A rather tendentious account. It appears to boil down to two distinctly separate considerations:
(1) Should the patients given the tracer have been informed of its nature, and their permission obtained? Of course. There is no argument over that. The mitigating circumstance was that the doctors conducting the experiment thought that the tracer was essentially as innocuous as ordinary iron supplement.
(2) Was there any medical risk from the use of Fe-59 isotope? No evidence of risk. The doses---as best as could be reconstructed---were tiny, the latent radioactivity low, and (what the video does not explain) had a half-life of 44.5 days. At the end of a year, the radioactivity would have been reduced by 99.66%, a factor of 294. Nor does the video compare the low radioactivity with the already latent radioactivity in the mother's body from naturally-ingested carbon-14 and potassium-40. Nor does the video take up the question of whether the few cancers appearing out of hundreds of cases were associated with natural environments that may have had measurable radioactivity (e.g., granite formations). In the realm of sparse data, it is problematic to distinguish between causation or chance.
The video is also coy about the source of the Fe-59. There is only one answer: it was produced by exposure of ordinary stable Fe-57 in a nuclear reactor, to gain two neutrons from neutron bombardment. In 1945, that might have been hard to obtain. Somebody might have had connections with the nuclear science surrounding the Manhattan Project. The resulting radioactivity was beta rays (electrons ejected from the nuclei).
Nowadays, it is common for both man and beast to be administered radioactive isotopes for medical imaging or cancer treatment. (Years ago, my cat had to take a cesium isotope to deal with a thyroid problem. He would eliminate it by normal urination. I had to store his litter for a month before disposing of it.)
A rather tendentious account. It appears to boil down to two distinctly separate considerations:
(1) Should the patients given the tracer have been informed of its nature, and their permission obtained? Of course. There is no argument over that. The mitigating circumstance was that the doctors conducting the experiment thought that the tracer was essentially as innocuous as ordinary iron supplement.
(2) Was there any medical risk from the use of Fe-59 isotope? No evidence of risk. The doses---as best as could be reconstructed---were tiny, the latent radioactivity low, and (what the video does not explain) had a half-life of 44.5 days. At the end of a year, the radioactivity would have been reduced by 99.66%, a factor of 294. Nor does the video compare the low radioactivity with the already latent radioactivity in the mother's body from naturally-ingested carbon-14 and potassium-40. Nor does the video take up the question of whether the few cancers appearing out of hundreds of cases were associated with natural environments that may have had measurable radioactivity (e.g., granite formations). In the realm of sparse data, it is problematic to distinguish between causation or chance.
The video is also coy about the source of the Fe-59. There is only one answer: it was produced by exposure of ordinary stable Fe-57 in a nuclear reactor, to gain two neutrons from neutron bombardment. In 1945, that might have been hard to obtain. Somebody might have had connections with the nuclear science surrounding the Manhattan Project. The resulting radioactivity was beta rays (electrons ejected from the nuclei).
Nowadays, it is common for both man and beast to be administered radioactive isotopes for medical imaging or cancer treatment. (Years ago, my cat had to take a cesium isotope to deal with a thyroid problem. He would eliminate it by normal urination. I had to store his litter for a month before disposing of it.)