He explains tests that range blownnjections to full radiation exposure. This class is a little more than an hour. We are going to be talking today about the radiation experiments. And by the radiation experiments, i mean experiments done in around the Second World War and the cold war, a fairly heterogeneous set of experiments. By the fact that they are studying the interaction of human beings and. Adioactivity a very curious phenomenon of radioactivity that came, i guess, to its biggest fruition with the explosion over hiroshima and subsequently not a saki in august 1945. We need to talk a little bit about the context in which they were done. First, we will talk about the war itself. The Second World War. We will talk about how it was a sciencebased war. We will talk about the development of big science. Big science. Lots of people. Lots of investigators. Lots of money. Complicated systems. And were going to talk about the cold war and ideas about National Defense and National Security and how that played into the radiation experiments. History, inical order to understand what happened, we need to understand the context in which it happened. Now there was medical research and physical Science Research going on in the interwar period. Sciencetalk about the research and then the medical research. There was small, poorly funded, poorly organized Research Going on. The example i am going to use is the story about some military research dined designed to figure out where an airplane is. The First World War saw a little bit of air power, but airplanes were getting faster. They were getting bigger. They could show up over your head. You would not know they were coming. One of the biggest military problems was out to detect airplanes before they got there. Research in the laboratory noticed if you send radio waves out, they would bounce back from planes. , if you look at how long it took them to bounce back from a plane, you could figure out about how far away they were. In other words, he used radio to airplanes, ande that is how we came up with the detectiondar radio. Nd range the discovery of radar was very uncoordinated. People did not talk to each other. It was done in a research laboratory. The only way that the army figured out it existed was someone from the army happened to go visit the research laboratory. Civilians withve expertise in the apparatus design. They did not have too much funding. This was the ad hoc manner of research in the interwar. The Second World War of course starts in 1939. It starts in europe. The United States does not enter until 1941. From the outset, people knew the Second World War would be a sciencebased war. That science would determine who won and who lost. One of the questions that arose then was, how do you organize the pursuit of science in wartime . We have talked about this in terms of the question of how to organize the medical corps. And a lot of the same issues stood out. The number of people in the medical corps were bigger than the entire armies had been in 1939. All of a sudden you are expanding the size. You have to put people in charge. You have to figure out who is in charge, what the different units look like. Once you make that decision, likely toion is persist well after the war is done. Same thing happened with science. Not surprising. A lot of it has to do with this here banded hare Bush Vandiver bush. M. I. T. At m. I. T. And he became the head of the office of research and development. Said thatork times this made him a science czar. He knew that access to the president would give him a lot of power in organizing Scientific Research. And he used that to get the research under his umbrella as well. Roosevelt was about to shell out the medical research and put it any different unit, when you went to roosevelt and he said, you know the people you want to give that responsibility to our under criminal indictment right now. That was literally true. Hadthe criminal indictment to do with antitrust violations. It did not matter. Roosevelt said i am not giving this to people who are criminals and went instead under bush. What bush organized was a civilian organization charged with coordinating the research, under the military. It used to be able at Pretty Research labs. You wanted to do research, you got a lab, hired some people, did research. Now you had people all over the country. You had people here, people there. You need of a lot of money. Could dod people who the contracting, could obtain the resources. It was becoming the kind of big the normhat has become since then. And big changes lasted well after the war was over. Lets get back to our example of radar. What happens with radar. By 1940, it is obvious that radar works, but it needs to be a lot better. You need to be better at discriminating between is between airplanes and birds. You need to he a lot better at detecting lowflying airplanes. So, they had the question where do we put this lab . Tension with governmentfunded research. On one hand, you have people who say it ought to go equally to all of the states. Why should one state get more money than another state . On the other hand, if you are in the middle of a war or war was imminent, as it was in 1940, it in somet some people states do not have much in the way of Research Infrastructure and people in other states do. The lab that was going to study radar is set up at the Massachusetts Institute of technology, and they called it the rad lab. An attempt tolly be deceitful, to confuse people into thinking that they were studying radiation physics, which did not seem like it would be a big topic for investigation. Well, radar turned out to be terribly important. Britain. Nted to invade you of heard of the battle of britain. Operation sea lion was supposed to smash britains air force. Attack had a lot more planes than britain. But because of radar, they were able to see the planes coming and germany never did succeed in invading england, much to the surprise of many people at the time. Perhapsr place that was even more important had to do with submarines. Were wreakingoats havoc on american convoys supplying britain, later on supplying the war effort. It was hard to find them. But it turned out the subs needed to resurface to change , to refresh error, and when they did, airplanes could spot them. How effective . Consider this. In january 1942 without using forces put in 8000 hours of patrol in the atlantic and managed to only find sub four submarines over a twomonth. Period. Plane wentrst time a out with radar installed, they found four submarines and sunk one of them. It showed that organized research could make a difference. And it has been said, possibly accurately, the atom bomb ended the war. At but radar one it. At but radar won it. That shows thede german submarines. 1941, 1942, not a lot. Then they bring in radar. And all of a sudden examples of early computers. In this case, computers mean people doing computations. Eventually we did move to electronic computers. Operationnovation was research, which means using statistics and geometry to figure out the best way to find a submarine in the ocean, or the organize your bombers squad so it was less likely to be shot down. Wanted to approach the secretary of the navy. The chief of Naval Operations was so tough he was said to shave every morning with a not he and it was was not too interested in civilian ideas of how to run his navy. But with the promise that first of all the navy would be in charge of everything and the Operation Research scientist would not take credit for anything managed to convince him to use the Radar Research and it got results. What kinds of results . That usedant vessels to take 35 weeks to be built were being built in 50 days. , the u. S. Army air corps had 800 planes. By the end of the war in 1944, at the airport just down the road, they were making 5500 each year. Proximity fuse that enabled munitions to explode when they got close to the target without having to hit it changed the strategy of warfare. All of these ideas from Mathematical Science convinced people that Scientific Research was something worth funding and worth doing and would make a difference in the war effort. Lets switch now to biological research. That was physical Science Research. Poison gas. Mustard gas. One of the most dreaded weapons of the First World War. Concerns it would be used widely in the Second World War. The problem with mustard gas is it is not specific. In order to test gas masks and protective clothing, you have to do the tests on human beings. You can do them anyway. There were socalled mandrake experiments man break experiments. People were put in a chamber. Ustard gas was introduced they were not left out until they collapsed and became unconscious, even though they might try very hard to get out. These were socalled volunteers. How voluntary were the volunteers . One person who was there said a , and ifplanatory talk necessary, a slight verbal dressing down proved effective and there has not been a single institute instance in which someone failed to volunteer. Makes you wonder if they really volunteered. Prisoners and conscientious objectors. The idea being you were doing something for the war effort. If you were going overseas to fight, you need to use to somebody on. Mustard gas was an early cancer agent. Chemotherapeutic there was some efficacy of treating with nitrogen mustard. Some efficacy. The patients died. However they got better for it while. Four a while. Diseases demic what about epidemic diseases . Always a problem in wartime. What about gonorrhea. There was a federal prison where experiments were done on gonorrhea. Penicillin is discovered in the 1930s and not widely produced. There was not enough penicillin in 1940 in all of the United States to treat one patient. D, the organization headed by not only organize clinical trials, but the production of penicillin. It showed it was incredibly effective for treating venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. By the end of the war, there was enough for the army, enough for civilians. There was even enough to give to some of the allies. There was also interest in giving it to people, to see if you could prevent people exposed to gonorrhea from getting gonorrhea. This touches on the ethical issues we will get to with radiation experiments. The experiments here were at the federal prison in terre haute, indiana. They were proposing to give these men gonorrhea and see of penicillin could be used to trade it. They knew that this was likely to be sensitive. So, in a memo from the head of the committee on medical a research, it said, when risks are involved, volunteers should only be utilized as subjects, and these only after the risks have been fully explained and after signed statements of been obtained, which will prove that the volunteer offered his services with full knowledge. This is a pretty clear indication of what you need to do to do experiments on people that might hurt them. Have had wider applicability had it not been a secret memo. It is unclear who actually wrote them. In any event, the experiments were stopped after a short time, because it turned out it was more difficult than you might think to give people gonorrhea. They were not stopped totally. In another series of experiments we touched on in another class, some of the same people involved went down to guatemala and continued this experience after the war. That is another story. Malaria tremendous problem. Sicily, north africa, the theater. The pacific you heard from ashley some of eradicates to malaria. It was harder to treat during the war because quinine, the drug that was most if treating malaria, came from plants that were in areas primarily occupied by our enemies. At a bring was another antimalarial drug. You can see these men did not we will come back to prisoners later on in the lecture. Subject than me malaria experiments was nathan leopold. Leopold and loeb became a very famous cause celebre. This led to issues in the nuremberg trials, because there was the question whether prisoners could give informed consent. As important as medical research was, doctors were not the star scientists. The people who were really the most important during the second cameof Second World War not from medicine. This is a statute this is a nuclear energy. 1930s, scientists trying werederstand pure science trying to understand the nature of the adam, and possibly the most exciting time the nature possibly the and most exciting time was the fission of the nucleus. That occurred in germany. The question arose, if energy can be derived from splitting bomb . Om, can you make a no one was quite sure. You might be able to. You would need two separate isotopes. You would need uranium 235. There is a wonderful paper by copenhagen called copenhagen. It sets of this question in the early years of the war about whether or not you can make a bomb. It revolves around what we know was a true interaction between heisenberg probably the most brilliant physicist of the 20 century, including einstein and niels bohr, and it took place in copenhagen, this meeting. Heisenberg visited niels bohr. We do not know exactly what happened in that meeting. We know that they had a split. They used to be very close. And we know that heisenberg went back to germany, and we know gavely afterward, germany up its attempts to make a nuclear bomb. Figure that the problems in making a bomb were so great, that we would not be able to make a bomb. Great historical questions about this episode, which again is very nicely set mean,the play, is i there is the question of why . Make a mathor error . What if germany had been able to make a nuclear bomb . I do not think there is any doubt that they would have dropped an atomic bomb if they could on central london, but they didnt. Making the bomb was hard. It required technical and social innovations. To separate the isotopes. You had to figure out a Chain Reaction that could be controlled. You needed large reduction plans to make large quantities of material. Andhad to get scientists people in the military working together, which was not that easy. Some of the work was done in existing universities like the university of chicago. Some of it was done in facility specifically built for the government, like the plutonium works on the Columbia River in Washington State, a site to which we will return. Events at the to university of chicago, not very far from where were sitting right here. Lets return to stagg field. Stagg field, 1927. Playedversity of chicago there. Anybody know who the first person to win the Heisman Trophy was and where he went to school . Obviously, the answer is the university of chicago. Wagner. University of chicago is a Founding Member of the big ten football conference. Eventually, here, you see action taking place out on stagg field. The university of chicago is an interesting institution. I had some opportunity to spend some time there. Into disrepair. Here you see a chart that shows the library which now stands imagine this if you can. They tore down their football stadium to build a library. True story. They actually did. They also left the big ten in 1946, and they left room for another member to join the big ten, and of course in 1949, Michigan State university was admitted to the big ten. A president who famously was known to observe that when i feel like exercising, i lie down until the feeling goes away. They were not big into the intercollegiate sports scene. , in 1942, they were still in the big ten. Stagg field still existed. It had swash courts under the courts underuash the stadium. It was on those squash courts that an event transpired that truly changed the course of history. December 2, 1942. Bricksd all kinds of laid up there on the squash courts. This is an artists depiction of the event. Very famous physicist, was there to see if they could have a self sustained nuclear reaction. There were cadmium rods soaking up all of the neutrons. A very famous physicist, was there. Finally the power went critical, proving you could have a selfsustaining nuclear reaction. The code word sent back to headquarters was the italian navigator has landed in the new world. Under the stance of stagg field at the university of chicago, we found out we actually had the capacity to build, inc. , a nuclear bomb. In theory, a nuclear bomb. He story shifts to build this bomb, we had to get some really smart people and it had to be done in secret. We did not know that germany was not going to be able to make a with japan. So, here in los alamos, new mexico, in a house 7500 feet north of albuquerque was perhaps the greatest collection of hadear physicists the world ever seen. Sometimes as many as eight Nobel Laureates would be sitting around dining together in the dining room. Incredibly isolated. Plates because the wood stoves did not work so well. They took them from Radar Research, from all over the country. 2 billion. They worked in complete secrecy to develop a Nuclear Weapon, to develop what they thought would be a Nuclear Weapon. They werent sure. And finally on july 16, 1945, at aound zero, shown here in mike darda, new mexico, the First Nuclear bomb exploded. The question what do we do this is a subject debated more now than it was then. At president. Ruman was he wanted Unconditional Surrender from japan. The emperor was not much in the meanwhile,otiate. The u. S. Military was working his way across the pacific ocean. In some pretty brutal, brutal battles. Iwo jima. You 12 weeks, okinawa. We thought this was a reversal for invading japan. If we invaded japan, that was what it was going to be like. There were a lot of things that might no