The scandal first came to public attention in a newsletter called
Science Trends in 1976 and in
Mother Jones magazine in 1981.
Mother Jones reporter Howard Rosenburg used the
Freedom of Information Act to gather hundreds of documents to investigate total radiation studies which were done at the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies (now the
Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education). The
Mother Jones article triggered a hearing before the
Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the
House Science and Technology Committee. Congressman
Al Gore of Tennessee chaired the hearing. Gore's subcommittee report stated that the radiation experiments were "satisfactory, but not perfect." In November 1986, a report by the staff of Massachusetts Congressman
Ed Markey was released, but received only cursory media coverage. Entitled "American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three decades of radiation experiments on U.S. citizens", the report stated that there had been 31 human radiation experiments involving nearly 700 people. Markey urged the Department of Energy to make every effort to find the experimental subjects and compensate them for damages, which did not occur. DOE officials knew who had conducted the experiments, and the names of some of the subjects. After the report was released, President
Ronald Reagan and Vice-President
George H. W. Bush resisted opening investigations of the radiation experiments. The Markey report found that between 1945 and 1947, eighteen hospital patients were injected with
plutonium. The doctors selected patients likely to die in the near future. Despite the doctors' prognoses, several lived for decades after.
Ebb Cade was an unwilling participant in medical experiments that involved injection of 4.7 micrograms of
Plutonium on 10 April 1945 at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This experiment was under the supervision of
Harold Hodge. The Markey report stated: "Although these experiments did provide information on the retention and absorption of radioactive material by the human body, the experiments are nonetheless repugnant because human subjects were essentially used as guinea pigs and calibration devices." ==Investigative report==