In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Fernald School in Massachusetts was a school for mentally disabled and abandoned children. Students were not treated well, so members of the Science Club were excited when they started being fed cereal for breakfast each morning. What they didn’t know was that they were part of an experiment, and that the Quaker oatmeal they were being served contained radioactive tracers. It took almost forty years before the boys in the club found out the truth.
Robert Harris, a nutrition professor at MIT, oversaw three experiments with over 70 boys from the school, all between ages 10 and 17. One of these experiments involved feeding the boys oatmeal and milk that were laced with radioactive nutrients, while another saw him directly injecting radioactive calcium into the boys. A third experiment dealt with calcium and the bloodstream. These experiments had both been approved by the Atomic Energy Commission, as were dozens of other experiments in the same time period. Quaker had decided to team up with scientists in order to have another way to market their products. They were in heavy competition with Cream of Wheat, whose product, unlike theirs, did not impact the absorption of iron.
With nutrition becoming a huge selling point in the early 1950s, Quaker provided funding for the experiment, along with the free breakfast cereal. The boys at the Fernald School ate the oats with radioactive tracers, which are used to help assess chemical reactions within the body, and it was found that the Quaker oats were not any worse when it came to absorbing calcium and iron than Cream of Wheat was. The boys who were used as test subjects in these experiments did not find out about the experiments until 1993, when the Secretary of Energy removed the classified status of several documents from the Atomic Energy Commission.
Upon learning of this testing, thirty students who had unknowingly taken part sued Quaker Oats and MIT. The focus point of the case was that Robert Harris and Quaker Oats had preyed on vulnerable boys with no families to look out for them, and it was questioned why they had not used test subjects from other schools or from MIT. A physics professor at MIT argued in front of the Senate that the experiment exposed the boys to trace amounts of radiation and not enough to have done any long-term damage to them. President Clinton issued an apology to the students in 1995, as the Atomic Energy Commission, a federally-funded agency that has since become defunct, had funded the study. A settlement of $1.85 million was eventually reached, but Quaker admitted no wrongdoing.