Kaare Rodahl, a scientist with the US Air Force’s Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, spent much of the 1950s traveling to villages in the Alaskan Arctic to conduct research on cold acclimatization. Four decades later, it was discovered that during one such study, he had administered radioactive isotopes of iodine-131 to over one hundred Alaska Native research subjects without their knowledge or consent. This news broke just as Alaska Native communities were attempting to recover from a series of revelations surrounding other instances of Cold War radiation exposure. In response, two major federal investigations attempted to determine whether Rodahl had adhered to ethical regulations and whether his actions could be expected to have a lasting health impact on former research subjects. The National Research Council, framing the study as a singular event in the Cold War past, found that research subjects had been ‘wronged, but not harmed’. The North Slope Borough, a powerful Alaska Native municipal government, countered this finding with their own investigation, which identified both the study and the subsequent federal inquiries as facets of the still-unfolding process of American settler colonialism in Alaska. In doing so, the North Slope Borough contested the authority of federal agencies to set the terms by which ethics could be retrospectively judged. This article argues that exploring how competing ethical regimes represent the relationship between violence and time can help us better understand how institutionalized bioethics reproduces settler colonial power relations.
In 1813, the American government passed An Act to Encourage Vaccination, the first federal endorsement of a medical practice in American history. The law tasked a federal agent with maintaining a supply of the smallpox vaccine and distributing it nationwide. James Smith, a well-respected physician and proponent of vaccination, was appointed as vaccine agent. Smith was skeptical of claims that only well-trained physicians should be allowed to perform vaccination; he felt it was a simple procedure that should be available to all American citizens. In 1822, he made a tragic error that caused several deaths and left him vulnerable to criticism from political opponents and his medical peers. This ended Smith's professional career and led to the repeal of the act itself. In this article, we use the rise and fall of James Smith to provide a historical perspective on contemporary debates surrounding delayed vaccination schedules. We explain how physicians-in the 19th century and today-have worked to build public trust in vaccination in an American culture suspicious of medical expertise.
In May 1975, high above the earth's surface, a structure resembling a large mushroom with two snow shovels attached to its dome released itself from stable geosynchronous orbit and drifted to a new station over Lake Victoria in Central Africa. The passage of the NASA Applied Technology Satellite 6 (ATS-6) from the Western Hemisphere to the Eastern Hemisphere marked the conclusion of a set of innovative trials that used satellites as healthcare delivery tools for remote villages in the Alaskan interior. 1 Two other partners in these trials, the Indian Health Service and the Lister Hill Center for Biocommunications (a new division of the National Library of Medicine) * Copyright 2017 by Tess Lanzarotta and Jeremy Greene. Tess Lanzarotta is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Her research focuses broadly on the history of biomedical research in Cold War Alaska, and on how contemporary interactions between researchers and Alaska Native peoples are shaped by their historical antecedents.
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