The children in question in this bizarre story were young males who were institutionalized at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts in the 1940s and 50s for being “feebleminded”. “Feeble-minded” was a term used at the time to describe children who exhibited behaviors that were considered “backward” and “odd”. Well, many of them were autistic and/or intellectually disabled, but a fair number of these boys were poor children whose parents discarded them at the school.
The Fernald school and much of American society had been deep into eugenics since the 19th Century, as evidenced by the fact that the children were institutionalized at the school to prevent them from breeding and “polluting” the general population with their “mental deficiency”. Fernald was a school in name only, offering very little in the way of education. It was a place for children to be housed, possibly to never be released. As one former resident stated, “They left us to rot”. These boys were stuck in the school until the 1960s when eugenics fell out of favor. When the 57 boys who were experimented on were lured into these nutritional studies under the auspices of joining a fake Science Club that would go on outings, they jumped at the chance to leave the grim grounds.
After every event they attended, the “students” were given oatmeal and milk laced with radioactive isotopes, and then monitored. These experiments, which were approved by the Atomic Energy Commission and conducted by MIT, were sponsored by the Quaker Oats Co.Why did Quaker Oats commission a study where young boys were denied consent and used as lab rats?Because Quaker Oats wanted to track and quantify the absorption of iron and calcium in the boys' bodies from their oatmeal. They wanted to disprove previous, spurious scientific claims that oatmeal didn’t provide the same nutritional value as rival hot cereal Cream of Wheat.
The Fernald school boys who were exploited for this calcium and iron absorption experiment sued MIT and Quaker Oats as adults in the mid-1990s but received only $1.85 million as compensation as it did not appear that the radiation had caused them any lasting harm.The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments insisted that the boys were exposed to 330 millirems which is equal to a year’s worth of background radiation in populations such as Denver.
However, the judge ruled in favor of the former Fernald residents due to the lack of ethics in regard to informed consent.But of course, this was not an isolated event in the US. The US has a long history of eugenics and medically experimenting on marginalized groups without their informed consent.
Most notable was the Tuskegee Insitute’s 30-year study of the effects of syphilis that was conducted on black men who did not know they had the disease and thus did not receive treatment.Eugenics publicly fell out of favor in the 60s but continues behind the scenes. .
There is no cure. Autism is genetic, so what they are talking about is either preventing autistic people from being born or altering our genes somehow.
