The World War II plutonium experiments: contested stories and their lessons for medical research and informed consent

During the Second World War medical researchers around the USA injected 18 hospital patients with radioactive plutonium in order to learn its effects on the body. Two documents, a newspaper account and a university committee report, tell divergent stories of the scientists and patients involved in that experiment. This article uses those documents-plutonium narratives-as a catalyst for exploring the problematic representation of past human experimentation, assumptions of moral progress in medical research, and the nature of informed consent today. Informed consent is shown to be an evolving process and discursive practice that cannot be understood apart from its historical and cultural embeddedness.