Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Bravo Medical Program: Radiation Standards, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Legacy of the Cold War, 1954 - the Present

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Introduction: Much of what is known about the biological effects of high-dose radiation comes from the "Bravo Medical Program," established in 1954 to track the effects of the fallout exposure of citizens of the Marshall Islands from the Bravo thermonuclear test. Although there are many accounts of the Bravo event, and some scholarly discussions of its aftermath, there is no full-fledged historical study of the Bravo Medical Program. Yet, this program was unique within the boundaries of American science in its effort to understand the long-term effects of radioactive fallout exposure from a nuclear test. The proposed project addresses this important historical episode, analyzing how the citizens of the Marshall Islands were studied as a major source of information about human radiation exposure for more than 50 years. The Program provided medical care for the exposed as well as produced data that were meant to establish the biological effects of radiation exposure, and which might be applied to radiation safety programs internationally. Intellectual Merits: The central goal of this project is to tell the story of the Bravo Medical Program, and to analyze how the knowledge produced was used in the development of national and international radiation safety standards and policies, as well as in later debates over dose reconstruction and compensation claims. In particular, the project seeks to answer the following questions: 1) What did the scientists involved expect to achieve through the Bravo Medical Program and how were their expectations linked to the development of international radiation safety policies and standards? 2) How were doses reconstructed and how has the continued uncertainty of radiation science contributed to ongoing debates about compensation? 3) How did the Marshallese and other parties outside the national laboratories make use of the scientific evidence? 4) Why did the Marshallese come to claim that they had been treated like "human guinea pigs"? These are historical questions, which we plan to answer through historical analysis. Broader Impact: The Bravo debate is not over. On-going compensation claims rest in part on the concept of "changed circumstances," which provides for a renegotiation of compensation if new evidence emerges suggesting that knowledge about environmental or medical conditions have changed. How and why has the knowledge changed? Why does the scientific information remain contested more than 50 years later? The Bravo Medical Program also provides a window through which to view broader questions about the contestation of scientific knowledge. How and why do scientific claims get contested? How can contestation be extended for long periods of time, even after many of the players have died? These questions have a broad relevance in a variety of environmental and healthy policy debates such as the safety of nuclear power, the reality and severity of global warming, and the risks and benefits of use of genetically modified organisms. This project offers an opportunity to approach broad questions of scientific uncertainty in relation to health and environmental policy, and to address the question of why scientific closure has often proven so difficult to obtain in these domains.