Cancer Therapy and Military Cold-War Research

This paper investigates the intimate relationship that existed between ‘traditional’ and military‐related research in the US during the cold war, by focusing on the history of two seemingly unrelated medical‐research programmes. The first was headed by the physician Donnall Thomas, who was primarily interested in developing a cure for childhood leukemia using total‐body radiation combined with bone‐marrow transplants. The second was led by another physician, Eugene Saenger, who used total‐body radiation to treat patients with advanced cancers, while they provided him with proxies for investigating the effects of radiation on the fighting capacities of soldiers on the nuclear battlefield. Traditional accounts of these programmes inevitably erect strong boundaries such that the investigators are ghettoized to one or the other side of the military/cancer‐therapy divide. Yet the work of Thomas and Saenger was closely related since both drew on the paradigm problem of the bone‐marrow syndrome, a constellation of symptoms – including bleeding, infections and death – that had been framed earlier following the atomic‐bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since Saenger and Thomas as well as many other investigators could draw on the bone‐marrow syndrome, ideas, practices and technologies were able to circulate freely between military and cancer‐therapy applications. Indeed sometimes researchers would claim that their investigations supported multiple aims as they pitched their studies to both military and civilian funding agencies. It was not only ideas and technologies that circulated among medical researchers, but also their ethical norms. And the fault‐lines that separated the ethical behaviour of cold‐war researchers were not necessarily determined by whether they were pursuing ‘traditional’ or military‐related medical research.

Ancient history · Battlefield · Cold war · Political science · Politics · Advances in Oncology and Radiotherapy · Historical Medical Research and Treatments · History · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Medicine

• Cancer Butch

  Open Access•Lochlann Jain•Cultural Anthropology•2007

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