Dr Eugene Saenger was a radiologist and an expert in nuclear medicine whose research contributed to the establishment of radiation safety standards for patients and medical personnel. It's just a shame that pioneering and life-saving research had to be done in the most morally questionable manner imaginable, taking the consent-less studies we've looked at before to their logical, unbelievably cruel conclusion. Studies which, decades later, would see Saenger sued by the families of the unwitting participants to the tune of a $3.6 million settlement. Thankfully for Saenger, he didn't have to foot that whole bill. The federal government were also involved in the case. Did they learn nothing from MKUltra? Well, no, because somehow this managed to happen before that, and yet nobody was brought to justice until the mid nineties. Dr Saenger started off well enough in the sixties, being among the first to report on the development of tumours in children after they were administered radiation treatment for benign conditions. He probably saved a lot of lives with that one. It was his work with the Pentagon that would wind up having the opposite effect, and ruining families' lives for generations to come. On behalf of army commanders at the Pentagon, Saenger embarked on a study that was designed to answer the question of what would happen if a nuclear weapon was detonated in the battlefield. How much radiation could a soldier stand before he became disorientated, or totally disabled? Deciding that their own enlisted troops had suffered quite enough over the years, researchers at the University of Cincinnati instead exposed cancer patients to larger doses of radiation than usual, many over their whole bodies, and recorded their physical and mental responses. Most of those patients were poor, working class people, many of them black. Twenty of the almost ninety involved died a month after the study began, and all of them experienced severe nausea and mental disorientation. These results were later used to improve treatments and survival rates or to relieve symptoms, true, but they also severely irradiated countless innocent people without their knowledge, and killed many of them, either immediately or further down the line. Which is so, so messed up. America!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
