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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I'm sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians.

By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2]

1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/

2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/

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It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process.

And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.

The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.

We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals.

Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.

True. When is the time to remove from checklists, and when is the time to add to them. If the feedback-loop isn't properly closed, you get imbalance.

Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives".

The system is unbalanced by default.

Sadly, heaps of paperwork with checklists does relatively little to protect safety in the end. Everyone just spends a lot of time filling out paperwork to justify whatever thing they want to do. At least when it comes to corporations and regulator oversight, the companies ultimately will continue to do whatever harm they were doing they just have to dedicate a large fraction of their resources to creating loads of paperwork that proves how compliant they are.

Actually corporations are naturally balanced by the free market: the competition and their customers (whose needs they must serve in order to even exist) keep them very well in check.

Regulations pretend to "improve" this but inevitably skew the balance to the side of safety, leading to ossification, stagnation, loss of competition and lack of innovation.

It's not just about preventing the bozos. It's also indirectly about making the general public trust that researchers aren't (still) acting like bozos. (Unfortunately, in this era trust in institutions is so wrecked that it might not matter.)

Yeah and now the current bozos own private islands with no jurisdiction so they fly people there to do the experiments.

Presumably their ethical approvement was about considerably more than just potential physical danger of putting on the device for 10 minutes?

Of course ethics does need to make sure that the testing isn't going to harm the participants directly, which is nice and simple in your example, but it also needs to make sure that any measurements will be stored (and anonymised) in ways that conform to your friend's country's healthcare data laws. It needs to make sure there are adequate data protection plans. It needs to ask questions like have they considered ways in which they might accidentally create a device with racial bias (the way pulse oximetres are often worse at reading the blood oxygen level of people with dark skin as they were made by and tested on the fingers of white people). Etc.

Surely we can agree that researchers should be required to obtain informed consent from test subjects before dusting them with known radioactive toxins?

Yes.

Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.

Governments are happy to exploit their citizens for any -- or no -- reason whatsoever.

People with power are happy to exploit other people for their own benefits if they can get away with it.

We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too.

And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.

There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things:

https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos

(radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)

It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf

Wow, and it was actually heart disease that took him and not the radiation directly.

This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy)

https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano

And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s.

To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.

Incidents like these decrease confidence in the medical establishment, which only has a net-negative effect.

Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.

For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments.

Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole.

There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it.

[0] - https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder...

[1] - https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...

> While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.

I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.

I think when you forgo high scrutiny you end up with a lot of sloppy research.

You literally have problems with a sloppy study showing something and then needing ten increasingly rigorous studies to show it's bunk.

So ethics review probably puts the kabosh on a lot of bad or unnecessary studies. Which is a positive.

Modern polite correct cancel culture snowflakes discover science. This is hilarious.

Everything we have nowadays was researched or discovered using "crazy", "unethical", unrestrained science.

Whatever we get out of injecting someone with plutonium isn’t worth it.

Good news: you might not need to add a radon tank to the hot tub you already own. The control group for [2] was people who did not do any hot spring bathing at all during an average week, so their methodology does not explore the significance of the radon itself.

The interesting thing is that they didn't find a higher incidence of lung, esophageal, and other soft-tissue cancers in elderly folks who bath in radon springs more than once a week.

The blood pressure reduction probably has more to do with heat exposure than with radon itself. Seems to me that regular exposure to a normal sauna or hot spring would probably elicit similar results.

It was a straw poll. A sampling bias is that none of the people who had died of cancer responded.

People don't die of cancer instantly -- in many cases, it's pretty indolent, and "alive with cancer"/"in remission" are fairly common statuses. This would surely be picked up in the respondent data.

If I were dying of cancer, odds are good that I would have ended up in the control group for not being especially proactive about visiting the hot springs. The authors of [2] explain this limitation themselves:

"Some study limitations should be considered. ... healthier people may have been more likely to bathe in the radon hot springs."

I am reminded of this somewhat unrelated but interesting bit of history involving glow-in-the-dark paint in the 1920s. I got radium and radon crossed in my brain before looking up this article, but figured it's interesting enough to share anyway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

No need to go all the way to Japan, just head to the radon health mines in Montana.

https://radonmine.com/

I first heard of it because we were visiting some Amish families and one wasn't around because they were on a trip out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis is a thing.

It might be a thing, though there’s zero direct evidence that it’s true.

Worse there’s an interest group that desires to push such a narrative anyway.

Radon mainly effects the lungs and requires continued exposure. I still personally would not expect a radon rich spring to be healthy, even with short term exposure. The effects of radon exposure over time on the lungs are well studied. Anecdotally, the primitive way to determine radon presence in a home without the use of sensors is to look at the number of scratches on a window. Radon causes them.

Our local library has a Radon detector you can borrow. We did. No Radon...

AFAIK the scientific consensus is no amount of radiation exposure is beneficial. There have been some theories going around about how a small amount of radiation can be beneficial but I think that's been proven not to be true.

The consensus does not exist. The LNT model is convenient because it lends itself to easy measurement, and extremely low radiation exposure (e.g. non-nuclear work on a submarine) can't be tied to any specific risk. You wouldn't want an occupational health organization behaving in any other way.

On the other hand, LNT utterly fails to address the well-documented trend that people in areas of high background exposure experience lower rates of cancer. The mechanisms of this effect are not understood, though often hypothesized, nor is there any strong argument for a particular upper limit (though plenty of known examples, like smoking and frequent flying, lie beyond it.)

I wouldn't advise anyone microdose on radon, nor ignore the risk of radon if you're in the habit of keeping your modern home closed up... but this matter is not settled as you portray.

Edit: sorry for my other flippant comment. The confident misunderstanding of science got me a little worked up.

I have one, and a sub slab Radon abatement system. My levels were pretty high for a basement and that was how I learned about Radon. You're 100% correct about that there is no safe level of Radon exposure. The international community decided on "safe levels" because the cost of abatement is far and away from what many countries can afford, but I think they're moving to the "no safe levels" definition this year.

The average outdoor radon level is around 0.4. If there's no safe level, how exactly do we plan to abate that?

You don't. "No safe levels" just means it'll be a health factor because there is no benign amount of Radon. The lowest my house gets is .4 due to ambient Radon, that just is what it is. The only thing you could do is move to somewhere that there's no Radon ATM.

Citations desperately needed.

Plenty available just a few clicks away, for those eager enough to do a quick search.

For the search-adverse readers, here is an introductory discussion on the topic, from a US vs Europe point of view.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477705/

I cannot find anything about window scratches and radon. Do you have a source for that? My googling is failing me.

https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le3... page 20. They don't show a picture, but with enough density and exposure time it kind of looks like frosting.

What kind of window scratches? on the inside or the outside of the window? visible to the eye?

Microscopic. Picture on page 20 looks like little dots. https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le3...

They can be visible with enough density, but it really depends on the pico-Curies and the window placement relative to sources.

Sure, but this is the US and they hadn't tried it on a contained black population yet . . .

The worst part about this comment is that I can't dispute the fact that the government tends to experiment on these populations. Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it.

About the only rebuttal I can give is that it's not just the US. I'm sure every nation has some population that they treat like dirt.

Whatabout-ism? Yes, but that's pretty much all I got.

The people doing these things think they're the 'good guys making hard decisions for the greater good.' It's not done with animosity or antagonism. They deserve the most severe of consequences for their actions, but without understanding the motivation, perspective, and rationale for these things - we're doomed to repeat them in the future, and indeed it's entirely possible we are at this very moment.

This article has been hugged to death, but I assume they're referring to Operation LAC. [1] "We" weren't spraying these neighborhoods because they had black people, but because they had 'the projects' - poor urban housing buildings. These densely populated areas with large sprawling concrete prison-like apartment buildings, were extremely similar in design to the areas in the USSR we might attack with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. And so we wanted to see how such an attack would play out.

It's the same thing with Tuskegee. The people involved likely envisioned themselves saving millions of lives, and gaining invaluable information that could be used to treat not only syphilis but any other sort of other diseases which might manifest similarly. The exact same logic people use today to experiment with gain of function with ever more dangerous diseases, even as diseases escape from labs at a frighteningly high rates. [2] So why only black people with Tuskegee? Because syphilis rates in black Americans were pushing near an order of magnitude higher than in other groups.

This 'greater good' rhetoric is rhetorically appealing, because it sounds reasonable. But the outcomes are scarcely desirable, because the ends people seek with their means very rarely ever comes to pass. But the horrible things they do in the interim trying to get there, all most certainly do happen. If somebody starts talking about the greater good, it should be a major red flag. One needs not justify good and just actions, and those are the sort we ought pursue.

---

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_LAC

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

'good guys making hard decisions for the greater good.'

I don't know man?

'Experiment on the blacks, I mean they can't vote anyway!' Sounds like a pretty easy decision to me for a scheming group of politicians and generals.

Greater good might hold up if we experimented on them only in times of war, but that hasn't been our history. The experimenting is why they have such high disease rates in the first place. Similar socioeconomic populations do not. For instance, Brazilian blacks. Or Peruvian or Colombian blacks. The projects were probably even built, in part, specifically with an eye to these kinds of tests.

Occam's razor. "Who should we run the human testing on sirs?"

"Marginalized group that's not allowed to vote sounds good to us son!"

It wasn't just on black Americans, even for LAC (let alone the countless other experiments carried out on civilians). This paper [1] has a lot more details. Just quoting it:

---

"Other test locations were selected to simulate other Soviet cities (such as San Francisco, CA and Panama City, FL), forests (such as Chippewa National Forest, MN), flatlands (such as Fort Wayne, IN, and Corpus Christi, TX), deserts, and unpopulated areas (Dugway Proving Ground, UT)."

---

The paper includes extensive details on the other reasons the areas that were chosen was chosen. It has nothing to do with who lived there, let alone voting trends. For things like this, the government simply comes up with a cover story, and most people simply believe what they're told. In this case, they told people that they were testing a harmless aerosol clouding system to protect areas from the Soviets bombers. And people simply unquestioningly believed them.

As for the projects, they were built in a similar way to Soviet apartment buildings because they had the exact same goal - reliable and comfortable housing made as affordably as possible. Wiki has a great picture of the projects that were experimented with here. [2] The city tore down some old deteriorating slums and created that complex under designs from the same guy who designed with World Trade Center.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233494/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe#/media/Fil...

> Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it.

I think all humans suck, just like all humans have the capacity to be kind, considerate and "good". It depends on the circumstances.

Most importantly, I think the somewhat common notion that inhabitants of Germany during the 30s and 40s were intrinsically evil is a very dangerous belief—if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.

The Milgram experiment, for all its faults, shows how evil can manifest from the banal.

It is not enough to defer to authority. It is not enough to go with the flow. It is not enough to support the status quo. ALL of these things can lead to extremely evil end results.

An individual must stand up and explicitly say "No. This is wrong. I will not do this. I will not promulgate this."

> if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.

Germany was/is a central power. Geo-politically, you always have problems with your neighbor, where they are your ally in war or your enemy. Being a central power means all your neighbors are your allied enemies.

The worst part about this is that the only unifying bipartisan opinion in 2020 is that blacks should be the first to get the covid vaccine.

When you find yourself feeling so limited in valid rebuttals to use, it's OK to sometimes think "I agree, so this doesn't actually need a rebuttal" and just upvote someone without needing to comment with the whataboutisms.

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