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 injecte d 18 hospital patients with radioactive plutonium in order to learn it s effects on the body. Two documents, a newspaper account and a univer sity committee report, tell divergent stories of the scientists and pa tients involved in that experiment. This article uses those documents - plutonium narratives - as a catalyst for exploring the problematic r epresentation of past human experimentation, assumptions of moral prog ress in medical research, and the nature of informed consent today. In formed consent is shown to be an evolving process and discursive pract ice that cannot be understood apart from its historical and cultural e mbeddedness.