ABSTRACT
The term "tracer study" has been used to describe medical procedures involving radioactive materials to diagnose disease or provide beneficial treatment. As Hamilton argued to expand the Army's radiological test program to include radiation inhalation experiments, he was preparing to inject unsuspecting patients with radioactive plutonium at the University of California. Hempelmann had by then completed animal radiation inhalation studies at Los Alamos, and had moved on to human plutonium injection studies. The US Department of War's project to develop RW rapidly took shape to include a four-part plan for human-subject experiments via injection, ingestion, inhalation, and external beam studies. In 1948 Joseph Hamilton contacted officials at RAND, a military think-tank in Santa Monica, California regarding an RW proposal to poison water with radioactive material, and again argued for large-scale RW field trials, while acknowledging that children and pregnant women were particularly vulnerable to radiation.
