal. With a smidge of radiation.
By the 1940s, practical applications of radiation for research were starting to be better understood, but it was still viewed in the public eye with some fear and awe. Radioactive materials had fallen out of favor as health treatments after the tragedy of the radium dial painters. Researchers knew large amounts of radiation could fuck up your life, but that didn’t mean they were gonna tell you they were dosing you with tiny bits of it.
Informed consent wasn’t really a thing yet. Especially not for people they saw as subhuman.
Walter E. Fernald, a previous superintendent of the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, MA, called the school a “model in the field of mental retardation.” Which didn’t match up with student Fred Boyce’s memories from the school. He recalled they were abused, forced to do manual labor, and sometimes food was withheld as a punishment.
Fernald was a eugenicist. This was all part of the school running properly as he saw it. Students with disabilities were let to know that they were not part of the human race. Business as usual.
Ninety students from the Fernald State School were coaxed into enrolling in this study with promises of special treatment like extra food and Red Sox tickets. The students just thought they had signed up for the “Fernald Science Club,” and perhaps a reprieve from misery at the state school. With so many participants having intellectual disabilities, the scientists felt explaining the experiment was unnecessary. Boyce hoped his participation would give him a chance to tell the scientists about the real conditions at the school, but it seems he didn’t have a voice there either.
So why the radiation? It’s a common technique still used now to track how substances travel through the body today. Three studies were conducted in all. Radioactive isotopes of calcium and iron were added to their cereal in two studies. In the third, they were injected directly with radioactive calcium.
The experiments continued until the mid 1950s, for about a decade.
The radiation levels they were exposed to didn’t turn out to be dangerous. It was comparable to the annual background radiation exposure from living in Denver, Colorado.
That’s not the fucking problem here.
The problem is that, instead of proper informed consent, test subjects found out decades later on the news that they’d been unknowingly fed radioactive isotopes as minors. They’d been used because they were “feeble minded.” The kids were never really told it was a study. Despite the fact that the findings had been published long before, the ugly truth behind it all came to light in a 1993 Boston Globe article from Scott Allen titled “Radiation used on Retarded.” It prompted a federal investigation.
One MIT researcher still defended the study because, hey, they learned stuff. And they didn’t radiate the kids to death so it’s cool, right? There’s no possible way they could have learned any of that without bribing and lying to a bunch of kids as young as seven who trusted you, right?
In 1998, Quaker Oats and MIT settled for $1.85 million in damages. Which I hope gave some closure to the men who were experimented on as children, but I’m not sure how much it costs to make the public trust you.
But sure, take the regulations off everything. What could possibly go wrong?
This has been your Moment of Science, asking how many cases like these have we not found out about yet?
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