The Plutonium Files: MIT scientists fed radioactive oatmeal to schoolboys to see what would happen

Monday, March 14, 2016 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Tags: radiation experiments, MIT, unethical science

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(NaturalNews) Between 1946 and 1953, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted a horrifying experiment in which schoolboys were fed radioactive oatmeal, simply to support marketing claims made by the Quaker Oats company!

The study was performed on more than 100 boys, many of whom were wards of the state and had been falsely declared "mentally retarded," according to The New York Times. The boys were recruited to join the "Fernald Science Club." They – and their parents, for boys who had parental guardians – were told that they were taking part in a study "in connection with the [MIT] nutrition department" aimed at "helping to improve the nutrition of our children."

Children irradiated for ... advertising?

In order to make the study sound appealing, the boys and their guardians were told they would be given "a quart of milk daily... taken to a baseball game, to the beach, and to some outside dinners," and that they would "enjoy it greatly."

No mention was made of the fact that they were eating Quaker Oats – provided, along with a research grant, by that company – laced with radioactive iron and calcium.

"You had to drink the milk. That was the thing," remembered one participant years later.

Shockingly, the entire point of the study was simply that Quaker Oats wanted to make advertising claims – similar to those made by competitor Cream of Wheat – that the nutrients in their cereal traveled throughout the body.

In 1998, MIT and Quaker Oats signed a $1.85 million settlement of a lawsuit by 45 of the victims. The state of Massachusetts also paid $676,000 to 27 participants. Other lawsuits on the case are still pending. Quaker Oats still denies that it had a major role in the study.

What other horrors have not been revealed?

However disturbing this one study might be, more disturbing still is the fact that it forms part of a larger pattern of the United States and its institutions approving of and conducting harmful research on human subjects without their consent.

The most infamous of these are the Tuskegee syphilis experiments by the U.S. Public Health Service, in which rural African American men in Alabama were told they were being treated for "bad blood," but never told they had been diagnosed with syphilis. Rather than treating them, the government researchers merely watched the progression of the disease, even after penicillin became available as an easy cure in the 1940s. The experiment continued for 40 years, while many of the subjects suffered and died, until a whistleblower revealed it in 1972.

According to the book The Plutonium Files, based on unclassified and declassified government documents, the government carried out a wide-ranging Cold War medical experimentation program, with a particular focus on radiation. Studies included one in which cancer patients and the terminally ill were injected with high doses of radioactive substances to see what would happen to them.

Further showing its contempt for medical ethics, the U.S. government also "recruited" thousands of German and Japanese scientists following World War II, many of whom were known to have performed horrific "medical" experiments on captives during the war. The U.S. government shielded these criminals from prosecution to make use of their scientific and engineering abilities for the Cold War.

The full scope of the U.S. military-industrial complex's unethical medical research may never be known. Operation Paperclip alone still has 600 million classified documents.

"The question is, if they would do this... if they would feed radioactive oatmeal to helpless children and lie to them and their parents about it for years... well gee, is there anything they wouldn't do?" asked Melissa Dykes, writing for Truthstream Media. "And what other experiments have been done on the public without its knowledge or consent?"

Sources for this article include:

TruthStreamMedia.com

NYTimes.com