December 12, 2024 (info@sfpublicpress.org)
Destroyed Records, Dying Witnesses Consign San Francisco Radiation Lab to ObscurityHow did a celebrated Navy atomic research center nearly vanish from public consciousness? Many records were classified and others shredded, including documentation of human experimentation.After running the world’s first doctoral program in radiation biology, James Newell Stannard spent his retirement researching “Radioactivity and Health: A History.” The exhaustive record of the field’s early days, published in 1988, mentions some of the work done at a U.S. Navy radiation lab headquartered in San Francisco. Some but not all, because the paper trail was incomplete. When the Navy closed the lab in 1969, “they threw out nearly all records, and there is nowhere, at least so far as I can find, one complete set of Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory reports!” Stannard said in a 1979 interview. Now most firsthand witnesses are dead, and the memories of the living have faded. With the lab’s former home the anchor of the city’s biggest real estate development project, knowledge of what lies beneath may be permanently hidden from a community desperate to understand the extent of the site’s threat to public health.In Part 5 of “Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point,” we trace the obscure nature of the work at the lab to the military’s culture of secrecy, explore why officials shredded millions of pages of paper records and show how an ongoing lack of official interest in acknowledging this history has frustrated local people dealing with the shipyard’s environmental legacy. — Read Part 5 of our investigation. |
