Boys Used as Lab Rats in '40s

Low-functioning children and other disadvantaged populations in the U.S. were used in harmful, painful and sometimes even deadly medical experiments, according to the book Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation

on Children in Cold War America
. In the 1940s, young boys from Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass., were used in an MIT experiment whose details weren't shared with them for decades. They had been fed daily oatmeal "mixed with radioactive milk" and "digest[ed] a series of iron supplements that gave them the radiation-equivalent of at least 50 chest X-rays." The experiment, designed to test calcium absorption, was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission and Quaker Oats.

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