Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Experiments best not done

CultureLab: The radioactive legacy of the search for plutopia

New Scientist talks about a new book (from Oxford University Press, so I assume it is credible) about some surprising Cold War experiments about radiation:
MAKING plutonium for nuclear bombs takes balls, but not in the way you might think. In 1965, scientists at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex in Washington state wanted to investigate the impact of radiation on fertility - and they weren't hidebound by ethics.

In a specially fortified room in the basement of Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, volunteer prisoners were asked to lie face down on a trapezoid-shaped bed. They put their legs into stirrups, and let their testicles drop into a plastic box of water where they were zapped by X-rays.

The experiments, which lasted for a decade and involved 131 prisoners, came up with some unsurprising results. Even at the lowest dose - 0.1 gray - sperm was damaged, and at twice that dose the prisoners became sterile. They were paid $5 a month for their trouble, plus $25 per biopsy and $100 for a compulsory vasectomy at the end so they didn't father children with mutations.

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