Feeding Orphans Radioactive Oatmeal

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Ah, a nice warm bowl of oatmeal. Could there be a more hearty or wholesome breakfast? Loaded with fiber, nutrients, and if you're feeling decadent, a dash of brown sugar, it is the perfect way to start your day. Also, the big cereal companies and their cheery adverts would have you believe. But for a group of Massachusetts orphans in the 1950s and60s, this breakfast of champions came with an extra unexpected ingredient, a whopping dose of radiation. unwitting guinea pigs in a secret study funded by Quaker Oats and MIT. These children were some of the thousands of victims of the most unethical decades of American medical research. This is the disturbing story of the Fenald State School oatmeal experiments. Our story begins at the Walter E. Fenol State School located in Walam, Massachusetts. Founded in 1888 as the experimental school for teaching and training idiotic children, Fernold was the product of the American eugenics movement, which sought to improve the nation's genetic stock and society as a whole, by preventing those individuals seen as defective from breeding.

[00:00:58]Institutions like Fernold, of which there were nearly 100 across the United States, were designed to house, isolate, and in certain cases forcibly sterilize children who were deemed to be feeble-minded. Tragically, nearly half of those committed to Fernold were not mentally disabled at all, achieving average scores on IQ tests. They were simply poor, uneducated children who had been orphaned or dumped at the school by parents who could not afford to take care of them. And dumped is the appropriate term according to former resident Fred Boyce, who was admitted in 1949 at the age of 8 when his foster mother died. He said, "We thought for a long time that we belonged there, that we were not part of the species. We thought we were some kind of, you know, people that wasn't supposed to be born.

[00:01:39]They, the state government, didn't have to look for homes for you, so they could just dump you off in these human warehouses and just let you rot. That's what they did. They let us rot.

[00:01:49]Conditions were cramped and spartan. At its peak, the institution housed some 2500 people. The children often being packed in 30 to a room. And to cut operating costs, the residents performed most of the manual labor around the school. As Michael Dantonio, author of the book The State Boy's Rebellion, writes, "The kids at Fernold raised the vegetables that they ate. They sewed the soles on the shoes that they wore. They manufactured the brooms that they used to sweep the floor." Despite its name, very little education took place at Fernold State School, and what was provided was woefully inadequate.

[00:02:20]Quoting again, it was a school in name only. A child would experience the first year of school five or six times in a row. He would read the same Dick and Jane reader and never make any progress because the school wasn't equipped to actually educate children. It was there as a sort of holding pen. End quote. And then there was the abuse. Corporal punishment was a way of life at Fernold.

[00:02:41]Freely meed out for the most minor of offenses or often none at all. According to former resident Jo Ala, who was abandoned at the school by his parents at the age of eight, the staff held a regular event called Red Cherry Day in which the children would sit in a circle and be called up alphabetically. And lucky me, my name is what? Almeida.

[00:03:00]You'd get up in front of all these kids and you would pull down your pants.

[00:03:03]You'd pull down your underpants and they'd make you turn around and they'd whack your ass with this branch until it was red like a cherry. These people were sick that worked there. End quote. And as you would expect from such a power dynamic, sexual abuse was also rampant.

[00:03:18]Unsurprisingly, many children chose to rebel, often by running away. Those who were caught were sent to the school's infamous Ward 22, where they were stripped naked and locked in solitary confinement for weeks on end. Then in 1946, the school announced that it was creating a science club whose members would be privy to all sorts of perks, including extra oatmeal and milk for breakfast, gifts like Mickey Mouse watches, and tickets to Boston Red Sox games. Given the bleak nature of their everyday existence, residents signed up in droves. Those who still had parents received the following consent form from the school administration. Dear parents, in previous years, we have done some examinations in connection with the nutritional department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the purposes of helping to improve the nutrition of our children and to help them in general more efficiently than before. For the checking up of the children, we occasionally need to take some blood samples which are then analyzed. The blood samples are taken after one test meal which consists of a special breakfast meal containing a certain amount of calcium. We've asked for volunteers to give a sample of blood once a month for 3 months and your son has agreed to volunteer because the boys who belong to the science club have many additional privileges. They get a quart of milk daily during that time and are taken to a baseball game to the beach and to some outside dinners and they enjoy it greatly. I hope you have no objection that your son is voluntarily participating in this study. The first study will start on Monday, June 8th.

[00:04:37]And if you have not expressed any objections, we will assume that your son may participate. Sincerely yours, Clemens E. Bender, MD, clinical director. What the letter failed to mention was that these special breakfast meals were laced with radioactive traces for the science club was in fact a cover for an MIT nutritional study conducted on behalf of the Quaker Oats Company. At the time, the company was eager to validate the nutritional value of its products. Recent studies suggested that the high levels of phitate found in oats inhibited the absorption of iron, a problem which Quaker's main hot cereal rival, cream of wheat, did not have.

[00:05:10]Furthermore, both companies were facing increasing competition from sugary dry breakfast cereals whose popularity was booming thanks to modern advertising techniques. Lasting from 1946 to 1956, the experiments at Fernold were largely conducted by MIT nutrition professor Robert Harris and PhD student Felix Bronner, whose research was funded through a Quaker Oats fellowship. Over the course of the study, more than 100 residents of the school were fed oatmeal and milk laced with radioactive iron 59 and calcium 47 and received intravenous calcium injections. These traces allowed the movement of these elements throughout the body to be tracked using radiation detectors. To Quaker Oats's delight, the study revealed that oatmeal was no worse at promoting iron absorption than cream of wheat. Harrison Bronner also discovered that calcium, both ingested and injected, is deposited straight into the bones. So the next time you see an advertisement claiming that milk helps build strong bones, know that this claim derives from non-consensual human experimentation.

[00:06:05]Indeed, while the Fernold study would never pass a research ethics board review today, it was hardly the only case of unethical human experimentation in the United States at the time or even the worst. As we've covered in our previous video, that time US scientists injected plutonium into people without their knowledge, and that time the United States tested biological warfare on its own citizens, the early Cold War period was something of a golden age for this kind of research, the unethical nature of which was typically justified in the name of national security. Nor was the Fernal study the only one conducted on a vulnerable institutionalized population. For example, from the 1950s to the 1970s, hundreds of inmates of Philadelphia's Hsburg prison were used as human guinea pigs to test the effects of various toxins, creams, detergents, and other products on their skin. While between 1946 and 1948, the United States Public Health Service infected 700 prostitutes, prison inmates, and psychiatric patients in Guatemala with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid in order to study the progress of these diseases. And of course, there were the CIA's infamous MK Ultra experiments in which thousands of unwitting subjects, including prisoners and psychiatric patients, were subjected to electric shock therapy, hallucinogenic drugs, and other forms of psychological torture in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to develop effective mind control, interrogation, and brainwashing techniques. According to John Lantos, an expert in medical ethics at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine and expert in medical ethics, such experiments were indicative of America's postwar mindset. Quoting, technology was good. We were the leaders. We were the good guys. So anything we did could not be bad. The tragic irony is that less than a decade before the discovery of Nazi human experiments had led to the drafting of the Nuremberg code which stated that quote the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent. Should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

[00:08:10]This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment, the method and means by which it is to be conducted, all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected, and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. Despite this, after the war, most American scientific institutions adopted ethical guidelines which required consent, but not informed consent. That is, subjects simply had to agree to participate in an experiment.

[00:08:42]They didn't have to be told the real purpose of said experiment or the potential risks or even exactly what was being done at all, such as we covered in our recent video, injecting people with cancer without their consent. It was not until 1953 that the National Institutes of Health created the first Federal Research Ethics Guidelines explicitly requiring informed consent. Not until 1974 that the federal government passed the National Research Act, establishing a national procedure for ethical review in medical research. But for many members of the Vernold Science Club, things were about to get significantly worse. By the 1960s, eugenics had become a dirty word, and a deinstitutionalization movement had begun to sweep the psychiatric field.

[00:09:19]Consequently, Fernold and other institutions began releasing all but their most severely disabled residents.

[00:09:24]However, no effort was made to reintegrate these residents into society and with barely any education or useful skills. Many struggled to get by. Fred Boyce and Joe Almeida both left Fernold in 1960 at the age of 19 with Boyce joining the Carnival Circuit and touring around the country. In his 40s, Almea felt himself drawn back to Fernold State School, now Walter Fernold Development Center, where he worked as a driver for 20 years. As he later explained, I always felt like they owed me. I always felt that they owed me because they took the most important thing of my life away. They took away my childhood and my education. The two things that you need in life to make it. They took from me.

[00:10:02]All the while, however, Boyce Almeida and the other science club members remained unaware that they had been used as human guinea pigs. It was not until 1993 when Secretary of Energy Hazes Liry declassified a number of Atomic Energy Commission documents from the 40s and 50s that the truth about the experiments finally came out. On December the 26th of that year, the story was broken by the Boston Globe. Soon, other publications began urging victims to come forward. Upon learning of the experiments, Fred Boyce gathered together 30 of his fellow Fernold classmates and launched a class action lawsuit against MIT, Quaker Oats, and the US government. Meanwhile, Senator Edward Kennedy chaired a hearing before the Senate's Committee on Labor and Human Resources to investigate the Fernold experiments. Questioning Constantine Malletkos, one of the study's organizers, Kennedy asked why the study had been conducted on institutionalized orphans instead of MIT students. Quote, "Aren't you appalled at the fact that the most vulnerable people in our society, which are young people, 7, 8 years old that are in an institution? Aren't you appalled that they were the ones selected?" Mletcos claimed that he and his colleagues were following the ethical guidelines of the time and that the choice of subjects was scientifically necessary, saying, "Because in all of these experiments, you have to have control of the subjects. You just can't let them walk around. You have to collect 100% of the excretions. You have to see that they're eating properly and all this kind of thing. Unless you do it that way, you're not going to have a good experiment."

[00:11:25]And as for the science club aspect of the study, Malletkos denied that it was any kind of ruse. It was an afterthought, as I gather, that somebody was talking about. It would be nice to do something for them because these kids have been involved. We've had to jab them and they had to eat a meal, every little drop of it, because you wanted to be sure they got 100% of the radioactivity. Wouldn't it be nice to do something for them? Also called to testify was J. David Litster, dean of research at MIT, who was questioned about the health effects of the radioactive traces the study's subjects were made to ingest. Litster revealed that the traces had exposed the children to between 170 to 330 milligrams of radiation, equivalent to receiving 30 consecutive chest X-rays. This kind of dose, he explained, would have given the children a 1 in 2,000 chance of developing cancer, barely higher than the national average. Indeed, in 1994, Massachusetts state panel confirmed that none of the students had developed any health conditions that could be directly traced to the radioactive isotopes used in the Fernold study. But for Fred Boyce, Joe Almeida, and the other Fernold students, their lawsuit was less about radioactivity than the unethical nature of the study. And while MIT claimed that the study followed the ethical guidelines of the time, and Quaker Roads denied it played little direct role in the research, contributing some serial and a small research grant, in 1998, both decided to settle out of court, paying the plaintiff $60,000 in compensation. It was a small victory, but one which helped bring some justice and closure to one of the darkest periods in American science. Bonus facts. Speaking of sadistic individuals and institutions and breakfast foods, the first modern designated breakfast cereal, forms of porridge aside, was invented in 1863 by a vegetarian Christian abolitionist doctor named James Caleb Jackson.

[00:13:05]Created for his sanatorium patients as a healthy start to the day. It was comprised of crumbled twicebaked Graham flour, which is essentially a type of non-bleleached allnatural finely ground whole wheat flour, and bran hard out a layer of the grain, which he called granula. The end product resembled a much harder version of modern grape nuts, but with significantly larger nuggets. Jackson's granular was reportedly so hard that it needed to be soaked in liquid for at least 20 to 30 minutes before it could be comfortably bitten into. In the 1870s, Dr. John Kellock ran his own sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, and was known for his very strange, sometimes sadistically abusive methods, including electrically shocking children's genitals, applying forms of acid to them, removal of the clitoris and females, and circumcising males. All to attempt to prevent masturbation and sexual urges.

[00:13:51]Interestingly, the latter male circumcision treatment as something commonly performed in America actually hails from this era. The modern non-Jewish non-Islamic practice of foreskin removal was not really a thing in the Western world until it began to be seen as a way to prevent masturbation. In any event, Dr. Kellogg visited Jackson's retreat and was most impressed with his granula. So impressed, in fact, that he ripped off the idea, creating his own version of it made of wheat, corn, and ground oats. He uninventively called it granula. As a result, Jackson sued and Kellogg was forced to rename his cereals granola. A few years later, a failed Battle Creek suspender salesman named Charles W. Post partially knocked off Kellogg's product and started selling an exceptionally similar granola product that he called grape nut, claiming it could make one's red blood redder. As with Jackson, Kellogg and Post both pushed this food item as an ideal healthy food to start the day with, setting the trend that has continued through today for this line of product. Between Kellogg and Post, at the turn of the 20th century, Battle Creek became a battle ground for two companies that would come to define the world of breakfast cereal. For instance, legend has it that due to a mishap making a batch of the original version of Graham crackers originally created by Presbyterian Minister Sylvester Graham as a way to curb sexual urges and particularly the urge to masturbate.

[00:15:00]John Kellogg and his brother Will invented a product they unimaginably dubbed cornflakes. Post was a little more flamboyant, naming his version of the same thing Elijah's Manor, meant as a striking illusion to the biblical story about the food that saved the wandering, starving Israelites. With a famed prophet sitting on a rock and hand feeding a raven on the front of the box, Elijah became the first serial mascot.

[00:15:20]However, fairly quickly, religious groups protested and Post changed the name to Post's toasties. Ultimately, the Kellogg brothers split over Will Kellogg's decision to recommend adding sugared cornflakes to help it sell better, something Dr. John Kellogg found borderline blasphemous as such a thing in his opinion encouraged sexual excitement. The two parted ways with Will founding the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company, which went on to become the now billiondoll Kellogg Corporation, which besides their tasty flakes, was soon also to introduce another breakfast staple, Rice Krispies.

[00:15:49]His brother, John Kellogg, stuck to his original principles and continue to dedicate his life to ridding the world of such evils as masturbation. Now given the ladies of the house at this time tended to be the ones who decided what the family would eat during the first few decades of the 20th century. Serial advertising was primarily aimed at housewives. Kelloggs told women to wink at their groceryer and see what they got. Answer: a box of cornflakes. Quaker Oats likewise sponsored radio dramas and midday radio shows aimed at housewives.

[00:16:16]Post told moms that bringing kids up on their cereals would help them later in life. In the late 1930s, as breakfast cereal became more established and commonly purchased anyway, cereal companies started thinking it might be best to skip the middlewoman, instead marketing directly to children who presumably would pester their mothers for which cereal they wanted. For instance, in 1936, a Dennis the Menace-like character named Skippy was used to specifically market wheaties to children. The problem here is that children tend not to like straight bran or wheat, but they do love sugar. In 1939, the first pre-shugared cereal was produced called Ranger Joe wheat Humsies. Ironically, the product was actually an effort by the creator to minimize how much additional sugar kids commonly put on their cereal by including a relatively small and regulated amount already. But instead of curbing the practice of overshugaring cereal, it eventually resulted in the opposite, starting with postcopying Ranger Joe Wheat Honeys with their own version called Sugar Crisp in 1949.

[00:17:13]Thanks to a major breakfast cereal producer now making such a pre-shugared product, the rest of the industry followed suit. By the 1960s, cereal companies were devoting approximately 90% of their advertising budgets to directly appealing to individuals of the youthful persuasion. This is why it's still common today to have prizes in cereal boxes, tie-ins with movies, video games, and TV shows, and products called Sprinkle Spangle, and Ice Cream Cone cereal. On that note, this is also why adding more and more sugar to breakfast cereal became a thing. As for widespread claims by the manufacturers that these cereals are part of a complete breakfast, technically the cereal companies are not lying here.

[00:17:49]Unsurprisingly, given that the three primary nutrient groups known as macronutrients that humans need to survive the carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, according to the American Chemical Society, a healthy breakfast should consist of mostly carbohydrates and proteins. It's a shocker, we know. And indeed, cereal, even if it's simply a bowl of pure sugar, constitutes carbs.

[00:18:09]So, these products can indeed technically be considered an essential part of a complete breakfast. Just perhaps not an advisable one given the vast majority are essentially candy cleverly marketed to appear nutritious, often complete with a giant label on the side showing all the vitamins added to the product along with the tiny recommended serving suggestion that nobody even comes close to following.

[00:18:30]But to be fair, combined with certain other breakfast items in extreme moderation, this staple of the breakfast world could potentially be useful if one leads a very physically active life instead of just rolling out of bed only to very soon after sit at a desk all day and then come home and sit on the couch until bedtime. On that note, perhaps those sedentary wealthy aristocrats of old were on to something in choosing to skip the morning meal. And for those who led a heavily manual labored life, it is perhaps no surprise that some form of grain-based morning meal seems to have been the choice people made throughout most of recorded history. It's easy to quickly eat and comprised a mix of simple and complex carbs to provide both quick and relatively longerlasting stores of energy. All while avoiding too much protein and fat, which while otherwise essential for life and important for things like maintaining muscle mass, might not sit well when eating mostly that in the morning and then jumping right into hard labor.