August 19, 2016 • 43 mins
Did the Quaker Oats company really do experiments on children? Join Matt and Ben as they dig into the checkered past of this cereal monolith.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
(00:21):
name is Noel, and call me Ben. You probably go
by a name as well. That makes this stuff they
don't want you to know. I'm excited about this one today, guys,
because this is a deep cut. And before we get
too into it, I want to extend and on air,
thank you to our colleague and personal friend Josh Clark, who,
(00:46):
as he so often does, accidentally hit us to this.
Oh he posted it or mentioned it in an article
or something. Yeah, he's got a great blog that you
can check out right now if you wish about the
They call it the Coolest Stuff for best stuff we
read this week, and so it's if you've got time.
It's a it's a great place to go. Everybody here.
How stuff works, as you might imagine, reads stuff constantly,
(01:10):
and as we found out about a very very strange
historical thing that we thought most folks in American abroad
wouldn't know about. And it starts with two entities that
ostensibly have nothing to do with each other. Yeah, it
feels like apples and tractors to me to just so
(01:34):
separate entities, or or like uh badgers and uh cheetos. Yeah,
hair brushes and hair brushes, or like or like asteroids
and venus fly traps and venus fly traps, exactly two
things that don't seem like that makes sense together. So
what what what's the first one? The first one is
(01:56):
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You probably know this as
m i T. It was founded in eighteen sixty one.
This is so, this is an old institution that we're
talking about here, very prestigious. A lot of great thinkers
and makers have come out of this. Oh yeah, it's
been around for a long time. It's won all kinds
of prestigious awards, right, and uh, it's become home to
(02:18):
some of the world's imminent scientist, statesman and economists. Uh.
The guy who invented condensed soup went there. Twenty nine
alumni from m i T of one Nobel prizes. That's
pretty good. And no, you'll like this one especially. More
than one third of the nation of the U S
space flights have included m i T educated astronauts, and
(02:40):
NASA has chosen more m I T graduates to become
astronauts than graduates of any other private institution. Well, I
have a Space Camp shirt, so you're pretty much in.
And I just ordered myself a NASA trucker hat on Amazon,
so that should be arriving any day now. And I'm
about datting it up and walking around on with my
Space Camp shirt ams hat on dude, speaking of that,
(03:04):
I found my picture of I think I sent it
to you, my picture of my Space Camp suit when
I was a little wee one, and I'm thinking about
putting on our Instagram. It's when it or at least
send it to me. I'm curious. So another another prestigious
fact about m I T that has nothing to do
with this show is that both hosts of Car Talk
(03:26):
attended M I T. Click and clack, click and out
of control. But anyway, you get the T L d R.
The quick and dirty of this is m I T
for centuries has been this amazing hub or seat of knowledge, innovation, wisdom,
(03:46):
and you know, the future of humanity, for scientific testing,
technology and all things above. And now for something completely different, Yeah,
completely and utterly different. So we have Thing A. Now
we're talking about Thing B, which is Quaker Oats. The
company that would become Quaker Oats actually formed in nineteen
(04:09):
o one, when four oat mills not oat meals. I
feel so bad that I actually wrote that joke in
the nets, and you even have a little ha there
to indicate that it's a joke, because some people might
not have known because it's not a good joke. So
these four mills, what make oats or mill oats? Rather um,
(04:32):
they combined, merge, shall we say, into a single super mill.
That was the dawn of the oatmeal tycoons. Which is
a phrase that Ben loves for some reason. Why I
love it because it's an excellent phrase. Remember those old
video games that would be like roller coaster Tycoon or uh,
I don't think they had all kinds of park Tycoon.
(04:54):
I would love to play a game called oatmeal Tycoon.
I don't know what, you know what? Actually I think
I like the idea of it more and the actual
thing would be pretty boring. For some reason, When I
think of an oatmeal flac and I picture some sort
of fat cat smoking a cigar and a giant golden
tub full of oatmeal. I can totally see that. And
(05:14):
and maybe, uh, you know, maybe his cigar looks like
a spoon. I don't know. There a lot of questions
about this. Yeah, let's workshop this one, but um so yeah.
The original Quaker oat trademark m began in eighth saventy
seven when one of the founding Mills used a Quaker
esque man. You may know him sort of looks like
(05:34):
a pilgrim like you may have been on the Mayflower.
You know. He's got a sort of a long white
shocks of hair, many a bit of a mane, and
a tall hat. Right, Yeah, he has uh, he has
that distinctive look that we have come to associate with Quakers,
whether fairly or unfairly. Uh. The Quaker movement is still
(05:57):
around here in the US and abroad, and it's it's
a group of very kind people. And the whole idea
of using that image was that it just instilled trust
in someone because there's the quality is going to be
perfection coming from these guys. Well, I mean and and
it is the very picture of wholesomeness. And that's a
(06:17):
word that's often associated with whole grains and good foods,
you know, healthy foods, like that. They're they're wholesome there.
That's right, because because oates like this, they're they're good
for you, right, Ben, Yeah, right, that's the idea. They're nutritious.
You'll hear, you'll hear some weird stuff about the Quaker man, right.
I love that we're playing out the wholesome stuff. Nowadays,
(06:40):
the company says that he is just a it's not
representing an actual person. It's just a man who's dressed
in Quaker garb. But the earlier advertising in nineteen o
nine identified him as William Penn, the seventeenth century philosopher.
But they you know, they later I guess rhet coons.
(07:00):
Is that the word? Yeah, because it's evolved so much
over time. We're talking about eighteen seventies, eighteen fifties, even
when they was first starting out. So got side tip
ladies and gentlemen, if you want to if you want
to impress your serial insider friends, if you're in the know,
they call him Larry. Yeah, yeah, that's what that's like,
(07:22):
the nickname. Anyhow, they started with Quaker oats and people
loved it. This whole Quaker thing worked very well for them,
caught on like gangbusters. Yeah, and they and they began
to grow into other areas, right like wildfire, Gangbusters, right
the Yeah. So, for instance, they started with other breakfast cereals,
(07:45):
other food and drink products, even into unrelated fields. For example,
in nineteen sixty nine, they bought Fisher Price, which many
of many of us listening may recognize as a toy
company that's just run in the early early age market.
Right now, there's telephones that the clinky wheels and the
(08:05):
face on it and any of those like classic toy
story toys that have been animated in the Toy Story
movies were probably originally made by Fisher Price. Yeah, and
so they owned that. The Oatmeal Plays owned that for
a while and then they spun it off in the nineties.
But they were also involved with making film. Didn't see
that one come in, did you? Yeah? Before researching this,
(08:28):
I had no idea that Quaker Oats had financed uh
Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory. What that doesn't it
doesn't seem like that, right, But they they had a
reason for this. Um. They we're gonna be able to
use some of the product names they're used in the
film to actually sell it and leverage it that would
(08:49):
become popular through the film. They wanted to sell gop stoppers. Yeah,
and then they also in two formed US Games, a
company that created did as Noel would say, video games
for the Atari fifty two. D Wow. They didn't do
so well though to that quicker guy's got his fingers
(09:10):
and all kinds of different stuff he's got, He's got
his mits and all kinds of oats, you know. Uh.
In eighty three they bought van Camps being products and
uh stokely van Camp and then Gatorade and currently they're
owned by PepsiCo. So in their own way, they have
also become quite successful. M I T. Seat of Learning.
(09:32):
Quaker Oats a global company that started with oatmeal and
then quickly cornered so many other markets. As you can see,
this company is a very little in common until that
is they joined forces. And to really look at this,
we need to look at the history of competition between
different companies and different products back in the day. So, uh,
(09:56):
nineteen forties, let's say let's go back there. Okay, were
there after its founding. It's doing really well, expanding its markets,
going to new places in the United States, going all
across the Great lands um, and it's trying to dominate
overall the cereal industry. What you eat for breakfast, it
should be this. Well, their chief rival was an outfit
(10:19):
that you may also know called cream of Wheat, Right,
you've heard of this. It's a wheat I think it's
simolina product that's kind of similar to oatmeal. Um, but
it's a little creamier. It's a little creamier. Um. But
they were they were getting big too around that time.
But it wasn't their only antagonist. Well, another antagonist here
(10:42):
was science because at the time, a widely publicized study
actually found that plant based grains contained an acid called
fight tate, which could actually hinder your digestive system UM
in a way that would keep minerals and vitamins like
calcium and iron from the being properly digested. A right, yes,
(11:03):
And there's another less obvious point here. Long time listeners,
you know what's happening concurrently in the US at this time.
This hubbub occurs in the nineteen forties. It's a few
years after bacon inexplicably becomes a fundamental part of the
American breakfast. Was it inexplicably to say, that's a great
(11:23):
point no, because we explicate it, uh fairly handily in
some earlier episodes. The first episode yes our podcast on
Edward Berne's a k a. The Father's Spend a k a.
The Father pr A, the father of Bernet sauce ak,
the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Uh So he was. We
(11:47):
won't get too into detail about this, but he was
tasked by a plate An outfit called the beech Nut
Company to popularize some leftover pork products that they had,
and he used some fairly clever but indirect methods to
make bacon a popular thing, because beforehand, people maybe a
(12:10):
bowl of oat meal, maybe a croissant, some fruit coffee.
I would liken it to the way, all of a sudden,
all of these taco bell products have like Doritos in them.
You know. I think it's sort of like a marketing
ploy to get rid of all the surplus Doritos. That's
my theory. I don't know if that's true or not,
but you know, this is a pretty brilliant example of like, hey,
(12:32):
let's take up meat scraps and turn them into meat gold. Yeah.
I think about what bacon is, right, it's essentially fat
back it's the fatty stuff. And let's also think about
how different bacon in the US is to bacon in
Europe or bacon in other parts of the world. And
the way he got it done right was he got
(12:52):
doctors to discuss how important protein is. Right, he had
a study. I hope you can hear the air quotes.
I'm making ladies and woman a study. So so we've
got we've got Quaker oats, and they're vying for competition
the serial market. They have an enemy in this publicized study,
(13:13):
and people are worried about nutrition, but they're also thinking, well,
bacon's just better. They needed a plan, prefably, not just
an ad campaign, but something that felt more objective, a study,
if you will, to contradict the other study floating around
in the zeitgeist. And they had a stroke of luck.
So they found out that the first entity we discussed,
(13:33):
m I T was going to be studying nutrition in
the human body. That's the thing one. Yes, So you know,
if they hear about this, somebody in one of their
offices just went, Eureka, we're doing this. They jumped at
the chance to fund the research that m I T
is trying to do with this because they thought this
was going to be exactly what they needed, right, to
(13:55):
provide satisfactory evidence not just of cereals benefits in general,
but of Quaker oats in particular, rather than those creeps
that cream of wheat or beach nut. Yeah, I don't.
I don't know if I don't think they were creeps.
Just I thought it sounded good. So they needed a
group of people, right, They needed an experiment in a
control group. They needed, ideally some young guinea pigs. As
(14:19):
Mill said, this was especially touted as nutritious for the
young and the growing. They needed kids would sign on willingly.
They needed kids who wouldn't ask questions, and we'll learn
more about those kids they selected right after a word
from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. From approximately
(14:52):
fifty seven to seventy three children from the Walter E.
Fernald State School were recruited to join what was referred
to as the Fernalde Science Club, which was at in
my team UM. Fernalde was a home for the quote
says it really really nasty term feeble minded that refers
(15:13):
to what we would now describe as being developmentally disabled kids. UM.
And in many of these cases kids who simply have
been abandoned by their parents. That's an important factor here.
The children at the fern Old School, we're not all
disabled in some way. They I don't know the politically
correct terms for this. UM. The terminology that's used in
(15:36):
the research we were done, like that was written in
the nineteen forties is much less than UM. I would
say satisfactory from a politically correct standpoint. That is an
important factor here. Not all of the children were disabled.
Many of them were just abandoned or you know, they
needed a place to stay. So children with special needs,
(15:57):
whether those needs are due to a developmental uh factor,
or whether they're due to a social factor such as
being abandoned. So for these kids who are, let's face it,
folks having a rough time in life, Uh, this M
I T. Science Club seems like a windfall. It grants
the children's special privileges. They go on field trips, they
get neat toys and swag like making mouse watches for example,
(16:20):
and they get special events. You get to go to
baseball games, met socks and stuff. They also got nutritious
meals all the time. Yeah, at very controlled intervals and
very high in calcium and iron talk about talk about
a catbird seat, right, what the catbird seat? It's a
good seat? Have you you've heard that phrase? Right? Of course,
(16:41):
I don't know this the catbird seat. I mean, I
don't know what. We don't know what it means. It's
just it means it's here in the best place. It's
a good situation. I'm going to say it's a cat indoors.
I'm assuming, oh they can grab birds maybe, or maybe
it's outdoors on a seat strategically able to catch birds. Okay, yeah,
well maybe I should also learn the etymology of these
(17:02):
colloquialisms plus about the now all right, But but the
point is it would have been it seems like it
would ostensibly be a great thing for these disadvantaged children. However,
not all was as it seemed. See here's the thing,
you guys. Uh. Some of these children were unable to
read for various reasons when they were told to sign
(17:26):
and consent to joining the science club. Also, the children
who actually had parents or guardians to uh to consult
about this, well, they weren't very They weren't much better
off because what was sent to them, who wasn't exactly
truthful in every case. Yeah, it wasn't as transparent as
(17:47):
one would imagine, and we have a quote to prove it.
And this is an excerpt from one of the notes
written home to the parents of a child requesting permission
for them to join the science club. And these letters
evolved over time, as because we're talking about a wide
range of dates here, from forties to the fifties. But
(18:08):
this is just one little snapshot of one of those letters.
I'll give us a go a few fellas, don't mind
um quote. We are considering the selection of a group
of our brighter patients, including name of child, to receive
a special diet rich in irons and vitamins or as
I like to call them, vitamins for a period of time.
(18:30):
These studies will cause no discomfort or change in the
patient other than a possible improvement. I hope that you
have no objection that your son or daughter is voluntarily
participating in this study. And again, that is an exert
from a sample permission letter sent home to the parents
(18:50):
or guardians of these children. You have to love the phrasing,
right as I hope that you have no objection that
your son is voluntarily participating means it's already happening. That's already.
So what M. I. T. Did not tell anyone, including
the parents, including the children, and maybe even the functionaries
at the state school, was that the calcium and iron
(19:10):
that they were feeding to these science club participants was irradiated.
Radioactive calcium and iron functioned like tracers, so the scientists
could watch the progression of these radioactive substances through the
children's body during the digestion process. And it should be
noted that, I mean today there are radioactive materials are
(19:31):
used in this way. For example, a stress test, patients
are injected with radioactive dye. They can then track the
movement of it through their bloodstream in order to see
that everything's you know, in tip top shape, what have you.
But this was not This was not the same as that.
This was much more of a experimental approach. Yeah. And also,
if you're signing up nowadays for that kind of test,
(19:54):
you know what's happening, You're not you're not being told
you're joining a fun club for baseball. You know what's happening.
There's it's a usually one or two times that's going
to happen in you know what, maybe a follow up
you have to do it again. So the dosing that
you're getting is fairly low. We have a specific example
of two of these tests. Yeah, the first, the first,
(20:16):
they would say, a battery of tests occurred in ninety six.
That's when seventeen boys eight this you know, radioactive iron
in their meals. It was an isotope that apparently can
harm blood and specifically the organ the spleen, which we
don't think about very often. Um. And and the the
(20:37):
whole thing here again is dosage is right, That's what
you have to worry about with anything like this. So
they were the boys were being exposed to between five
hundred and forty four two one thousand and twenty four
millirems of radiation over the course of seven different meals.
And just to compare this dosage with the amount of
(20:58):
radiation the three of us or anyone listening might receive
throughout the course of a year in the US. In
the US in particular, that would be around three d
miller ms from all the different natural, naturally occurring sources
of radiations sunlight, bananas, things like, yeah, exactly. Uh. And
then also the team calculated calcium digestion by adding radioactive
(21:20):
radioactive forms calcium to the breakfast milk of nineteen boys,
and this time each kid only at one radioactive meal
and exposed their bones to thirty five millirims of radiation.
By comparison, again, during their lifetimes, most Americans will receive
a hundred and ten miller rams of radiation on their
bones from the fallout of nuclear weapon testing. So the
(21:43):
next question you probably have is how did people learn
about that? Because the passages that we just told you
with the details of some of these illegal, unethical test
came to light through us through quality journalism. Yes, we
learned about it from Scott Allen who was writing for
(22:04):
the Boston Globe, and he found out about it because
a lot of documents around that time had been declassified
about this testing that was occurring throughout the United States,
but mostly in Boston. M Yeah, and this this led
to some pretty pretty significant reactions in in Congress. Right. Well,
(22:27):
Eventually in ninety four, what happens is the President Bill
Clinton forms the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments or
because we live in a world that loves awkward acronyms,
acre are uh. It was chaired by it was shared
by Dr Ruth Faden of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute
(22:49):
of bio Ethics, and Clinton's this this happens to, Like
Matt said, the way these documents got released, Clinton's Secretary
of Energy, whose name is Hazel O'Leary, had instituted an
openness policy, and so one point six million pages of
classified records from the time of the Cold War and
(23:09):
just after World War two and beyond were released. No
wiki leaks, no Snowden, no UM, no Pentagon papers, the
government itself, and that is how that is how these
other journalists found out about this. But the records made
it clear that when Quaker Oats and m I. T
were working together on this kind of stuff, the Atomic
(23:31):
Energy Commission was also providing funding. And not just this,
but they have been sponsoring tests, multiple tests, and multiple
situations on effects of radiation on the human body. Ya.
As it turned out, citizens of the United States who
had checked into various hospitals for numerous different ailments UM
were secretly being injected with varying amounts of plutonium and
(23:55):
other radioactive materials without their knowledge, or we assume there
can set yes. And if you want to learn more
specifically about this happening at the fern Old Research Center.
There is a paper you can find on archive dot
org called Human Subjects Research Radiation Experimentation. It's part of
the hearing that Ben just mentioned that when Bill Clinton
(24:19):
and the administration created this group. This is one of
the hearings where they have all the findings and interview
tons of people, even two of the children who were
experimented on at the fern Old School, right, and their
interviews with several of them. As you said there, it's
strange to hear some of the descriptions. One thing we
do want to point out about this study in particular
(24:42):
is that despite congressional investigation, despite declassification, there are still
conflicting numbers on some of this. So that's why you're
hearing Nolan, Matt and I say stuff like forty two
seventy something children, you know, and you might see numbers
as high as ninety and the age ranges very widely.
(25:03):
In one of those people that's interviewed says he was
seven at the time, but then most of the reporting
puts the children in their teens, so you know, it's
kind of crazy. Well, in other words, it feels like
a lot of this information information is just scratching the
surface of what the full extent of some of these
experiments might have looked like. So you know, it implies
(25:24):
to me that there were more than one unethical radiation
experiment going on. That's an excellent point. And speaking of
scratching the surface, you're right. We have yet to begin
looking at the other instances of Cold War radiation experiments,
but we will after a word from our spot and
(25:54):
we're back. As we said before the break, this is
one instance of a radioactive experiment conducted on unsuspecting, unconsenting civilians.
And for those of you in the know about the
effects of radiation on the human body, it's not as
if these people were shocked or injected with some sort
(26:18):
of instant cancer. It did, however, uh. It did, however,
expose them to an abnormal amount of radiation. And it
is far from the only instance of this. We found,
in the course of just a little bit of digging,
various numerous situations in which unsuspecting citizens, some even unborn,
(26:42):
were treated as guinea pigs by Uncle Sam for the
for the purpose of learning more about the effects of radiation.
And did you notice what we just said, unborn? That's
right in nineteen fifty three, the US Atomic Energy Commission
man several studies at the University of Iowa on the
health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women.
(27:06):
In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from one hundred
to two hundred micro curies that's three point seven to
seven point four m b q of iodine one one,
which is radioactive, in order to study the women's aborted
embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage and
to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In
(27:27):
another study, researchers gave twenty five newborn babies who were
under thirty six hours old and wade from five and
a half to eight and a half pounds um iodine one,
either orally or through an injection, so that they could
measure the amount of iodine and their thyroid glands. Yikes,
And they kind of had it easy if they survived,
(27:48):
because prisoners of Washington and Oregon state at least those
two states, had their testicles or radiated. UM soldiers were
exposed to nuclear fall school children at radium rods inserted
into their nose the same way that those uh what what?
What were they called the pinchers, the forceps that are
(28:11):
used to pull the brains out of mummies or out
of corpses during the process of mummification. Uh that radium
rods shoved up their nose. And there were also cases
where we We've talked about this a little bit before,
where radioactive chemicals in a gaseous form were released over
US and Canadian cities measuring the health effects of radioactive
(28:33):
fallout from nuclear bomb test. Is that like the St.
Louis one we spoke about on Yeah, and then there's
something else. There's a thing called Operation Sunshine. That sounds
fun and nice, right, it's Operation Sunshine. What is that, noll? Yeah,
it's basically body snatching. So fifteen hundred sample cadavers, many
(28:55):
of them babies and young children, were taken from countries
from Australia to Europe, often without their parents consent or knowledge,
and were used for exposure experiments. And this very misleadingly
named Operation Sunshine is that to see the effects on
(29:16):
a cadaver of radiation, see the effects on human tissue
depending on the UH, depending on the state of decay
of the corps. I wonder how much they actually learned
from that study that. I mean, it seems pretty brutal,
but at least it's cadavers. Well, we have seen that
science is such a double edged sword. Some of the
most valuable life saving medical information has come from horrific
(29:36):
acts of war. And I know, folks that it may
sound as though Matt Noel and I are unfairly picking
on the good old us of A. We are presenting
facts that are not theories of the things that occurred
in this nation's history, but we are by no means
(29:58):
dismissing the other experiments that occurred in other countries around
the same time. In Russia, for instance, there was a
nuclear exercise code named Snowball in ninety four. They detonated
an r D S four nuclear bomb. This bomb is
as powerful as the two bombs used in the American
(30:18):
strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stated goal of the
operation was military training to break through heavily fortified defensive lines,
but what they ended up doing is exposing forty five
thousand soldiers to the epicenter of a nuclear blast. Not
during the time. They didn't drop the bomb on them,
(30:40):
but they dropped the bomb, and they said, go go
in there. So when we think about how disturbing and
unethical it is for dozens and dozens of children to
be exposed to any kind of radiation without their knowledge,
we also have to remember this is a world in
which other country ease. We're also experimenting to two scales
(31:03):
that we cannot and we we we may never know
the scope of at this point. And yeah, because they're
dealing with the new technology that they weren't sure about.
Forty five thousands seems like a whole lot of test
subjects for you know, a single pool or for one
big study that sounds that sounds a little overkill to
(31:25):
me to do that, you know, send a hundred guys
in then yeah, right, And there have been other experiments
in different countries, of course, the horrific things that groups
of people can do to other groups of people when
they decide there for one reason or another sub human right,
(31:45):
the same the same brutal statistic experiments that occurred in
World War Two in both the European and Pacific theaters
continue to a degree today and places across the world.
And you know, maybe the countries don't have a significant
cash of resources. So why would you stop the concentration
(32:07):
camps in North Korea is the question that the real
politics fans are asking themselves. And this leads us to
I mean there, we do have to put some historical
context in this. The the idea of informed consent as
we understand it now from an ethical viewpoint, didn't really
exist back then, and they didn't to Matt's point, like
(32:29):
they didn't know what the full effects of this radiation
might be. They were they were learning something that they
strongly felt was for the greater good. But uh, with
the fern Old experiments were specifically talking about children who
perhaps could not consent legally to do this kind of testing,
(32:49):
didn't have parents or guardians that could truly consent to it,
and were misinformed or just not informed about the you know,
the experiments that we're going on. It does give it
an extra creepy layer of exploit exploitativeness. Yeah, in my mind,
there's a great moment in the hearing where, and I'm
(33:09):
not being sarcastic, I don't really I believe in sincerity,
there is a sincerely great, profound moment in the hearing
where they're one of the senators or one of the
representatives is speaking to one of the officials from m
I T. And they say, well, we didn't think we
were doing harm. Uh, you know, this amount of radiation
(33:30):
they're being exposed to is less than the amount of
radiation I exposed myself to when I use the X
ray foot machine at the shoe store, which those were
fairly common. Some our listeners from that time may recognize
that and also be aware that those did greatly increase
people's chances of cancer. Uh, we just didn't know. It
was just fun to do. But he said that, Semi
(33:51):
T guy, and he says, well, you know, what's the
harm essentially, And and the representative or the congressional officials says,
you know, that's that's a great point. So why didn't
you get anybody from one of our fine private schools
here in Massachusetts. Why didn't you tell them what was
going on and ask them if they wanted to do it,
(34:14):
which I I which I thought was a powerful moment.
Well yeah, And another question that was asked in that
that A similar exchange that occurred during those hearings was
would you have allowed your child to join the science
club if you knew If you knew what was happening. Yeah,
that's interesting. Even just the idea of it as a
(34:35):
science club is really predatory sounding to me, you know,
like it's it's it's certainly they weren't doing fun science activities,
you know they were who knows what happened to us
in space Camp just seems like that's true. Wait what
happens to space Camp stage? It was the vegas of NASA.
(34:56):
But but you know what I mean, I mean, I
just feel like I feel like it has it's almost
like a creepy van that's just free candy on it,
you know, like I don't know, it's just that's it
gets very achy to me. Yeah, I see what you're saying.
And it is exploitative, especially to take children who have
the odds stacked against them, uh, socially and and probably
(35:16):
would never have ordinarily encountered an opportunity of such charity.
And it turned out to be a windowless band that
said free candy on the side. But when when we
see this, we we have to understand that these sorts
of things are exactly what happened when people fall into
the slippery slope of the greater good. Because people's greater
(35:40):
goods are not always the same thing. And then you know,
if this is wartime research and you're scientists here and
you're saying, well, there is a one in two thousand
percent chance, there's a one out of two thousand chants
that I will directly give one of these children an
inoperable humor or cancer uh later in their lives. But
(36:03):
in doing so, I am essentially sacrificed in this child
to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people
in the future. I mean, is that is that true?
Or is that something people tell themselves in the wee
hours when they can't sleep. Yeah, I think it's both right,
It could It could very well be true with any
of these kind of experiments that are awful for an
(36:25):
individual or even a large group of people. But in
the end, as we saw from the unit one from
the concentration camp studies, you know that research was kept
and used right right, Yes, we have we have an
earlier podcast on human experimentation. Uh. We we have an
(36:46):
exploration of how that occurred, the kind of devil's bargain
that the Allied countries made at the close of World
War Two, And just like that, the fern Olde research
that was done on the Science Club was used to
see how nutrients go throughout the body, how they're either
excreted or absorbed. It's pretty awful. It was later used
(37:08):
in some osteoporosis research. So we'd like to know what
you think about this, Ladies and gentlemen, do you think
this kind of experimentation continues today? Now? I know people
who really genuinely believe in kim trails. I know they
get a lot of flak on the internet and a
lot of people will argue back and forth. It's a
(37:29):
very divisive issue. But for people who are skeptical about that,
about that concept, not the science behind it, if there
is science, But for people who are skeptical about a
government or a state level actors sense of ethics or
responsibility for the health of its people, then we have
to consider things like this happen are are happening now
(37:54):
probably you know somewhere in the world. So what does
it make you think? Do you do you think this
stuff is worth it? Do you think it could have
happened in a different way? Do you think that future
historians will shed light on what may be happening now
that we don't know about we'd like to hear from
you and to prove that we are listening. It's time
(38:15):
for shut Atkins. Our first shout out goes to Kyle
P who wrote us an email. He suggests that we
make an episode about the psychology behind the mind of
a conspiracy theorist. Oh how he wants us to look
at the patterns, perspective, and mindset of a theorist um
(38:36):
whether it's wanting to believe there's someone in control, just
distrust in authority, mental illness, or being aware of accepted
conspiracies and remaining skeptical on others. H he wants us
to examine why theorists are so obsessed with seeking and
researching the truth. That's pretty good, like an overall examination
(38:57):
of the mindset of conspiracy re lists. What do you
think guys? Yeah, I'm into it, so thanks for writing Kyle.
Thanks so much for checking out the show, Kyle. Our
second shout out of the week comes to us via
Ashby gray Uh. Ashby says recently discovered conspiracy stuff and
(39:17):
stuff you should know to get through work. Loving it.
Apparently all these dudes are married. Dang hashtag single a
f well Ashby, thanks for writing. I think I got
a little set up here from my crew includes you,
Josh and Chuck if you're listening, sure I am, I
am not in fact married, and the hashtag unmarried AF.
(39:41):
Thanks for watching h I too, I'm unmarried A. That's right, No,
you're unmarried AF. For the records, see the record two
out of the five. That's not bad. Ashby in all seriousness,
thanks so much for checking out the show. And uh
for anyone who hasn't for some reason checked out our counterpart,
Stuff you should Know, give them, give them an auditory gander.
(40:02):
They're worth the time. Finally, we have went from Connor J.
Via email, Dear Ben, Matt and Noel Fox Eye, the
second Gunman, Tiger, blood flash and light brown. He didn't
make that up either. That's in the letter, Yes in
the letter, and I'm I'm yes, I am humbled by
that phenomenal nickname. My name is Connor. I am a
twelve year old from Minden, Louisiana and seriously considering a
(40:25):
trip to Atlanta. Come on along. Connor um started out
first on Stuff you Should Know, just two hundred episodes
to go, moved on to stuff you miss in history class,
dabbled a bit and brain stuff and stuff to blow
your mind. And after all that rigamarole, listen to your
podcasts and like them better than the rest heavens an
idea for one, what about some more Internet mysteries? You
(40:48):
know what, Connor, we just had a little sit down
where we hashed out some ideas for the calendar coming up,
and um, there's there's an Internet mystery on there that
I am pretty excited about. I kind of had to
sell these guys on it, but I think you're going
to like it. So Connor, a shout out to you.
Glad you're listening, and um, yeah, look for some Internet
(41:08):
mysteries to come. This concludes our gosh, but wait, it's
not quite the end of the show. What if you're saying, Hey,
the episode's done, but I'm not. There's more stuff that
I want to learn about this. I'm sad. There's no
reason to be sad. Fellow fellow listener, fellow delver into
(41:29):
the unknown and the dark edges of obscure history. Right
you can. You can check out some fantastic books that
have been written about this and other similar events. We
like to call us further reading because in the past
people have asked this, you know, where can I find
out more about this? Uh? So we found two pretty
(41:50):
solid books that you might enjoy, well maybe enjoys not
the right word, uh fascinating in the fascinating where you
can at least find more stuff. The first one is
The Plutonium Files, Colon America's secret medical experiments in the
Cold War, and that is by Eileen Welsome. The second
one is Undo Risk Colon Secret State Experiments on humans,
(42:11):
and that is by Jonathan D. Moreno, who was in
those hearings. Exactly he was in those hearings. And if
you if you want to get all the sources that
we use, or at least the vast majority of them,
if you head on over to YouTube dot com slash
conspiracy Stuff, check out the episode that's gonna match up
with this one, and in the description you're going to
find a huge list of sources where you can just
(42:34):
dig for hours and hours. So, speaking of social media
online things, if you would like to follow us on
Twitter and Facebook to see some of our stories that don't,
for one reason or another make it to the air,
or things your fellow listeners want other people to know about.
Find us at Facebook and Twitter, where we are Conspiracy Stuff.
If you'd like to see a picture of our very
(42:55):
own Matt Madman Frederick as a child, all space camped up,
then this at our Instagram where we are Conspiracy Stuff Show.
And if all of that still doesn't quite scratch the
conspiratorial itch behind your cognitive ears and reaching for that one,
Or if you have a story you'd like to tell
us regarding human experimentation, if you'd like to tell us
(43:18):
your position on medical ethics, or if you have a
recommendation for a show we should cover in an upcoming episode.
All of our best suggestions and best episodes therefore come
from you. You can write to us directly. We are
conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
(00:21):
name is Noel, and call me Ben. You probably go
by a name as well. That makes this stuff they
don't want you to know. I'm excited about this one today, guys,
because this is a deep cut. And before we get
too into it, I want to extend and on air,
thank you to our colleague and personal friend Josh Clark, who,
(00:46):
as he so often does, accidentally hit us to this.
Oh he posted it or mentioned it in an article
or something. Yeah, he's got a great blog that you
can check out right now if you wish about the
They call it the Coolest Stuff for best stuff we
read this week, and so it's if you've got time.
It's a it's a great place to go. Everybody here.
How stuff works, as you might imagine, reads stuff constantly,
(01:10):
and as we found out about a very very strange
historical thing that we thought most folks in American abroad
wouldn't know about. And it starts with two entities that
ostensibly have nothing to do with each other. Yeah, it
feels like apples and tractors to me to just so
(01:34):
separate entities, or or like uh badgers and uh cheetos. Yeah,
hair brushes and hair brushes, or like or like asteroids
and venus fly traps and venus fly traps, exactly two
things that don't seem like that makes sense together. So
what what what's the first one? The first one is
(01:56):
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You probably know this as
m i T. It was founded in eighteen sixty one.
This is so, this is an old institution that we're
talking about here, very prestigious. A lot of great thinkers
and makers have come out of this. Oh yeah, it's
been around for a long time. It's won all kinds
of prestigious awards, right, and uh, it's become home to
(02:18):
some of the world's imminent scientist, statesman and economists. Uh.
The guy who invented condensed soup went there. Twenty nine
alumni from m i T of one Nobel prizes. That's
pretty good. And no, you'll like this one especially. More
than one third of the nation of the U S
space flights have included m i T educated astronauts, and
(02:40):
NASA has chosen more m I T graduates to become
astronauts than graduates of any other private institution. Well, I
have a Space Camp shirt, so you're pretty much in.
And I just ordered myself a NASA trucker hat on Amazon,
so that should be arriving any day now. And I'm
about datting it up and walking around on with my
Space Camp shirt ams hat on dude, speaking of that,
(03:04):
I found my picture of I think I sent it
to you, my picture of my Space Camp suit when
I was a little wee one, and I'm thinking about
putting on our Instagram. It's when it or at least
send it to me. I'm curious. So another another prestigious
fact about m I T that has nothing to do
with this show is that both hosts of Car Talk
(03:26):
attended M I T. Click and clack, click and out
of control. But anyway, you get the T L d R.
The quick and dirty of this is m I T
for centuries has been this amazing hub or seat of knowledge, innovation, wisdom,
(03:46):
and you know, the future of humanity, for scientific testing,
technology and all things above. And now for something completely different, Yeah,
completely and utterly different. So we have Thing A. Now
we're talking about Thing B, which is Quaker Oats. The
company that would become Quaker Oats actually formed in nineteen
(04:09):
o one, when four oat mills not oat meals. I
feel so bad that I actually wrote that joke in
the nets, and you even have a little ha there
to indicate that it's a joke, because some people might
not have known because it's not a good joke. So
these four mills, what make oats or mill oats? Rather um,
(04:32):
they combined, merge, shall we say, into a single super mill.
That was the dawn of the oatmeal tycoons. Which is
a phrase that Ben loves for some reason. Why I
love it because it's an excellent phrase. Remember those old
video games that would be like roller coaster Tycoon or uh,
I don't think they had all kinds of park Tycoon.
(04:54):
I would love to play a game called oatmeal Tycoon.
I don't know what, you know what? Actually I think
I like the idea of it more and the actual
thing would be pretty boring. For some reason, When I
think of an oatmeal flac and I picture some sort
of fat cat smoking a cigar and a giant golden
tub full of oatmeal. I can totally see that. And
(05:14):
and maybe, uh, you know, maybe his cigar looks like
a spoon. I don't know. There a lot of questions
about this. Yeah, let's workshop this one, but um so yeah.
The original Quaker oat trademark m began in eighth saventy
seven when one of the founding Mills used a Quaker
esque man. You may know him sort of looks like
(05:34):
a pilgrim like you may have been on the Mayflower.
You know. He's got a sort of a long white
shocks of hair, many a bit of a mane, and
a tall hat. Right, Yeah, he has uh, he has
that distinctive look that we have come to associate with Quakers,
whether fairly or unfairly. Uh. The Quaker movement is still
(05:57):
around here in the US and abroad, and it's it's
a group of very kind people. And the whole idea
of using that image was that it just instilled trust
in someone because there's the quality is going to be
perfection coming from these guys. Well, I mean and and
it is the very picture of wholesomeness. And that's a
(06:17):
word that's often associated with whole grains and good foods,
you know, healthy foods, like that. They're they're wholesome there.
That's right, because because oates like this, they're they're good
for you, right, Ben, Yeah, right, that's the idea. They're nutritious.
You'll hear, you'll hear some weird stuff about the Quaker man, right.
I love that we're playing out the wholesome stuff. Nowadays,
(06:40):
the company says that he is just a it's not
representing an actual person. It's just a man who's dressed
in Quaker garb. But the earlier advertising in nineteen o
nine identified him as William Penn, the seventeenth century philosopher.
But they you know, they later I guess rhet coons.
(07:00):
Is that the word? Yeah, because it's evolved so much
over time. We're talking about eighteen seventies, eighteen fifties, even
when they was first starting out. So got side tip
ladies and gentlemen, if you want to if you want
to impress your serial insider friends, if you're in the know,
they call him Larry. Yeah, yeah, that's what that's like,
(07:22):
the nickname. Anyhow, they started with Quaker oats and people
loved it. This whole Quaker thing worked very well for them,
caught on like gangbusters. Yeah, and they and they began
to grow into other areas, right like wildfire, Gangbusters, right
the Yeah. So, for instance, they started with other breakfast cereals,
(07:45):
other food and drink products, even into unrelated fields. For example,
in nineteen sixty nine, they bought Fisher Price, which many
of many of us listening may recognize as a toy
company that's just run in the early early age market.
Right now, there's telephones that the clinky wheels and the
(08:05):
face on it and any of those like classic toy
story toys that have been animated in the Toy Story
movies were probably originally made by Fisher Price. Yeah, and
so they owned that. The Oatmeal Plays owned that for
a while and then they spun it off in the nineties.
But they were also involved with making film. Didn't see
that one come in, did you? Yeah? Before researching this,
(08:28):
I had no idea that Quaker Oats had financed uh
Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory. What that doesn't it
doesn't seem like that, right, But they they had a
reason for this. Um. They we're gonna be able to
use some of the product names they're used in the
film to actually sell it and leverage it that would
(08:49):
become popular through the film. They wanted to sell gop stoppers. Yeah,
and then they also in two formed US Games, a
company that created did as Noel would say, video games
for the Atari fifty two. D Wow. They didn't do
so well though to that quicker guy's got his fingers
(09:10):
and all kinds of different stuff he's got, He's got
his mits and all kinds of oats, you know. Uh.
In eighty three they bought van Camps being products and
uh stokely van Camp and then Gatorade and currently they're
owned by PepsiCo. So in their own way, they have
also become quite successful. M I T. Seat of Learning.
(09:32):
Quaker Oats a global company that started with oatmeal and
then quickly cornered so many other markets. As you can see,
this company is a very little in common until that
is they joined forces. And to really look at this,
we need to look at the history of competition between
different companies and different products back in the day. So, uh,
(09:56):
nineteen forties, let's say let's go back there. Okay, were
there after its founding. It's doing really well, expanding its markets,
going to new places in the United States, going all
across the Great lands um, and it's trying to dominate
overall the cereal industry. What you eat for breakfast, it
should be this. Well, their chief rival was an outfit
(10:19):
that you may also know called cream of Wheat, Right,
you've heard of this. It's a wheat I think it's
simolina product that's kind of similar to oatmeal. Um, but
it's a little creamier. It's a little creamier. Um. But
they were they were getting big too around that time.
But it wasn't their only antagonist. Well, another antagonist here
(10:42):
was science because at the time, a widely publicized study
actually found that plant based grains contained an acid called
fight tate, which could actually hinder your digestive system UM
in a way that would keep minerals and vitamins like
calcium and iron from the being properly digested. A right, yes,
(11:03):
And there's another less obvious point here. Long time listeners,
you know what's happening concurrently in the US at this time.
This hubbub occurs in the nineteen forties. It's a few
years after bacon inexplicably becomes a fundamental part of the
American breakfast. Was it inexplicably to say, that's a great
(11:23):
point no, because we explicate it, uh fairly handily in
some earlier episodes. The first episode yes our podcast on
Edward Berne's a k a. The Father's Spend a k a.
The Father pr A, the father of Bernet sauce ak,
the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Uh So he was. We
(11:47):
won't get too into detail about this, but he was
tasked by a plate An outfit called the beech Nut
Company to popularize some leftover pork products that they had,
and he used some fairly clever but indirect methods to
make bacon a popular thing, because beforehand, people maybe a
(12:10):
bowl of oat meal, maybe a croissant, some fruit coffee.
I would liken it to the way, all of a sudden,
all of these taco bell products have like Doritos in them.
You know. I think it's sort of like a marketing
ploy to get rid of all the surplus Doritos. That's
my theory. I don't know if that's true or not,
but you know, this is a pretty brilliant example of like, hey,
(12:32):
let's take up meat scraps and turn them into meat gold. Yeah.
I think about what bacon is, right, it's essentially fat
back it's the fatty stuff. And let's also think about
how different bacon in the US is to bacon in
Europe or bacon in other parts of the world. And
the way he got it done right was he got
(12:52):
doctors to discuss how important protein is. Right, he had
a study. I hope you can hear the air quotes.
I'm making ladies and woman a study. So so we've
got we've got Quaker oats, and they're vying for competition
the serial market. They have an enemy in this publicized study,
(13:13):
and people are worried about nutrition, but they're also thinking, well,
bacon's just better. They needed a plan, prefably, not just
an ad campaign, but something that felt more objective, a study,
if you will, to contradict the other study floating around
in the zeitgeist. And they had a stroke of luck.
So they found out that the first entity we discussed,
(13:33):
m I T was going to be studying nutrition in
the human body. That's the thing one. Yes, So you know,
if they hear about this, somebody in one of their
offices just went, Eureka, we're doing this. They jumped at
the chance to fund the research that m I T
is trying to do with this because they thought this
was going to be exactly what they needed, right, to
(13:55):
provide satisfactory evidence not just of cereals benefits in general,
but of Quaker oats in particular, rather than those creeps
that cream of wheat or beach nut. Yeah, I don't.
I don't know if I don't think they were creeps.
Just I thought it sounded good. So they needed a
group of people, right, They needed an experiment in a
control group. They needed, ideally some young guinea pigs. As
(14:19):
Mill said, this was especially touted as nutritious for the
young and the growing. They needed kids would sign on willingly.
They needed kids who wouldn't ask questions, and we'll learn
more about those kids they selected right after a word
from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. From approximately
(14:52):
fifty seven to seventy three children from the Walter E.
Fernald State School were recruited to join what was referred
to as the Fernalde Science Club, which was at in
my team UM. Fernalde was a home for the quote
says it really really nasty term feeble minded that refers
(15:13):
to what we would now describe as being developmentally disabled kids. UM.
And in many of these cases kids who simply have
been abandoned by their parents. That's an important factor here.
The children at the fern Old School, we're not all
disabled in some way. They I don't know the politically
correct terms for this. UM. The terminology that's used in
(15:36):
the research we were done, like that was written in
the nineteen forties is much less than UM. I would
say satisfactory from a politically correct standpoint. That is an
important factor here. Not all of the children were disabled.
Many of them were just abandoned or you know, they
needed a place to stay. So children with special needs,
(15:57):
whether those needs are due to a developmental uh factor,
or whether they're due to a social factor such as
being abandoned. So for these kids who are, let's face it,
folks having a rough time in life, Uh, this M
I T. Science Club seems like a windfall. It grants
the children's special privileges. They go on field trips, they
get neat toys and swag like making mouse watches for example,
(16:20):
and they get special events. You get to go to
baseball games, met socks and stuff. They also got nutritious
meals all the time. Yeah, at very controlled intervals and
very high in calcium and iron talk about talk about
a catbird seat, right, what the catbird seat? It's a
good seat? Have you you've heard that phrase? Right? Of course,
(16:41):
I don't know this the catbird seat. I mean, I
don't know what. We don't know what it means. It's
just it means it's here in the best place. It's
a good situation. I'm going to say it's a cat indoors.
I'm assuming, oh they can grab birds maybe, or maybe
it's outdoors on a seat strategically able to catch birds. Okay, yeah,
well maybe I should also learn the etymology of these
(17:02):
colloquialisms plus about the now all right, But but the
point is it would have been it seems like it
would ostensibly be a great thing for these disadvantaged children. However,
not all was as it seemed. See here's the thing,
you guys. Uh. Some of these children were unable to
read for various reasons when they were told to sign
(17:26):
and consent to joining the science club. Also, the children
who actually had parents or guardians to uh to consult
about this, well, they weren't very They weren't much better
off because what was sent to them, who wasn't exactly
truthful in every case. Yeah, it wasn't as transparent as
(17:47):
one would imagine, and we have a quote to prove it.
And this is an excerpt from one of the notes
written home to the parents of a child requesting permission
for them to join the science club. And these letters
evolved over time, as because we're talking about a wide
range of dates here, from forties to the fifties. But
(18:08):
this is just one little snapshot of one of those letters.
I'll give us a go a few fellas, don't mind
um quote. We are considering the selection of a group
of our brighter patients, including name of child, to receive
a special diet rich in irons and vitamins or as
I like to call them, vitamins for a period of time.
(18:30):
These studies will cause no discomfort or change in the
patient other than a possible improvement. I hope that you
have no objection that your son or daughter is voluntarily
participating in this study. And again, that is an exert
from a sample permission letter sent home to the parents
(18:50):
or guardians of these children. You have to love the phrasing,
right as I hope that you have no objection that
your son is voluntarily participating means it's already happening. That's already.
So what M. I. T. Did not tell anyone, including
the parents, including the children, and maybe even the functionaries
at the state school, was that the calcium and iron
(19:10):
that they were feeding to these science club participants was irradiated.
Radioactive calcium and iron functioned like tracers, so the scientists
could watch the progression of these radioactive substances through the
children's body during the digestion process. And it should be
noted that, I mean today there are radioactive materials are
(19:31):
used in this way. For example, a stress test, patients
are injected with radioactive dye. They can then track the
movement of it through their bloodstream in order to see
that everything's you know, in tip top shape, what have you.
But this was not This was not the same as that.
This was much more of a experimental approach. Yeah. And also,
if you're signing up nowadays for that kind of test,
(19:54):
you know what's happening, You're not you're not being told
you're joining a fun club for baseball. You know what's happening.
There's it's a usually one or two times that's going
to happen in you know what, maybe a follow up
you have to do it again. So the dosing that
you're getting is fairly low. We have a specific example
of two of these tests. Yeah, the first, the first,
(20:16):
they would say, a battery of tests occurred in ninety six.
That's when seventeen boys eight this you know, radioactive iron
in their meals. It was an isotope that apparently can
harm blood and specifically the organ the spleen, which we
don't think about very often. Um. And and the the
(20:37):
whole thing here again is dosage is right, That's what
you have to worry about with anything like this. So
they were the boys were being exposed to between five
hundred and forty four two one thousand and twenty four
millirems of radiation over the course of seven different meals.
And just to compare this dosage with the amount of
(20:58):
radiation the three of us or anyone listening might receive
throughout the course of a year in the US. In
the US in particular, that would be around three d
miller ms from all the different natural, naturally occurring sources
of radiations sunlight, bananas, things like, yeah, exactly. Uh. And
then also the team calculated calcium digestion by adding radioactive
(21:20):
radioactive forms calcium to the breakfast milk of nineteen boys,
and this time each kid only at one radioactive meal
and exposed their bones to thirty five millirims of radiation.
By comparison, again, during their lifetimes, most Americans will receive
a hundred and ten miller rams of radiation on their
bones from the fallout of nuclear weapon testing. So the
(21:43):
next question you probably have is how did people learn
about that? Because the passages that we just told you
with the details of some of these illegal, unethical test
came to light through us through quality journalism. Yes, we
learned about it from Scott Allen who was writing for
(22:04):
the Boston Globe, and he found out about it because
a lot of documents around that time had been declassified
about this testing that was occurring throughout the United States,
but mostly in Boston. M Yeah, and this this led
to some pretty pretty significant reactions in in Congress. Right. Well,
(22:27):
Eventually in ninety four, what happens is the President Bill
Clinton forms the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments or
because we live in a world that loves awkward acronyms,
acre are uh. It was chaired by it was shared
by Dr Ruth Faden of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute
(22:49):
of bio Ethics, and Clinton's this this happens to, Like
Matt said, the way these documents got released, Clinton's Secretary
of Energy, whose name is Hazel O'Leary, had instituted an
openness policy, and so one point six million pages of
classified records from the time of the Cold War and
(23:09):
just after World War two and beyond were released. No
wiki leaks, no Snowden, no UM, no Pentagon papers, the
government itself, and that is how that is how these
other journalists found out about this. But the records made
it clear that when Quaker Oats and m I. T
were working together on this kind of stuff, the Atomic
(23:31):
Energy Commission was also providing funding. And not just this,
but they have been sponsoring tests, multiple tests, and multiple
situations on effects of radiation on the human body. Ya.
As it turned out, citizens of the United States who
had checked into various hospitals for numerous different ailments UM
were secretly being injected with varying amounts of plutonium and
(23:55):
other radioactive materials without their knowledge, or we assume there
can set yes. And if you want to learn more
specifically about this happening at the fern Old Research Center.
There is a paper you can find on archive dot
org called Human Subjects Research Radiation Experimentation. It's part of
the hearing that Ben just mentioned that when Bill Clinton
(24:19):
and the administration created this group. This is one of
the hearings where they have all the findings and interview
tons of people, even two of the children who were
experimented on at the fern Old School, right, and their
interviews with several of them. As you said there, it's
strange to hear some of the descriptions. One thing we
do want to point out about this study in particular
(24:42):
is that despite congressional investigation, despite declassification, there are still
conflicting numbers on some of this. So that's why you're
hearing Nolan, Matt and I say stuff like forty two
seventy something children, you know, and you might see numbers
as high as ninety and the age ranges very widely.
(25:03):
In one of those people that's interviewed says he was
seven at the time, but then most of the reporting
puts the children in their teens, so you know, it's
kind of crazy. Well, in other words, it feels like
a lot of this information information is just scratching the
surface of what the full extent of some of these
experiments might have looked like. So you know, it implies
(25:24):
to me that there were more than one unethical radiation
experiment going on. That's an excellent point. And speaking of
scratching the surface, you're right. We have yet to begin
looking at the other instances of Cold War radiation experiments,
but we will after a word from our spot and
(25:54):
we're back. As we said before the break, this is
one instance of a radioactive experiment conducted on unsuspecting, unconsenting civilians.
And for those of you in the know about the
effects of radiation on the human body, it's not as
if these people were shocked or injected with some sort
(26:18):
of instant cancer. It did, however, uh. It did, however,
expose them to an abnormal amount of radiation. And it
is far from the only instance of this. We found,
in the course of just a little bit of digging,
various numerous situations in which unsuspecting citizens, some even unborn,
(26:42):
were treated as guinea pigs by Uncle Sam for the
for the purpose of learning more about the effects of radiation.
And did you notice what we just said, unborn? That's
right in nineteen fifty three, the US Atomic Energy Commission
man several studies at the University of Iowa on the
health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women.
(27:06):
In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from one hundred
to two hundred micro curies that's three point seven to
seven point four m b q of iodine one one,
which is radioactive, in order to study the women's aborted
embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage and
to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In
(27:27):
another study, researchers gave twenty five newborn babies who were
under thirty six hours old and wade from five and
a half to eight and a half pounds um iodine one,
either orally or through an injection, so that they could
measure the amount of iodine and their thyroid glands. Yikes,
And they kind of had it easy if they survived,
(27:48):
because prisoners of Washington and Oregon state at least those
two states, had their testicles or radiated. UM soldiers were
exposed to nuclear fall school children at radium rods inserted
into their nose the same way that those uh what what?
What were they called the pinchers, the forceps that are
(28:11):
used to pull the brains out of mummies or out
of corpses during the process of mummification. Uh that radium
rods shoved up their nose. And there were also cases
where we We've talked about this a little bit before,
where radioactive chemicals in a gaseous form were released over
US and Canadian cities measuring the health effects of radioactive
(28:33):
fallout from nuclear bomb test. Is that like the St.
Louis one we spoke about on Yeah, and then there's
something else. There's a thing called Operation Sunshine. That sounds
fun and nice, right, it's Operation Sunshine. What is that, noll? Yeah,
it's basically body snatching. So fifteen hundred sample cadavers, many
(28:55):
of them babies and young children, were taken from countries
from Australia to Europe, often without their parents consent or knowledge,
and were used for exposure experiments. And this very misleadingly
named Operation Sunshine is that to see the effects on
(29:16):
a cadaver of radiation, see the effects on human tissue
depending on the UH, depending on the state of decay
of the corps. I wonder how much they actually learned
from that study that. I mean, it seems pretty brutal,
but at least it's cadavers. Well, we have seen that
science is such a double edged sword. Some of the
most valuable life saving medical information has come from horrific
(29:36):
acts of war. And I know, folks that it may
sound as though Matt Noel and I are unfairly picking
on the good old us of A. We are presenting
facts that are not theories of the things that occurred
in this nation's history, but we are by no means
(29:58):
dismissing the other experiments that occurred in other countries around
the same time. In Russia, for instance, there was a
nuclear exercise code named Snowball in ninety four. They detonated
an r D S four nuclear bomb. This bomb is
as powerful as the two bombs used in the American
(30:18):
strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stated goal of the
operation was military training to break through heavily fortified defensive lines,
but what they ended up doing is exposing forty five
thousand soldiers to the epicenter of a nuclear blast. Not
during the time. They didn't drop the bomb on them,
(30:40):
but they dropped the bomb, and they said, go go
in there. So when we think about how disturbing and
unethical it is for dozens and dozens of children to
be exposed to any kind of radiation without their knowledge,
we also have to remember this is a world in
which other country ease. We're also experimenting to two scales
(31:03):
that we cannot and we we we may never know
the scope of at this point. And yeah, because they're
dealing with the new technology that they weren't sure about.
Forty five thousands seems like a whole lot of test
subjects for you know, a single pool or for one
big study that sounds that sounds a little overkill to
(31:25):
me to do that, you know, send a hundred guys
in then yeah, right, And there have been other experiments
in different countries, of course, the horrific things that groups
of people can do to other groups of people when
they decide there for one reason or another sub human right,
(31:45):
the same the same brutal statistic experiments that occurred in
World War Two in both the European and Pacific theaters
continue to a degree today and places across the world.
And you know, maybe the countries don't have a significant
cash of resources. So why would you stop the concentration
(32:07):
camps in North Korea is the question that the real
politics fans are asking themselves. And this leads us to
I mean there, we do have to put some historical
context in this. The the idea of informed consent as
we understand it now from an ethical viewpoint, didn't really
exist back then, and they didn't to Matt's point, like
(32:29):
they didn't know what the full effects of this radiation
might be. They were they were learning something that they
strongly felt was for the greater good. But uh, with
the fern Old experiments were specifically talking about children who
perhaps could not consent legally to do this kind of testing,
(32:49):
didn't have parents or guardians that could truly consent to it,
and were misinformed or just not informed about the you know,
the experiments that we're going on. It does give it
an extra creepy layer of exploit exploitativeness. Yeah, in my mind,
there's a great moment in the hearing where, and I'm
(33:09):
not being sarcastic, I don't really I believe in sincerity,
there is a sincerely great, profound moment in the hearing
where they're one of the senators or one of the
representatives is speaking to one of the officials from m
I T. And they say, well, we didn't think we
were doing harm. Uh, you know, this amount of radiation
(33:30):
they're being exposed to is less than the amount of
radiation I exposed myself to when I use the X
ray foot machine at the shoe store, which those were
fairly common. Some our listeners from that time may recognize
that and also be aware that those did greatly increase
people's chances of cancer. Uh, we just didn't know. It
was just fun to do. But he said that, Semi
(33:51):
T guy, and he says, well, you know, what's the
harm essentially, And and the representative or the congressional officials says,
you know, that's that's a great point. So why didn't
you get anybody from one of our fine private schools
here in Massachusetts. Why didn't you tell them what was
going on and ask them if they wanted to do it,
(34:14):
which I I which I thought was a powerful moment.
Well yeah, And another question that was asked in that
that A similar exchange that occurred during those hearings was
would you have allowed your child to join the science
club if you knew If you knew what was happening. Yeah,
that's interesting. Even just the idea of it as a
(34:35):
science club is really predatory sounding to me, you know,
like it's it's it's certainly they weren't doing fun science activities,
you know they were who knows what happened to us
in space Camp just seems like that's true. Wait what
happens to space Camp stage? It was the vegas of NASA.
(34:56):
But but you know what I mean, I mean, I
just feel like I feel like it has it's almost
like a creepy van that's just free candy on it,
you know, like I don't know, it's just that's it
gets very achy to me. Yeah, I see what you're saying.
And it is exploitative, especially to take children who have
the odds stacked against them, uh, socially and and probably
(35:16):
would never have ordinarily encountered an opportunity of such charity.
And it turned out to be a windowless band that
said free candy on the side. But when when we
see this, we we have to understand that these sorts
of things are exactly what happened when people fall into
the slippery slope of the greater good. Because people's greater
(35:40):
goods are not always the same thing. And then you know,
if this is wartime research and you're scientists here and
you're saying, well, there is a one in two thousand
percent chance, there's a one out of two thousand chants
that I will directly give one of these children an
inoperable humor or cancer uh later in their lives. But
(36:03):
in doing so, I am essentially sacrificed in this child
to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people
in the future. I mean, is that is that true?
Or is that something people tell themselves in the wee
hours when they can't sleep. Yeah, I think it's both right,
It could It could very well be true with any
of these kind of experiments that are awful for an
(36:25):
individual or even a large group of people. But in
the end, as we saw from the unit one from
the concentration camp studies, you know that research was kept
and used right right, Yes, we have we have an
earlier podcast on human experimentation. Uh. We we have an
(36:46):
exploration of how that occurred, the kind of devil's bargain
that the Allied countries made at the close of World
War Two, And just like that, the fern Olde research
that was done on the Science Club was used to
see how nutrients go throughout the body, how they're either
excreted or absorbed. It's pretty awful. It was later used
(37:08):
in some osteoporosis research. So we'd like to know what
you think about this, Ladies and gentlemen, do you think
this kind of experimentation continues today? Now? I know people
who really genuinely believe in kim trails. I know they
get a lot of flak on the internet and a
lot of people will argue back and forth. It's a
(37:29):
very divisive issue. But for people who are skeptical about that,
about that concept, not the science behind it, if there
is science, But for people who are skeptical about a
government or a state level actors sense of ethics or
responsibility for the health of its people, then we have
to consider things like this happen are are happening now
(37:54):
probably you know somewhere in the world. So what does
it make you think? Do you do you think this
stuff is worth it? Do you think it could have
happened in a different way? Do you think that future
historians will shed light on what may be happening now
that we don't know about we'd like to hear from
you and to prove that we are listening. It's time
(38:15):
for shut Atkins. Our first shout out goes to Kyle
P who wrote us an email. He suggests that we
make an episode about the psychology behind the mind of
a conspiracy theorist. Oh how he wants us to look
at the patterns, perspective, and mindset of a theorist um
(38:36):
whether it's wanting to believe there's someone in control, just
distrust in authority, mental illness, or being aware of accepted
conspiracies and remaining skeptical on others. H he wants us
to examine why theorists are so obsessed with seeking and
researching the truth. That's pretty good, like an overall examination
(38:57):
of the mindset of conspiracy re lists. What do you
think guys? Yeah, I'm into it, so thanks for writing Kyle.
Thanks so much for checking out the show, Kyle. Our
second shout out of the week comes to us via
Ashby gray Uh. Ashby says recently discovered conspiracy stuff and
(39:17):
stuff you should know to get through work. Loving it.
Apparently all these dudes are married. Dang hashtag single a
f well Ashby, thanks for writing. I think I got
a little set up here from my crew includes you,
Josh and Chuck if you're listening, sure I am, I
am not in fact married, and the hashtag unmarried AF.
(39:41):
Thanks for watching h I too, I'm unmarried A. That's right, No,
you're unmarried AF. For the records, see the record two
out of the five. That's not bad. Ashby in all seriousness,
thanks so much for checking out the show. And uh
for anyone who hasn't for some reason checked out our counterpart,
Stuff you should Know, give them, give them an auditory gander.
(40:02):
They're worth the time. Finally, we have went from Connor J.
Via email, Dear Ben, Matt and Noel Fox Eye, the
second Gunman, Tiger, blood flash and light brown. He didn't
make that up either. That's in the letter, Yes in
the letter, and I'm I'm yes, I am humbled by
that phenomenal nickname. My name is Connor. I am a
twelve year old from Minden, Louisiana and seriously considering a
(40:25):
trip to Atlanta. Come on along. Connor um started out
first on Stuff you Should Know, just two hundred episodes
to go, moved on to stuff you miss in history class,
dabbled a bit and brain stuff and stuff to blow
your mind. And after all that rigamarole, listen to your
podcasts and like them better than the rest heavens an
idea for one, what about some more Internet mysteries? You
(40:48):
know what, Connor, we just had a little sit down
where we hashed out some ideas for the calendar coming up,
and um, there's there's an Internet mystery on there that
I am pretty excited about. I kind of had to
sell these guys on it, but I think you're going
to like it. So Connor, a shout out to you.
Glad you're listening, and um, yeah, look for some Internet
(41:08):
mysteries to come. This concludes our gosh, but wait, it's
not quite the end of the show. What if you're saying, Hey,
the episode's done, but I'm not. There's more stuff that
I want to learn about this. I'm sad. There's no
reason to be sad. Fellow fellow listener, fellow delver into
(41:29):
the unknown and the dark edges of obscure history. Right
you can. You can check out some fantastic books that
have been written about this and other similar events. We
like to call us further reading because in the past
people have asked this, you know, where can I find
out more about this? Uh? So we found two pretty
(41:50):
solid books that you might enjoy, well maybe enjoys not
the right word, uh fascinating in the fascinating where you
can at least find more stuff. The first one is
The Plutonium Files, Colon America's secret medical experiments in the
Cold War, and that is by Eileen Welsome. The second
one is Undo Risk Colon Secret State Experiments on humans,
(42:11):
and that is by Jonathan D. Moreno, who was in
those hearings. Exactly he was in those hearings. And if
you if you want to get all the sources that
we use, or at least the vast majority of them,
if you head on over to YouTube dot com slash
conspiracy Stuff, check out the episode that's gonna match up
with this one, and in the description you're going to
find a huge list of sources where you can just
(42:34):
dig for hours and hours. So, speaking of social media
online things, if you would like to follow us on
Twitter and Facebook to see some of our stories that don't,
for one reason or another make it to the air,
or things your fellow listeners want other people to know about.
Find us at Facebook and Twitter, where we are Conspiracy Stuff.
If you'd like to see a picture of our very
(42:55):
own Matt Madman Frederick as a child, all space camped up,
then this at our Instagram where we are Conspiracy Stuff Show.
And if all of that still doesn't quite scratch the
conspiratorial itch behind your cognitive ears and reaching for that one,
Or if you have a story you'd like to tell
us regarding human experimentation, if you'd like to tell us
(43:18):
your position on medical ethics, or if you have a
recommendation for a show we should cover in an upcoming episode.
All of our best suggestions and best episodes therefore come
from you. You can write to us directly. We are
conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
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