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The old photograph struck me immediately. The caption read: "Ella Tyree, 29, inject[ing] atomic materials into animals to determine effects of radiation on humans."
The image, published by Ebony magazine, showed Tyree, a black female scientist trained at Spelman College, working in an atomic science laboratory near Chicago circa 1949.
Spelman, the historically black women's college in Atlanta, Georgia, also happens to be my undergraduate alma mater, and so naturally I was intrigued.
But before I could launch the photograph over my social networks, I happened to re-read the caption: "[T]o determine the effects of radiation on humans," it said.
Just as other scientists working at the time, Tyree and her counterparts were unwitting participants in a larger Cold War research agenda that, in shifting from military to peacetime applications, conscripted "hundreds of individuals [who] were exposed to radiation in experiments which provided little or no medical benefit to the subjects... American citizens thus became nuclear calibration devices."
According to declassified papers subsequently examined in a government report on "American nuclear guinea pigs", 31 experiments were conducted in...
The image, published by Ebony magazine, showed Tyree, a black female scientist trained at Spelman College, working in an atomic science laboratory near Chicago circa 1949.
Spelman, the historically black women's college in Atlanta, Georgia, also happens to be my undergraduate alma mater, and so naturally I was intrigued.
But before I could launch the photograph over my social networks, I happened to re-read the caption: "[T]o determine the effects of radiation on humans," it said.
Just as other scientists working at the time, Tyree and her counterparts were unwitting participants in a larger Cold War research agenda that, in shifting from military to peacetime applications, conscripted "hundreds of individuals [who] were exposed to radiation in experiments which provided little or no medical benefit to the subjects... American citizens thus became nuclear calibration devices."
According to declassified papers subsequently examined in a government report on "American nuclear guinea pigs", 31 experiments were conducted in...