New Book Documents Cold War Experiments on Kids

[The Straight Story]

...

It was 1954 and at 14, he had already spent nearly half his life in a succession of Massachusetts institutions that unflinchingly labeled kids like him "morons.'' But his new place, the Fernald State School in Waltham, seemed like it might be different.

"They picked some of the oldest guys and asked us if we wanted to be in this club,'' Dyer, 72, said in an interview from his home in Watertown, Mass. "We all got together and decided, why not? We'll get time off the grounds.''

The boys were promised presents, outings to the seashore, trips to Fenway Park and extra helpings of oatmeal.

"It was like Christmas,'' Dyer recalled. "Red Sox games, parties. I got a Mickey Mouse watch that I still have.''

It took decades before Dyer learned that he and the boys he still considers brothers were little more than guinea pigs. A state task force in 1994 found Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists fed the unwitting boys radioactive oatmeal and milk for a Quaker Oats nutrition study.

His story is one of many told in a new book, "Against Their Will,'' the result of five years of gathering data from medical and university libraries and archives, medical journals and records from many of the now-shuttered state hospitals and orphanages where experiments were conducted.

"We thought something wasn't right, but we didn't know,'' Dyer said. "They were using the kids who they were supposed to be helping.''

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/New-Book-Documents-Cold-War-Experiments-on-Kids-214529391.html

[gopiscrap]

1. That is fucking horrible

sounds like a lawsuit to me!

[newfie11]

2. What I don't understand is the government knew

Already the results of radiation. What happened to the people in Japan after they were bombed, the soldiers that stood out watching the test blasts, etc.

We accuse Hitlers bunch of atrocities with the horrible tests they did but we aren't any better.

I am a downwinder, my dad (electrician) died several years after wiring a uranium mine/processing plant in Ambrosia Lake NM.

My entire family of 6 has no working thyroid.

It's pathetic when your own fucking government destroys people for repeated experiments they already had answers to.

[Ilsa]

3. Jesus Christ.

Kids. They were just kids. What monsters.