6 ms·

Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before

Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I'm sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians. By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2] 1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/ https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/ 2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/

bguebert 2y ago
It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos (radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)
- greenavocado 2y ago
  It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.
  - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
    Governments are happy to exploit their citizens for any -- or no -- reason whatsoever.
    - hkpack 2y ago
      People with power are happy to exploit other people for their own benefits if they can get away with it. We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too. And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.
- hobobaggins 2y ago
  Wow, and it was actually heart disease that took him and not the radiation directly. This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy) https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano
- krisoft 2y ago
  I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process. And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals. Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        True. When is the time to remove from checklists, and when is the time to add to them. If the feedback-loop isn't properly closed, you get imbalance.
        nickpp 2y ago
        Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives". The system is unbalanced by default.
- jorvi 2y ago
  And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s. To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Incidents like these decrease confidence in the medical establishment, which only has a net-negative effect. Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments. Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole. There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it. [0] - https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elderly-chinese-are-unvaccinated https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder... [1] - https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-case-study-understanding-the-impact-of-polio-vaccine-disinformation-in-pakistan/ https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...
    - MisterTea 2y ago
      > While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.
  - Gibbon1 2y ago
    I think when you forgo high scrutiny you end up with a lot of sloppy research. You literally have problems with a sloppy study showing something and then needing ten increasingly rigorous studies to show it's bunk. So ethics review probably puts the kabosh on a lot of bad or unnecessary studies. Which is a positive.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  Modern polite correct cancel culture snowflakes discover science. This is hilarious. Everything we have nowadays was researched or discovered using "crazy", "unethical", unrestrained science.
  - arresin 2y ago
    Whatever we get out of injecting someone with plutonium isn’t worth it.
oooyay 2y ago
Radon mainly effects the lungs and requires continued exposure. I still personally would not expect a radon rich spring to be healthy, even with short term exposure. The effects of radon exposure over time on the lungs are well studied. Anecdotally, the primitive way to determine radon presence in a home without the use of sensors is to look at the number of scratches on a window. Radon causes them.
- mpreda 2y ago
  What kind of window scratches? on the inside or the outside of the window? visible to the eye?
  - Retric 2y ago
    Microscopic. Picture on page 20 looks like little dots. https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le3754.pdf https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le3...
  - oooyay 2y ago
    They can be visible with enough density, but it really depends on the pico-Curies and the window placement relative to sources.
- nsguy 2y ago
  Our local library has a Radon detector you can borrow. We did. No Radon... AFAIK the scientific consensus is no amount of radiation exposure is beneficial. There have been some theories going around about how a small amount of radiation can be beneficial but I think that's been proven not to be true.
  - oooyay 2y ago
    I have one, and a sub slab Radon abatement system. My levels were pretty high for a basement and that was how I learned about Radon. You're 100% correct about that there is no safe level of Radon exposure. The international community decided on "safe levels" because the cost of abatement is far and away from what many countries can afford, but I think they're moving to the "no safe levels" definition this year.
odyssey7 2y ago
Good news: you might not need to add a radon tank to the hot tub you already own. The control group for [2] was people who did not do any hot spring bathing at all during an average week, so their methodology does not explore the significance of the radon itself.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  The interesting thing is that they didn't find a higher incidence of lung, esophageal, and other soft-tissue cancers in elderly folks who bath in radon springs more than once a week. The blood pressure reduction probably has more to do with heat exposure than with radon itself. Seems to me that regular exposure to a normal sauna or hot spring would probably elicit similar results.
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    It was a straw poll. A sampling bias is that none of the people who had died of cancer responded.
    - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
      People don't die of cancer instantly -- in many cases, it's pretty indolent, and "alive with cancer"/"in remission" are fairly common statuses. This would surely be picked up in the respondent data.
      - odyssey7 2y ago
        If I were dying of cancer, odds are good that I would have ended up in the control group for not being especially proactive about visiting the hot springs. The authors of [2] explain this limitation themselves: "Some study limitations should be considered. ... healthier people may have been more likely to bathe in the radon hot springs."
nazgulsenpai 2y ago
I am reminded of this somewhat unrelated but interesting bit of history involving glow-in-the-dark paint in the 1920s. I got radium and radon crossed in my brain before looking up this article, but figured it's interesting enough to share anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
drewcoo 2y ago
Sure, but this is the US and they hadn't tried it on a contained black population yet . . .
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  The worst part about this comment is that I can't dispute the fact that the government tends to experiment on these populations. Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it. About the only rebuttal I can give is that it's not just the US. I'm sure every nation has some population that they treat like dirt. Whatabout-ism? Yes, but that's pretty much all I got.
  - 8372049 2y ago
    > Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it. I think all humans suck, just like all humans have the capacity to be kind, considerate and "good". It depends on the circumstances. Most importantly, I think the somewhat common notion that inhabitants of Germany during the 30s and 40s were intrinsically evil is a very dangerous belief—if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.
    - bsder 2y ago
      The Milgram experiment, for all its faults, shows how evil can manifest from the banal. It is not enough to defer to authority. It is not enough to go with the flow. It is not enough to support the status quo. ALL of these things can lead to extremely evil end results. An individual must stand up and explicitly say "No. This is wrong. I will not do this. I will not promulgate this."
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - csomar 2y ago
      > if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it. Germany was/is a central power. Geo-politically, you always have problems with your neighbor, where they are your ally in war or your enemy. Being a central power means all your neighbors are your allied enemies.
userbinator 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis is a thing.
- Retric 2y ago
  It might be a thing, though there’s zero direct evidence that it’s true. Worse there’s an interest group that desires to push such a narrative anyway.
zdragnar 2y ago
No need to go all the way to Japan, just head to the radon health mines in Montana. https://radonmine.com/ https://radonmine.com/ I first heard of it because we were visiting some Amish families and one wasn't around because they were on a trip out there.

bguebert 2y ago

It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

zero-sharp 2y ago
There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos (radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)
greenavocado 2y ago
It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf
surfingdino 2y ago
Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.
- mangamadaiyan 2y ago
  Governments are happy to exploit their citizens for any -- or no -- reason whatsoever.
  - hkpack 2y ago
    People with power are happy to exploit other people for their own benefits if they can get away with it. We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too. And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.
hobobaggins 2y ago
Wow, and it was actually heart disease that took him and not the radiation directly. This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy) https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano
krisoft 2y ago
I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process. And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals. Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      True. When is the time to remove from checklists, and when is the time to add to them. If the feedback-loop isn't properly closed, you get imbalance.
      - nickpp 2y ago
        Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives". The system is unbalanced by default.
jorvi 2y ago
And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s. To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Incidents like these decrease confidence in the medical establishment, which only has a net-negative effect. Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments. Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole. There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it. [0] - https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elderly-chinese-are-unvaccinated https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder... [1] - https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-case-study-understanding-the-impact-of-polio-vaccine-disinformation-in-pakistan/ https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    > While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences. I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  I think when you forgo high scrutiny you end up with a lot of sloppy research. You literally have problems with a sloppy study showing something and then needing ten increasingly rigorous studies to show it's bunk. So ethics review probably puts the kabosh on a lot of bad or unnecessary studies. Which is a positive.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Modern polite correct cancel culture snowflakes discover science. This is hilarious. Everything we have nowadays was researched or discovered using "crazy", "unethical", unrestrained science.
- arresin 2y ago
  Whatever we get out of injecting someone with plutonium isn’t worth it.

oooyay 2y ago

Radon mainly effects the lungs and requires continued exposure. I still personally would not expect a radon rich spring to be healthy, even with short term exposure. The effects of radon exposure over time on the lungs are well studied. Anecdotally, the primitive way to determine radon presence in a home without the use of sensors is to look at the number of scratches on a window. Radon causes them.

mpreda 2y ago
What kind of window scratches? on the inside or the outside of the window? visible to the eye?
- Retric 2y ago
  Microscopic. Picture on page 20 looks like little dots. https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le3754.pdf https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le3...
- oooyay 2y ago
  They can be visible with enough density, but it really depends on the pico-Curies and the window placement relative to sources.
nsguy 2y ago
Our local library has a Radon detector you can borrow. We did. No Radon... AFAIK the scientific consensus is no amount of radiation exposure is beneficial. There have been some theories going around about how a small amount of radiation can be beneficial but I think that's been proven not to be true.
- oooyay 2y ago
  I have one, and a sub slab Radon abatement system. My levels were pretty high for a basement and that was how I learned about Radon. You're 100% correct about that there is no safe level of Radon exposure. The international community decided on "safe levels" because the cost of abatement is far and away from what many countries can afford, but I think they're moving to the "no safe levels" definition this year.

odyssey7 2y ago

Good news: you might not need to add a radon tank to the hot tub you already own. The control group for [2] was people who did not do any hot spring bathing at all during an average week, so their methodology does not explore the significance of the radon itself.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
The interesting thing is that they didn't find a higher incidence of lung, esophageal, and other soft-tissue cancers in elderly folks who bath in radon springs more than once a week. The blood pressure reduction probably has more to do with heat exposure than with radon itself. Seems to me that regular exposure to a normal sauna or hot spring would probably elicit similar results.
- odyssey7 2y ago
  It was a straw poll. A sampling bias is that none of the people who had died of cancer responded.
  - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    People don't die of cancer instantly -- in many cases, it's pretty indolent, and "alive with cancer"/"in remission" are fairly common statuses. This would surely be picked up in the respondent data.
    - odyssey7 2y ago
      If I were dying of cancer, odds are good that I would have ended up in the control group for not being especially proactive about visiting the hot springs. The authors of [2] explain this limitation themselves: "Some study limitations should be considered. ... healthier people may have been more likely to bathe in the radon hot springs."

nazgulsenpai 2y ago

I am reminded of this somewhat unrelated but interesting bit of history involving glow-in-the-dark paint in the 1920s. I got radium and radon crossed in my brain before looking up this article, but figured it's interesting enough to share anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

drewcoo 2y ago

Sure, but this is the US and they hadn't tried it on a contained black population yet . . .

bilbo0s 2y ago
The worst part about this comment is that I can't dispute the fact that the government tends to experiment on these populations. Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it. About the only rebuttal I can give is that it's not just the US. I'm sure every nation has some population that they treat like dirt. Whatabout-ism? Yes, but that's pretty much all I got.
- 8372049 2y ago
  > Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it. I think all humans suck, just like all humans have the capacity to be kind, considerate and "good". It depends on the circumstances. Most importantly, I think the somewhat common notion that inhabitants of Germany during the 30s and 40s were intrinsically evil is a very dangerous belief—if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.
  - bsder 2y ago
    The Milgram experiment, for all its faults, shows how evil can manifest from the banal. It is not enough to defer to authority. It is not enough to go with the flow. It is not enough to support the status quo. ALL of these things can lead to extremely evil end results. An individual must stand up and explicitly say "No. This is wrong. I will not do this. I will not promulgate this."
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - csomar 2y ago
    > if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it. Germany was/is a central power. Geo-politically, you always have problems with your neighbor, where they are your ally in war or your enemy. Being a central power means all your neighbors are your allied enemies.

userbinator 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis is a thing.

Retric 2y ago
It might be a thing, though there’s zero direct evidence that it’s true. Worse there’s an interest group that desires to push such a narrative anyway.

zdragnar 2y ago

No need to go all the way to Japan, just head to the radon health mines in Montana. https://radonmine.com/ https://radonmine.com/ I first heard of it because we were visiting some Amish families and one wasn't around because they were on a trip out there.