Tortured Science: Health Studies, Ethics and Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Critical Approaches in the Health Social Sciences Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0895037777 ISBN 13: 9780895037770

Publisher: Routledge, 2012

Synopsis

The U.S.A. s nuclear weapons program has exposed workers and the public to health hazards since World War II. In the 1980s and 1990s, federal health agencies responded to new revelations about these hazards by pouring millions of dollars into research on the health impacts of radiation. In Tortured Science: Health Studies, Ethics and Nuclear Weapons in the United States , community health activists and researchers reflect on the research program for addressing the health effects of nuclear weapons production at Hanford, WA, Rocky Flats, CO, Livermore Labs, CA, and Fernald, OH. The authors describe conflicts of interest, data suppression, technical inadequacies, and other examples of how researchers failed in their social responsibility to the affected human populations. The research program s health studies did not lead to any meaningful follow-up on the major health concerns of community members, nor have they helped communities seek reparations for high radiation exposures that may have contributed to thyroid, bone, lung and other diseases. In Tortured Science , several ethicists review these health research problems. Research ethics as a discipline seeks to protect individuals and groups, obtain approval from affected communities, mitigate potential research harms, and guard against vigilance, scientific contrivance, denial, and suppression of findings. Such protections were not adequately provided in the research program on the health effects of nuclear weapons production, as critiqued in the ethical reviews. This book compels us to develop a new ethical framework for scientific research on military-industrial and other sources of contamination. Intended Audience: Public health professionals; graduates/undergraduates in public health, community health, environmental studies, epidemiology, medical anthropology, public sociology, ethics/religious studies, and science policy; government health researchers at federal health agencies, centres for ethics and bioethics (private/academic), and community health organisations; community-based researchers and environmental organisations; nuclear weapons and peace organisations.

About this title

About the Author

Amy Lowman, Dianne Quigley, Steve Wing

From the Back Cover

IN PRAISE OF "Community members that live downwind and downstream of Department of Energy weapons-production sites know firsthand that contamination doesn't stop at the fence line. They have been subjected to health studies that protect the agency and the federal government from a moral responsibility to fully disclose the entire environmental and health legacy of nuclear weapons production. Tortured Science raises important ethical issues about how health studies have gone awry and how citizens who served the United States during the Cold War have been abandoned by their government as acceptable collateral damage." —Susan Gordon, Director, Alliance for Nuclear Accountability "Before torturing suspects to extract data became the norm today, torturing science to hide data was standard operating procedure in the nuclear age. Tortured Science sheds light on key narratives of obstruction and deceit that have kept the dangers of ionizing radiation from public view. Dedicated to the late radiation-research pioneer Dr. Alice Stewart, this book honors her life's work by documenting a wide array of health effects resulting from the mass production of nuclear weapons in the United States. In a post-Fukushima world, knowing the difference between convoluted half-truths and elusive hard truths can make all the difference in the world." —Robert Del Tredici, Photographer/author, The People of Three Mile Island and At Work in the Fields of the Bomb "We need to be constantly reminded about the 'public' in public health. Public health science without the 'public; is not just bad science, it is ethically flawed. Put more simply, it is wrong. This book is simultaneously inspiring and dismaying, showing in detail what technically and ethically flawed public health science looks like. No practitioners or students of public health should be allowed to avert their eyes. Tortured Science is food for thought and a goad to action, by some of the most important figures in the movement to truly include 'public' in public health." —David Ozonoff, MD, MPH, Professor of Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0895037777
• ISBN 13: 9780895037770
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282
• Editor: Quigley Dianne