American history tv airs on cspan 3 every weekend telling the american story through events, interviews, and visits to historic locations. This month American History tv is in primetime to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on cspan 3. Our features include lectures in history, visits to College Classrooms across the country, to hear lectures from top history professors. American artifacts takes a look at the treasures at u. S. Historic sites, museums, and archives. Real america revealing the 20th century through archival films and newsreels. The civil war where you hear about the people who shape the civil war in reconstruction, and the presidency focuses on u. S. President s and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies, and legacies. All this month in primetime and every weekend on American History tv on cspan 3. All week in primetime its American History tv where well feature programs from our lectures in history series in which we take you into College Classrooms across the country. Each night leads off with a debut of a new class, and tonight its sexuality in america. We start at 8 00 eastern with a lecture on the origins of the gay rights movement. Thats followed by a discussion on sexual freedom in the 1950s. Gays and lesbians in early 20th century america, and then race and Sex Education in if the mid 20th century. Thats tuesday on American History tv here on cspan 3. With the house and senate returning from their summer break next week, on thursday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern well preview four Key Issues Facing Congress this fall. Federal funding to combat the zika virus. Women in America Today want to make sure that they have the ability to not get pregnant. Why . Because mosquitos ravage pregnant women. But today they turn down the very money that they argued for last may, and they decided to gamble with the lives of children like this. The annual defense policy and programs billing. All of these votes are very vital to the future of this nation. In a time of turmoil, in a time of the greatest number of refugees since the end of world war ii. Gun violence legislation and criminal justice reform. Every member of this body, every republican and every democrat wants to see less gun violence. We must continue to work the work of nonviolence and demand an end to senseless killing everywhere. And the resolution for congress to impeach irs commissioner john House Resolution 828 impeaching john andrew koskinen, commissioner of the Internal Revenue service, for high crimes and misdemeanors. Well review the expected congressional debate with Susan Ferrechio with the washington examiner. Join us thursday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan for congress this fall. Were going to talk today about the radiation experiments, skps by the radiation experiments, i mean experiments that were done in and around the Second World War and during the cold war. A fairly heterogenius set of experiments done by lots of different people in lots of different places. All unified by the fact that theyre constitutional studying the interaction of human beings and radioactivity. Very curious phenomenon of radioactivity that came, i guess, to the its biggest fruition with the explosion over hiroshima and nagasaki in august of 1945. Now, before we can talk about the experiments in order to make sense of them, we need to talk a little bit about the context in which they were done. What were going to talk about is, first of all, the war itself. Second world war. Were going to talk about how it was a sciencebased war. Were going to talk about the development of big science. Big science. Lots of people. Lots of investigators. Lots of money. 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. Well talk first about the physical Science Research and then about the medical research. There was some small poorly funded, poorly organized Research Going on, and the example im going to use is the story about trying to find out where ab airplane is. The First World War saw a little bit of airpower. They were getting faster and bigger. They could show up over your head. You wouldnt know they were coming. A staff member noticed if you sent radio waez back, they would be sent back from planes. Furthermore, if you looked at how long it took them to bounce back from the plane, you could figure out about how far away they were. In other words, he used radio to detect and range airplanes, and thats how we came up with the acronym radar. Radio detection and ranging. Radar. The discovery of radar was very uncoordinated. It was done in a Naval Research laboratory, and the only way that the army even found out that it existed is that somebody from the army happened to go and visit the Naval Research laboratory. They didnt reach on the to civilians who had expertise in how to design a radar apparatus. They didnt have much funding. This was typical of the ad hoc manner of research in the interwar period. The Second World War, of course, starts in 1939. Starts in urine. The United States doesnt enter until 1941. From the outset people knew that the Second World War was going to be a sciencebased war. One of the questions that arose is how do you organize the pursuit of science in war time . Now, weve talked about this before with the question of how to organize the medical corps, and a lot of the same issues apply. The medical corps, youll remember, at the height of the Second World War, the number of people in the medical corps was bigger than the entire army had been in 1939. How do you organize it . You have to decide who is in charge and what the different units look like. Then once you have made that decision, that decision is very likely to persist well after the war is gone. You create structures that then continue. The same thing happened for the organization of science. Not surprising. A lot of it had to do with vandervere bush. He was one of the early pioneers of concepts that we now call computing. He made a mechanical vegs of what we now have as an electronic computer. He was the dean at m. I. T. On became head of the office of the osrd. The New York Times said that this made him the science tsar. He knew that access to the president was going to give him a lot of power in organizing Scientific Research, and he used that to get the medical research under his umbrella as well. Roosevelt was about to shell out the medical research and put it in a different unit. He went to roosevelt, and he said you know the people that you want to give that responsibility to are under criminal indictment right now. Well, that was literally true, but it had to do with antitrust violations and hmos in washington d. C. Didnt matter. Roosevelt said im not giving this to people who are criminals, and it went instead under bush. Now, what bush organized was a civilian organization. It was charged with coordinating the research. Primarily funded by the military. What they learned to do is operate big Scientific Research. It used to be that people had Simple Research labs. You wanted to do research, you had a lab, you hired some people, you did research. Now suddenly you have had people all over the country. You had people here and there and you needed lots of money. Who could obtain the resources . It was starting to become the kind of big science that has now become the norm since then. Again, the changes that were made lasted well after the war was over. Lets get back to our example of radar. What happens with radar . The government decided to fund a Research Laboratory and, again, they confronted the question of where do we put this lab . We talked earlier about the tension with government funded research. On the one hand, youve got people who say it ought to go equally to all the states. Why should one state get more money than another state . On the other hand, if are you in the middle of a war or if a war is eminent as it was in 1940, it turns out that people in some states dont have much in the way of Research Infrastructure and people in other states do. The lab that was going to study radar was set up at the Massachusetts Institute of technology. They called it the rad lab, r. A. D. Rad lab. That was actually an attempt to be deceiptful trying to confuse people into thinking they were going to study radiation and physics which in 1940 didnt seem like it was going to be a big topic for investigation. Well, radar turned out to be terribly important. Ill give you a couple of different examples. Youve heard of the battle of britain. Hitler wanted to invade britain. Operation sealion in 1940 was supposed to smash britains air force. Germany had a lot more attack planes than britain had defense planes. By using radar, they were able to see the planes coming, use their fighters effectively, and as you know, germany, in fact, never did succeed in invading england, much to the surprise of many people at the time. The other place where it was perhaps even more important had to do with submarines. The german uboats were wreaking havoc on american convoys supplying britain, later on supplying the war effort. They emitted confusing sonar signals. It was hard to find them. It turns on the that the subs needed to surface to take in fresh air and recharge batteries, and when they surfaced, airplanes with radar could see them up to five miles away. How effective . Consider this. In january and february of 1942 without using radar, allied forces put in 8,000 hours of patrol in the atlantic and managed to only find four submarines to attack. Over a twomonth period. The very first night a plane went out with radar installed, they found four submarines, and they sunk one of them. Its that kind of effectiveness of radar that has grown over the course of the war. It showed that organized research could make a difference. It has been said possibly accurately that the atom bomb ended the war, but radar won it. A few more examples of the kinds of big physical Science Research. This is the slide that shows the monthly losses of german submarines, and you can see between 1941 and 1942 theres not a lot. Then they bring in radar, and all of a sudden it goes up. These are examples of early computers. In this Case Computers means people who are doing computation. Eventually we then move to electronic computers. Another innovation was Operations Research, which meant using statistics and geometry to figure out the best way to find a submarine in the ocean. Or the best way to organize your bomber squad so it would be unlikely to get shot down. This required some social engineering as well. Vandervere bush wanted to approach the secretary of the navy. The chief of Naval Operations was so tough that he was said to shave every morning with a blowtorch. He really wasnt all that interested in civilians ideas about how he ought best to run his navy. However, the success of the operation together with the promise that, first of all, the navy would be in charge of everything, and, second of all, the Operations Research scientist wouldnt take credit for anything. Managed to convince him to use Operations Research and the radar and it got results. Other kinds of results u. S. Merchant vessels that used to take 35 weeks to be built were being built in 50 days. In 1939 the u. S. Army air corps had 800 planes by the end of the war in 1944 at Willow Run Airport just down the road. They were making almost 5,500 each year. Proximity fuse that enabled munition to explode when they got close to their target without actually having to hit it changed the entire strategy of warfare. All of these Research Ideas from mathematics and the physical sciences convinced people that Scientific Research was something worth funding and worth doing and that it would make a difference in the war effort. Lets switch now to biological research that went on during the war. Thats physical Science Research. Poison gas. Mustard gas. One of the most dreaded weapons of the First World War. Concerns that it was going to be used widely in the Second World War. The problem with mustard gas is that its speciesspecific. In order to test gas masks, in order to test protective clothing, you have to do the experiments on human beings. You cant do them on anybody else. Lots of experiments were done using mustard gas. There were socalled man break experiments that were designed to see how long it would take a man to break, people were put into a chamber. The mustard gas was introduced. They werent let out until they collapse and became unconscious, even though they might try very hard to get out. These were socalled volunteers. How voluntarily were the volunteers . One person who was there said occasionally there have been individuals or groups who did not cooperate fully. A short explanatory talk, and if necessary, a slight verbal dressing down has always proved successful, and theres want been a single instance in which somebody refused to volunteer. It makes me wonder if they really were volunteering. Some of the people who were used were prisoners and conscienceous objectors. The other thing is you owed something to the war effort if you werent going overseas to fight, you needed to do something at home. Now, mustard gas, as many of you know, actually has a dual use. It was an early cancer chemo therapeutic agent, and there were experiments done at yale that showed some efficacy of some. The patients died, but they got better for a while. However, these were secret results, and they couldnt be published. What about epidemic diseases . Always a problem in war time. Gonorrhea. This is the federal prison in indiana where experiments were done on gonorrhea. Penicillin was discovered in the 1930s. It was not widely produced. In 1941 there was not enough penicillin in the United States to treat even one patient. In 1942 there was enough to treat one. Osrd, the organization headed by vandervere bush organized not only clinical trials, but also the production of penicillin. Controlled protocols showed it was incredibly effective for treating venereal disease like syphilis and gonorrhea, and by the end of the war there was enough for the army, there was enough for civilians, there was even enough to give it to some of our allies. There was also interest in using it to see if you could prevent people who had been exposed to gonorrh gonorrhea. They were proposing to give these men gonorrhea and see if penicillin could be used to treat it, but they knew this was likely to be sensitive. In a memo from the head of the committee on medical research, which was part of the office of Scientific Research and development, ann richards said when any risks are involved, volunteers only should be utilized as subjects, and these only after the risks have been fully explained and after signed statements have been obtained which shall prove that the volunteer offered his services with full knowledge. Now, this is a pretty clear indication of what you need to do to do experiments on people that might hurt them. It might have had wider applicability had it not been a secret memo. Its unclear who actually read them. In any event, the experiments at terre haute 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, and in another series of experiments that we touched on in another class, some of the same people involved in the United States went down to guatemala and continued these experiments after the war. Thats another story. Malaria. Tremendous problem. In sicily, north after cardiac the Pacific Theater and you heard from ashley about some of the efforts to eradicate malaria during the war and afterwards, some people thought it was the biggest medical problem of the war. It was harder to treat during the war because the drug that was most effective for treating malaria came from plants that were primarily in areas occupied by our enemies. Another antimalaria drug. You can see these men did not take their drug. Sperlts we experiments were done using prisoners. Well come back to prisoners later on in the lecture. One famous subject for the malaria experiments was Nathan Leopold who had kidnapped somebody at the university of chicago, and leopold and lowe became a very famous cause celeb. This image was on the malaria war in the stateville prison in illinois, and this led to issues in the nuremburg trials because there was a question whether or not prisoners could give informed consent. As important as medical research was, doctors were not the star scientists. The people that really were the most important for the research in the Second World War came from not medicine, but physics. This is a statue at the university of chicago by henry moore entitled nuclear energy. Dan has a wonderful book called the physicists that talks about the physics during and after the war. In the 1930s scientists trying to understand pure science were trying to understand the nature of the atom and probably the most exciting scientific