This account of how US authorities studied the surviving victims of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki ought to be of wide interest, but Lindee's
version of the story will not attract a general readership outside
academic circles. Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel
laureate in literature, has described the atomic bomb survivors as
"people who, despite all, didn't commit suicide." After the war
these people comprised the world's best sample by far for studies
of how exposure to radiation affects individuals and their
offspring. An Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was set up under the
US Atomic Energy Commission, and the work of the ABCC over nearly
three decades is the subject of this book. Lindee (History and
Sociology of Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania) refers to the ABCC's
work as "colonial science," by which she means primarily that the
dominant power could not carry out its work without the cooperation
of its defeated subjects. How was the organization and work of the
commission affected by this dilemma? Did any kind of systematic
bias creep into the many scientific papers published under its
auspices? These are the kinds of questions that interest Lindee,
but the language in which she cloaks her conclusions sometimes
makes it hard to tell what they are. Take the question of why it
was decided that the ABCC would not provide medical care to the
survivors as it was studying them: "I suggest that the treatment
debate was a forum in which various parties explored the proper
relationship of the Americans to the Japanese." Although this is an
authoritative scholarly work, it suffers from an excess of
sophistication and circumspection, so that the questions readers
most want answered are not addressed squarely enough. (Kirkus
Reviews)
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of
1945 unleashed a force as mysterious as it was
deadly--radioactivity. In 1946, the United States government
created the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) to serve as a
permanent agency in Japan with the official mission of studying the
medical effects of radiation on the survivors. The next ten years
saw the ABCC's most intensive research on the genetic effects of
radiation, and up until 1974 the ABCC scientists published papers
on the effects of radiation on aging, life span, fertility, and
disease.
"Suffering Made Real" is the first comprehensive history of the
ABCC's research on how radiation affected the survivors of the
atomic bomb. Arguing that Cold War politics and cultural values
fundamentally shaped the work of the ABCC, M. Susan Lindee tells
the compelling story of a project that raised disturbing questions
about the ethical implications of using human subjects in
scientific research.
How did the politics of the emerging Cold War affect the
scientists' biomedical research and findings? How did the ABCC
document and publicly present the effects of radiation? Why did the
ABCC refuse to provide medical treatment to the survivors? Through
a detailed examination of ABCC policies, archival materials, the
minutes of committee meetings, newspaper accounts, and interviews
with ABCC scientists, Lindee explores how political and cultural
interests were reflected in the day-to-day operations of this
controversial research program.
Set against a period of conflicting views of nuclear weapons and
nuclear power, "Suffering Made Real" follows the course of a
politically charged research program and reveals indetail how
politics and cultural values can shape the conduct, results, and
uses of science.
General
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