Joseph Gilbert Hamilton

Hamilton drinks a solution with radioactive sodium in a self- experiment

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton (born November 11, 1907 , † February 18, 1957 ) was an American physicist and medical doctor at the Faculty of Physics at the University of California , which was headed by nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence .

Life

His specialty was the medical application of radioactive nuclides . Together with the medical physicist John Lawrence (Ernest's brother), he ran the radiation laboratory at the University of Berkeley from 1942 (later renamed the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory ), above all the most powerful cyclotron in the world at the time .

Together with John Lawrence and the radiologist Robert Stone , Hamilton treated healthy test subjects and cancer patients with artificial nuclides from the cyclotron. The uses of radioactive phosphorus , strontium and iodine that he devised are still in use today (see radiation therapy and radioiodine therapy ).

From 1944 he investigated the effect and distribution of plutonium in the organism on behalf of the Manhattan Project and produced plutonium for the secret laboratory of Los Alamos .

In 1945-46, Hamilton had plutonium injected into a number of seriously ill patients, including children, in his laboratory and partner clinics in Rochester and Chicago. Nothing is known of any negative consequences for the test subjects . These experiments, which are not carried out with the intention of healing and without the consent of the patient, are nevertheless generally classified as unethical. The Atomic Energy Commission , founded in 1946, canceled the test series. In 1950, Hamilton himself wrote that the human experiments had the “smell of beech forest ”.

At about the same time, Hamilton also checked on behalf of the government whether radionuclides were suitable as weapons of mass destruction . The US Department of Defense had a corresponding research program in Dugway, Utah, which was discontinued in 1953 to Hamilton's disappointment. From 1949-53, Hamilton was responsible for test safety in this project.

In 1957, Hamilton died of leukemia . His colleagues agreed that he contracted the disease from a lack of caution in handling the radionuclides.

He was married to the painter Leah Hamilton .

literature

• Moss W, Eckhardt R: The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments , Los Alamos Science 23 (1995), 177-233
• Welsome E: The Plutonium Files . Dial Press, New York 1999.

Web links

• Department of Energy Openness: Human Radiation Experiments
• "In Memoriam: Joseph Gilbert Hamilton" , Obituary of the University of California, 1959 (English)