Eugene Saenger

Dr. Eugene Saenger (March 5, 1917 – September 30, 2007)^[1] was an American university professor and physician. A graduate of Harvard University,^[1] Saenger was a pioneer in radiation research and nuclear medicine. He taught at the University of Cincinnati for more than thirty years.^[2]

Saenger is perhaps best known for the morally questionable radiation experiments he conducted on human cancer patients during the 1960s and early 1970s. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union spent much of their time trying to figure out if they could survive a nuclear catastrophe. How much radiation could a human body take? This would be important information for the Pentagon to know, in order to protect its soldiers in the event they were crazy enough to start an atomic holocaust. Enter the seeming go-to government choice for secret experimentation: unknowing African Americans.

From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, led an experiment exposing 88 cancer patients, poor and mostly black, to whole body radiation, even though this sort of treatment had already been pretty well discredited for the types of cancer these patients had. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. They were simply told they would be getting a treatment that might help them. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation. Nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pain, loss of appetite, and mental confusion were the results. A report in 1972 indicated that as many as a quarter of the patients died of radiation poisoning. Dr. Saenger recently received a gold medal for “career achievements” from the Radiological Society of North America. In 1994, the families of the patients sued Saenger, the University of Cincinnati, and the federal government. In 1999, the families won a $3.6 million settlement.^[2]

See also

• Human experimentation in the United States

Notes