In January 1955, a lifelong football fan approached Lou Spadia, the general manager of the San Francisco 49ers, with a peculiar request: Would his players like to participate in a science experiment at an atomic research lab?
It wouldn't take much, the fan explained—just some radioactive material inside the players, who would then undergo a physical examination. The end result, he promised, would be "of mutual benefit and undoubtedly of interest to" Spadia, team owner Tony Morabito, head coach Red Strader—and to science.
The 49ers had just finished their fifth season in the NFL, and though they'd missed the playoffs for a fifth straight year, they were one of the league's top draws and seemed on the cusp of something big. Joe Perry, the first man to rush for 1,000 yards in consecutive seasons, had just been named the league's first Black MVP. Perry and perennial all-pro Hugh "The King" McElhenny, a celebrity since high school, lined up in what a team PR man had dubbed the "Million Dollar Backfield." Pure gloss, since no player back then made even six figures, but the flack was onto something: Perry, McElhenny, and teammates John Henry Johnson and Y. A. Tittle are all in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
This helps explain why Spadia's correspondent, a Navy physician named Albert R. Behnke Jr., was interested in the 49ers. It doesn't explain why Spadia, Morabito, and some players evidently agreed. Within a couple of weeks, Behnke had "completed arrangements" for the 49ers "to serve as subjects" in a nuclear-medicine experiment, as a colleague at UC Berkeley reported in one of the four surviving letters that outline the situation.
Behnke had been in the news a few years earlier, when he reported the failure of an unorthodox experiment: feeding sailors in the Pacific "large quantities" of garlic in order to ward off mosquitoes. But the 49ers likely knew their man from his groundbreaking work analyzing the physiques of pro football players.
The 49ers were almost certainly the most high-profile participants in a wider, decades-long research program at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, a specialized "atomic defense" outfit headquartered at a major naval shipyard in San Francisco from 1946 to 1969. But they weren't the only ones: Scientists there exposed at least 1,073 people to potentially harmful doses of radiation in at least 24 experiments and technical exercises. (The former shipyard, a profoundly polluted EPA Superfund site that generations of activists say has poisoned the historically Black neighborhood where it's situated, is now part of the biggest real-estate redevelopment project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake.) All this, plus the 49ers' involvement, is spelled out in government documents, scattered across the country, that I spent years combing through for an investigative series you can read here.