Vanderbilt University Hospital - 1945-49 at Prenatal Clinic
[back] Human Experiments

At Vanderbilt-829 women were told to drink something that would be good for their fetuses.  The drinks actually contained varying amounts of radioactive iron.  Within an hour, the material crossed the placenta and began circulating in the blood of their unborn fetuses.“  In a study done in the sixties, scientists discovered four fatal malignancies among the children exposed to prenatal radiation and no cancers in the non-exposed group. 2003] Carol Rutz's Lecture at Indiana University

Tennessee clinic, 829 pregnant women served radioactive iron as part of their regular treatment. What did they think they were getting?  This was a study done immediately after World War II and these young women came to the clinic thinking that they were getting vitamins to drink, that this would help their babies. And in fact, what was being studied was how fast the radio iodine crossed into the placenta. ....At Vanderbilt University in Nashville. ..... They had all kinds of ailments, skin diseases, cancer, blood disorders, some of their offspring, their children that they were carrying at the time of this experiment died of cancer. And very strange cancers at young ages.  [Interview Eileen Welsome] Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed Radioactivity to Thousands of Americans