Abstract
During the Second World War medical researchers around the USAinjected 18 hospital patients with radioactive plutonium in orderto learn its effects on the body. Two documents, a newspaperaccount and a university committee report, tell divergent storiesof the scientists and patients involved in that experiment. Thisarticle uses those documents – plutonium narratives– as a catalyst for exploring the problematicrepresentation of past human experimentation, assumptions of moralprogress in medical research, and the nature of informed consenttoday. Informed consent is shown to be an evolving process anddiscursive practice that cannot be understood apart from itshistorical and cultural embeddedness.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments 1995 Final Report. Washington DC: US Government Printing Office (061-000-00-848-9).
Appelbaum, Paul S., Loren H. Roth, and Charles W. Lidz 1982 The Therapeutic Misconception: Informed Consent in Psychiatric Research. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 5: 319–329.
Appelbaum, Paul S., Loren H. Roth, Charles W. Lidz, Paul Benson, and Willliam Winslade 1987 False Hopes and Best Data: Consent to Research and the Therapeutic Misconception. Hastings Center Report 17: 20–24.
Arnold, Robert M. and Charles W. Lidz 1995 Clinical Aspects of Consent in Health Care. InEncy. of Bioethics, rev. ed., Warren Reich, ed. pp. 1250–1256. New York: Simon and Schuster/Macmillan.
Balshem, Martha 1993 Cancer in the Community. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.
Beauchamp, Tom L. and Ruth R. Faden 1995 History of Informed Consent. InEncy. of Bioethics, rev. ed., Warren Reich, ed. pp. 1232–1238. New York: Simon and Schuster/Macmillan.
Beecher, Henry 1966 Ethics and Clinical Research. NEJM 274: 1354–1360.
Beeson, Paul B. 1985 Retrospective Commentary on the Bacterial Endocarditis Study. Reviews of Infectious Disease 7: 574–576.
Blumgart, Herrman L. 1969 The Medical Framework for Viewing the Problem of Human Experimentation. Daedalus 98: 248–274.
Cassell, Eric J. 1986 The Changing Concept of the Ideal Physician. Daedalus 115: 185–208.
1991 The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cho, Mildred K. 1994 Are Clinical Trials of Cell Transplantation for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Ethical? IRB 16: 12–15.
Clifford, James 1986 Introduction: Partial Truths. InWriting Culture, James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., pp. 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, James and George E. Marcus 1986 Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Curran, W.J. 1969 Governmental Regulation of the Use of Human Subjects in Medical Research. Daedalus 98: 542–594.
Dowling, Harry F. 1977 Fighting Infection: Conquests of the Twentieth Century, chapters 8–10. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Edgar, H. and D. S. Rothman 1990 New Rules for New Drugs: The Challenge of AIDs to the Regulatory Process. Millbank Q. 68, Supplement 1: 111–142.
Faden, Ruth and Tom Beauchamp 1986 A History and Theory of Informed Consent. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fox, Renée C. 1959 Experiment Perilous. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1991 The Evolution of American Bioethics: A Sociological Perspective. InSocial Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics, George Weisz, ed., pp. 201–217. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fox, Renée C. and Judith P. Swazey 1974 The Courage to Fail. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1992 Spare Parts. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fox, Renée C., Judith P. Swazey and Judith C. Watkins, Eds. 1992 The Study of the Sick: Proceedings of an Oral History Conference on the Development of Clinical Research, 20–22 May 1991. Philadelphia: The Acadia Institute and the Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Frank, Arthur 1995 The Wounded Storyteller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, Clifford 1988 Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gordon, Deborah 1994 The Ethics of Ambiguity and Concealment around Cancer. InInterpretive Phenomenology, Patricia Benner, ed., pp. 270–322. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gotay, Carolyn Cook 1991 Accrual to Cancer Clinical Trials. Soc Sci Med 33: 569–577.
Harth, S.C. and Y. H. Thong 1995 Parental Perceptions and Attitudes about Informed Consent in Clinical Research involving Children. Soc Sci Med 40: 1573–1577.
High, Dallas 1992 Research with Alzheimer's Disease Subjects: Informed Consent and Proxy Decision Making. J Am Geriatr Soc 40: 950–957.
Ivy, Andrew C. 1946 The Brutalities of Nazi Physicians. JAMA 132: 714–715.
Jonas, Hans 1969 Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects. Daedalus 98: 219–247.
Katz, Jay 1995 Do We Need Another Advisory Commission on Human Experimentation? Hastings Center Report 25: 29–31.
Katz, Jay, Alexander Capron, and E.S. Glass 1972 Experimentation with Human Beings. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Kaufman, Sharon R. 1993 The Healer's Tale: Transforming Medicine and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
King, Nancy M.P. 1995 Experimental Treatment. Hastings Center Report 25: 6–14.
Kleinman, Arthur 1988 The Illness Narratives. New York: Basic Books.
1995 Writing at the Margin. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kodish, Eric, John D. Lantos and Mark Siegler 1990 Ethical Considerations in Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials. Cancer 65: 2400–2404.
Kolata, Gina 1995 Scientists Claim Gene Therapy's First Success. New York Times, 20 October 1995.
Levine, Robert J. 1986 Ethics and Regulation of Clinical Research, 2nd ed., Baltimore: Urban and Schwarzenberg.
1994 The Impact of HIV Infection on Society's Perception of Clinical Trials. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 4: 93–98.
1995 Consent Issues in Human Research. InEncy. of Bioethics, rev. ed., Warren Reich, ed., pp. 1241–1250. New York: Simon and Schuster/Macmillan.
Mann, Charles C. 1994 Radiation: Balancing the Record. Science 263: 470–473.
Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fischer 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McNeill, P. 1993 The Ethics and Politics of Human Experimentation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mattingly, Cheryl and Linda C. Garro 1994 Introduction: Narrative Representation of Illness and Healing. Soc Sci Med 38: 771–774.
Moore, Francis D. 1969 Therapeutic Innovation: Ethical Boundaries in the Initial Clinical Trials of New Drugs and Surgical Procedures. Daedalus 98: 502–521.
Paget, Marianne A. 1988 The Unity of Mistakes: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Medical Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Romano, John 1974 Reflections on Informed Consent. Archives of General Psychiatry 30: 129–135.
Rothman, David 1987 Ethics and Human Experimentation: Henry Beecher Revisited. NEJM 317: 1195–1199.
1991 Strangers at the Bedside. New York: Basic Books.
1995 Research, Human: Historical Aspects. InEncy. of Bioethics, rev. ed., Warren Reich, ed., pp. 2248–2258. New York: Simon and Schuster/Macmillan.
Sandelowski, Margaret and Linda C. Jones 1996 ‘Healing Fictions’: Stories of Choosing in the Aftermath of the Detection of Fetal Anomalies. Soc Sci Med 42: 353–361.
Saris, A. Jamie 1995 Telling Stories: Life Histories, Illness Narratives, and Institutional Landscapes. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 19: 39–72.
Schain, Wendy S. 1994 Barriers to Clinical Trials. Cancer 74: 2666–2671.
Starr, Paul 1982 The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books.
Susman, Warren I. 1984 Culture as History. New York: Pantheon.
Taylor, Kathryn M. 1992 Integrating Conflicting Professional Roles: Physician Participation in Randomized Clinical Trials. Soc Sci Med 35: 217–224.
Taylor, Kathryn M., R.G. Margolese, and C.L. Soskolne 1984 Physicians' Reasons for not entering eligible patients in a randomized clinical trial of surgery for breast cancer. NEJM 310: 1363–1367.
UCSF Ad Hoc Fact Finding Committee 1995 Report on World War II Human Radiation Experiments. UCSF, February.
Welsome, Eileen 1993 The Plutonium Experiment. The Albuquerque Tribune, A Three-Part Report, 15–17 November 1993.
Young, Katharine 1987 Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
KAUFMAN, S.R. THE WORLD WAR II PLUTONIUM EXPERIMENTS: CONTESTED STORIES AND THEIR LESSONS FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH AND INFORMED CONSENT. Cult Med Psychiatry 21, 161–197 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005360928209
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005360928209