Joseph Gilbert Hamilton

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton
Joseph G. Hamilton drinking a radioactive sodium solution in 1939, with Robert Marshak to the right.
Born	November 11, 1907
Died	February 18, 1957 (1957-02-19) (aged 49)
Nationality	United States
Fields	physics
Institutions	Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Alma mater	University of California
Known for	medical effects of exposure to radioactive isotopes, unethical human experimentation

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton (November 11, 1907 – February 18, 1957) was an American professor of Medical Physics, Experimental Medicine, General Medicine, and Experimental Radiology as well as director (1948-1957) of the Crocker Laboratory, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hamilton studied the medical effects of exposure to radioactive isotopes and he pioneered their use in the treatment and diagnosis of disease. He was married to the painter Leah Hamilton.

Hamilton received his B.S. in Chemistry in 1929 from the University of California. He studied medicine in Berkeley, and he interned at the University of California Hospital, San Francisco. He was awarded his M.D. degree in 1936. The cyclotron in Berkeley was then producing useful amounts of radioactive isotopes, and even before he received his degree, Hamilton became interested in their effects on living tissue. In a series of papers published in 1937 he detailed early medical trials using radiosodium, followed by papers detailing the use of the radioactive isotopes of potassium, chlorine, bromine, and iodine. Radioactive iodine was found to be particularly useful in the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid disorders.

Hamilton's studies of isotope retention in humans, especially of radioactive strontium and the transuranic elements, were the principal source for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) estimates of tolerance limits of these substances. As part of the Manhattan Project in 1944, he and his research team began studies on the effect of plutonium in rats. Then, in secret trials conducted from 1945 to 1947, they injected plutonium into humans without their informed consent at the University of California Hospital at San Francisco. The human trials, which attempted to find the toxicity of plutonium in the human body, were terminated by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950.

Albert Stevens, known as CAL-1, was a patient who received a dose of plutonium in 1945. Hamilton used Stevens as his first plutonium injection subject. Stevens had been misdiagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, but was later found only to have an ulcer. After the plutonium injection he survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human, living 20 more years until his death at 79 years of age. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with 131 kBq (3.55 µCi) of plutonium without his knowledge or informed consent.