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Los Alamos Science No. 23, 1995
Radiation Protection and the Human Radiation Experiments
| Many people have a great fear of radiation with very little understanding about what it is and how its effects vary with dose. Research on the health effects of radiation has been a priority at Los Alamos from the Manhattan Project to the present. The first section of this volume introduces the average reader to radiation and its properties, radiation and its relationship to cancer, and the epidemiology of radiation exposure. The second section relates the experiences of LANL plutonium workers who had accidental intakes of this reactor-produced element and highlights the ongoing efforts at LANL to understand and mitigate the effects of exposure. Finally, the last section sets the record straight on the 1944 government-run experiments, publicized during the 1993 DOE openness initiative, which involved plutonium uptake by human subjects. This volume lays out the Laboratory's involvement in those experiments, why they were done, what was learned, and what happened to the subjects. |
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