One Saturday in June 2000, a small crowd gathered on the grounds of the University of Cincinnati (UC) Medical Center. They congregated around a plaque that had been placed a few months prior as a ceremonial end to years of litigation. Among the crowd was the case’s presiding judge, Sandra Beckwith of the Southern District of Ohio. She stood, holding a candle, looking at the plaque that bore the words: “In Memoriam Cancer Patients Radiation Effects Study, 1960–1972.”[1] Beneath this was a list of seventy names. These names commemorated the patients who were irradiated as part of a UC study funded by the Department of Defense (DOD). But even in this moment of commemoration and closure, this retroactive attempt at justice was incomplete.
To understand how that plaque came to be, it’s necessary to go back to 1960, when these experiments began under the leadership of UC physician Dr. Eugene Saenger. He and his colleagues received DOD funding to study the effects of whole-body radiation with the hopes of developing a blood or urine test to detect radiation exposure in the event of nuclear war.[2] But their subjects of choice were cancer patients, who were deceived and misled into participating in the study under the guise of treatment. The subjects were recruited from Cincinnati General Hospital, one of the few hospitals available for Black and low-income Cincinnatians.[3] As a result, more than 60% of the patients were Black, despite the fact that they made up only 26% of the city’s population at the time. The vast majority of the study’s subjects were lower or working class.[4]
For over a decade, the subjects were not fully informed of the risks and consequences of this study. For the first five years, no written consent forms were used.[5] But even after those forms were implemented, the patients were not warned of the dangers, which ranged from mild side effects like nausea to a risk of death.[6] Many of these patients suffered excruciating misery without any palliative care, so as not to “compromise” the study itself.[7] But even after dozens of irradiations, the intended urine test was never developed.[8] It’s unclear why that goal was never met, in part because the researchers published very little about their findings. But in the final years of the experiments, their purpose broadened, with the alleged goals of offering potential palliative care and studying the effects of radiation on the body.[9]
The experiments finally came to an end in early 1972, when UC English professor Martha Stephens drew attention to them as a whistleblower.[10] After Stephens exposed the study, physicians, university administrators, and politicians reached an agreement: the study would be suspended, but it would also be concealed. No investigations would be conducted, and the truth would not be told, not even to the subjects.[11]