Suffering made real

by M. Susan Lindee

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 unleashed a form of energy as mysterious as it was deadly. Suffering Made Real is the compelling story of the first attempts to understand how radiation affected the survivors of the atomic bomb and subsequent generations of Japanese. Arguing that Cold War politics and cultural values fundamentally shaped this scientific research, M. Susan Lindee examines the daily workings, expectations, purposes, and limitations of a project that raises disturbing questions about the ethical implications of using human subjects in scientific research. In 1946, an American scientific agency, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), was established in Japan to study the long-term biomedical effects of radiation on the survivors. Over the next twenty-nine years, American scientists and physicians, with funding from the Atomic Energy Commission, published hundreds of papers documenting the effects of radiation on aging, life span, fe