The Beagle Club Radiation Experiments

        The Beagle Club Radiation Experiments were a series of radiobiology experiments performed on beagles spanning the 1950s and 1980s at a plethora of facilities, ranging from the Argonne National Laboratory to the University of Utah. Due to the fear of nuclear fallout that permeated concerns about the Cold War, scientists across America were sponsored by the government to gain empirical data on how radiation affected cancer, lifespan, and internal organs in beagles in an attempt to model how it would affect those same traits in humans.

        Beagles were chosen over typical “lab animals” like mice and rabbits for a number of reasons, the principal ones being their medium size (which made scientific observation significantly easier in comparison smaller animals like lab mice), uniform breeding patterns, docile and forgiving temperament, and anatomical similarity to humans, specifically, in terms of their bone metabolism and radiation sensitivity.

        While the experiments ultimately did yield valuable information, they were in no capacity safe for the beagles, with many of them dying due to exposure to the radiation from Strontium-90 and Cobalt-60. Unfortunately, these animals died horrifically due to bone sarcomas, skeletal deformities, forms of leukemia, and other malignancies. And finally, as if the use of test animals in this case was not unethical enough, the beagles that died were frozen for final tissue analyses before being disposed of like medical waste.

• Opeyemi J., 11th Grade