Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/feb/11/the-coventry-experiment-why-were-indian-women-in-britain-given-radioactive-food-without-consent

The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent?

As part of an experiment on iron absorption, 21 Indian women had been fed chapatis baked with radioactive isotopes.

When details about a scientific study in the 1960s became public, there was shock, outrage and anxiety. But exactly what happened?

By Samira Shackle
Tue 11 Feb 2025 00.00 EST

In 2019, Shahnaz Akhter, a postdoctoral researcher at Warwick University, was chatting to her sister, who mentioned a documentary that had aired on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s. It was about human radiation experiments, including one that had taken place in 1969 in Coventry. As part of an experiment on iron absorption, 21 Indian women had been fed chapatis baked with radioactive isotopes, apparently without their consent.

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By chance, at about the same time, a historian and broadcaster, Dr Louise Raw, came across some old reporting about the radioactive chapatis – specifically, a 1995 story in India Today following up on the documentary, which jogged her memory of watching the film when it aired. Raw is interested in hidden histories and was immediately intrigued. “I read this and thought it was outrageous and weird and sinister,” she told me. Raw felt the story deserved more attention than it had received – perhaps a parliamentary inquiry or compensation – and started tweeting about it. “You can’t believe how kind the British are,” read the first tweet in a thread she posted in August 2023. “Every morning, a van pulls up outside your house in Coventry. A friendly man brings you a freshly baked flatbread to eat. It’s just for you, not anyone else in your family. Every afternoon he comes back to make sure you’ve eaten it.” The thread went on to detail the key points in the documentary and India Today’s follow-up.

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In the postwar period, doctors used radiation to treat everything from arthritis to ringworm. By the mid-1950s, it had become clear that exposure increases the chance of developing certain cancers and can cause infertility. The use of radiation was pared back, but medical researchers remained excited about the quick, precise experimentation it offered. This, along with other new technologies such as cell culturing and a massive growth in antibiotics, sparked a sense that medical science might even be able to defeat disease entirely.

At the time Elwood was working on his iron studies, the culture of medicine was paternalistic. Most doctors believed they were best placed to make decisions about risk on behalf of their patients. Consent was often seen as at best unnecessary, and at worst actively obstructive to the pursuit of knowledge. In 1947, after the Nuremberg trials exposed the full horror of the Nazis’ medical experiments on inmates at concentration camps, a new set of principles for ethical research on humans, known as the Nuremberg Code, had been introduced. The first of its 10 points is: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The code also sets out other principles: experiments should be for the good of society and carried out by qualified researchers, and the risk should never exceed the potential benefit. But at first the code didn’t have much effect on researchers in the UK and the US, who saw it as something that applied to evil war criminals, not high-minded doctors who wanted to further scientific knowledge. In 1964, the medical researcher Paul Beeson, who had been a professor of medicine at both Yale and Oxford, wrote that the Nuremberg Code was “a wonderful document to say why the war crimes were atrocities, but it’s not a very good guide to clinical investigation which is done with high motives”.

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But as details of experiments carried out throughout the 20th century emerged, it became clear that good intentions are not enough. The Tuskegee experiment, which ran in Alabama from 1932 to 1972, aimed to explore the prevalence of syphilis among black men. Participants believed they were being treated for their condition, but in fact they were given placebos even after penicillin emerged as an effective, readily available treatment for syphilis in the mid-1940s. Many died unnecessary deaths. In the 1960s, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook school in Staten Island were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, sometimes repeatedly, for research into a vaccine. There are countless other examples from the US, UK and Canada. A number of these involved radiation exposure: in the 1950s, pregnant women in London and Aberdeen were injected with radioactive iodine to test their thyroid function despite the fact that radiation exposure of any sort poses a risk to a foetus. In Massachusetts in the 1940s and 1950s, boys with learning difficulties at a residential school were fed radioactive oatmeal as part of an experiment to see how Quaker Oats were digested.

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