Experiments of Opportunity and Mental Gymnastics
A Hiroshima victim is examined for radiation exposure. Photo: Pinterest
The men who carried out this research were awfully cavalier about exposing people to radioactive substances, and they were even more relaxed about getting consent, but they weren’t monsters. About the researchers’ mindsets, Eileen Welsome says:
“I think scientists who did these kinds of experiments were great at rationalization. They thought the studies were for a greater good. Whenever there was a nuclear accident, the scientists and doctors swooped in to study the effects. They studied the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the soldiers at the Nevada Test Site, and employees injured in criticality incidents. These studies were called “experiments of opportunity.” A Los Alamos employee named Cecil Kelly was fatally injured in a criticality incident in the 1950s and the doctor/scientists rushed to the hospital to get samples of his blood, vomit, [and] bone marrow. They even saved his brain and sent it to a military institute.”
Convinced that most of what they were doing was either harmless or for the greater good, few of the researchers involved with the tests ever raised an alarm or complained in public about the secret projects.
Everybody had a career to look out for, after all, and nobody wanted to get in trouble. Besides, most of the test subjects were unaware of what had happened to them, and the majority were poor, black, or under military discipline and unlikely to complain about health problems that in any event mostly likely wouldn’t surface until decades later.
