Film on a medical experiment on Punjabi women causes a stir (India Today, 1995)

Pritam Kaur: one of the 2 1 Punjabi women who were given the chapatisas ‘cure.’ When Pritam Kaur of Coventry went to the doctor in 1969, complaining of a migraine, little did she know that more than two decades later, the ‘cure’ administered to her would hit the headlines. According to Deadly Experiments, a Channel 4 documentary shown on July 6, Kaur and 20 other Punjabi women-all, like her, suffering from varied ailments-were unsuspecting human guinea pigs in an experiment involving radioactive iron salts.

I came across this story earlier today through a reposted twitter thread and my first thought was—how have I never heard of it before? And why does it seem like there’s no information about it online? I I tried using a search engine, but at first the Indian Today article was the only mention of it I could find.

After some more searching, I stumbled across a journal article that mentions the same documentary: True Stories: Deadly Experiments, aired on Channel 4 in 1995.

Apparently, the documentary—which I can’t find anywhere—reported that radiation experiments had also been performed on 91 pregnant British women, who, without their consent, were repeatedly injected with radioactive iodine.

In an 1995 article from The Herald:

THE Government has been asked to explain why there was no follow-up investigation on pregnant women who were repeatedly injected with radioactive iodine more than 30 years ago.

. . . The constituent, Mrs Kathleen Morrison, 62, her sister, and three friends were among 91 pregnant women who had radioactive iodine injected into their thyroids.

Mrs Morrison has called for follow-up research following fears that the children of those who volunteered for the experiment in Aberdeen between 1962 and 1964 may be affected.

She suffered throat cancer seven years ago and, although she is not claiming it was as a result of the research, she is concerned about the effects of the work carried out at the Obstetric Medicine Research Unit, then headed by obstetrician Sir Dugald Baird.

The experiment is understood to have been carried out as part of his PhD thesis by Dr Aboul Khair, a Research Fellow in Therapeutics and Pharmacology.

A subsequent experiment carried out in the same unit involving a further 37 women, who were about to have abortions, revealed that unborn children were more susceptible to radioactive iodine than had previously been realised. However, it was known at that stage the foetus is at risk from even low level radiation.

And apparently, from what I can find, nothing came of this?

The Medical Research Council, which funded the experiments, yesterday denied they had been carried out secretly or that there had been any risk. Its spokesman, Mr Paul Fawcett, said he could not comment on the experiment in which Mrs Morrison was involved because he had only scant details, but confirmed another experiment involving 37 women was carried out.

The Chanel 4 documentary also links it to Project Sunshine, a nuclear research project that, among other things, studied the effects of radiation on the human body.

And how did they do that?

Body snatching!

Of infants, no less

Project Sunshine and the Slippery Slope: The Ethics of Tissue Sampling for Strontium-90

In July 1995 (as the US Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was finalising its report) a UK Channel 4 documentary True Stories: Deadly Experiments reported that 91 pregnant British women had been injected with radioactive iodine in the 1960s and a further 37 women who were due to undergo medically-approved abortions had been involved in a separate series of tests to monitor the effect of radioactive iodine in the foetus

The experiments were conducted in Aberdeen, Hammersmith and Liverpool. The press reports also noted that “In a separate series of experiments, between 1957 and 1970, body parts from an estimated 6,000 corpses had been removed for tests without the permission of the next of kin and sent for examination at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, the programme claimed.”

Although it pointed to a ‘consistently elevated’ incidence of thyroid cancer in Grampian since the experiments were done no follow-up study was undertaken following the report. One patient, a former headmistress who had participated in the experiments and suffered thyroid cancer subsequently said, "We were definitely never told there was any risk involved with the injections because if we had been told that we just wouldn’t have done it. The tests were never really discussed with us at all, and the experiments had already started before I was told they involved radioactive iodine. But, of course, in those days you never thought for one minute that doctors would ever do anything that was going to harm you.

On 4 June 2001 the UK Daily Mail reported that “Bodies of stillborn British babies and infants who died at just a few months old were shipped to the US in the 1950s and 1960s to be used in nuclear experiments. After the tests the bodies were cremated and radioactivity in the remains was measured.”

The experiments were said to be code-named Operation Sunshine and Britain was said to have become involved in 1955 when Dr Willard Libby appealed for “large numbers of bodies - preferably stillborn or newly born babies - for experiments on the effect of fallout from atom bomb Tests.” Libby was quoted as saying, “If anybody knows how to do a Good job of body snatching, they will really be serving his country.”

And, from another news article (ABCNEWS, 2001)

Half a century after secret studies on the effects of radioactive fallout were carried out in the United States and Britain, the world is waking up to the “body snatching” of the 1950s.

Called “Project Sunshine,” studies conducted on dead babies sought to measure the amount of radioactive strontium-90 being absorbed by humans due to nuclear testing.

On Tuesday, the Australian Ministry for Health and Aged Care launched an investigation into reports of Australian baby samples being dispatched for Project Sunshine without the parents’ permission.

. . .

The investigation was launched days after a British newspaper reported that British scientists obtained children’s bodies from various hospitals and shipped their bones and other body parts to the United States for classified nuclear experiments.

. . .

Project Sunshine, which was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, attempted to study the absorption of strontium-90 in human tissue, primarily bone.

In June 1995, a presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, set up by former President Clinton released classified documents from the Atomic Energy Commission, which showed that scientists working on Project Sunshine were aware of the dubious ethical and legal grounds on which their research was being conducted

In a transcript of a secret meeting on Jan. 18, 1955, Dr. Willard Libby, a University of Chicago researcher, who went on to win the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, acknowledged that the difficulty in getting human samples was resulting in “great gaps” in the project’s findings.

“I don’t know how to get them,” Libby is quoted as saying. “But I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them and particularly in the young age group. So, human samples are of prime importance and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.”

Side note: Libby was also involved in the Manhattan Project.

More than 1,500 cadavers — many of them babies — were gathered from half a dozen countries from Europe to Australia in the 1950s for the studies on the effects of radiation conducted by the now defunct Atomic Energy Commission, according to U.S. government documents.

In a 1995 British documentary, Deadly Experiments, Jean Prichard, a British mother of a stillborn baby whose legs were removed by British hospital doctors in 1957, said she was forbidden to dress her daughter for her funeral to prevent her from finding out what had happened.

“I asked if I could put her christening robe on her, but I wasn’t allowed to, and that upset me terribly because she wasn’t christened,” she said. “No one asked me about doing things like that, taking bits and pieces from her.”

Though British and Canadian media have, in the past, reported that cadavers of infants were sent to the United States for Project Sunshine, there have been no official investigations into the murky shipments.

. . .

ABCNEWS reported details of the program in 1995, including the practice of obtaining cadavers from cities where tracking was lax, particularly in poverty- stricken areas.