Re: "The Plutonium Files"-Question

[Paul Lavely <lavelyp@uclink4.berkeley.edu>]

>
>Is this the book which Eileen Welsome, formerly of the Albuquerque Tribune,
>was preparing following her series in the Tribune in 1993 [which led to the
>DOE "openness initiative" by former DOE Sec. O'Leary]  on the plutonium
>injection experiments which won Welsome the Pulitizer Prize?
>
>If so when was it published, and what is the publishing company?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Stewart Farber
>Public Health Sciences
>email: radproject@aol.com
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Stewart - it is at Amazon.com for about $19. Here is one of several 
reviews at Amazon.

  As World War II reached its climax, the U.S. push to create an 
atomic bomb spawned an industry the size of
                            General Motors almost overnight. But a 
little-understood human dilemma quickly arose: How was all the 
radiation
                            involved in building and testing the bomb 
going to affect the countless researchers, soldiers, and civilians 
exposed to
                            it? Government scientists scrambled to 
find out, fearing cancer outbreaks and worse, but in their urgency 
conducted
                            classified experiments that bordered on 
the horrific: MIT researchers fed radioactive oatmeal to residents of 
a state
                            boys' school outside Boston; prisoners in 
Washington and Oregon were subjected to crippling blasts of direct
                            radiation; and patients with terminal 
illnesses (or so it was hoped) were secretly injected with large 
doses of
                            plutonium--survivors were surreptitiously 
monitored for years afterward.

                            It was these plutonium guinea pigs that 
set journalist Eileen Welsome on her decade-long search to expose 
this grisly
                            chapter of America's atomic age, a feat 
that would earn her the Pulitzer Prize. In the impressively thorough 
and
                            compelling Plutonium Files, Welsome 
recounts her work with a reporter's gift for description, 
characterizing early
                            radiation researchers as "a curious blend 
of spook, scientist, and soldier," tirelessly interviewing survivors 
and their
                            families, and providing social and 
political context for a complex and far-reaching scandal. Perhaps 
most damning is
                            that not only did these cold-war 
experiments violate everything from the Hippocratic Oath to the 
Nuremberg Code,
                            Welsome reveals, they were often 
ill-conceived, inconclusive, and repetitive--"they were not just 
immoral science,
                            they were bad science." --Paul Hughes


Paul Lavely
lavelyp@uclink4.berkeley.edu
-- 
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