Harold Hodge

Who was Harold Hodge?

Harold Carpenter Hodge was a well-known toxicologist who published close to 300 papers and 5 books. He was the first president of the Society of Toxicology in 1960. He received a BS from Illinois Wesleyan University and a PhD in 1930 from the State University of Iowa, publishing his first paper in 1927. He received a number of honors and awards during his career, and he was president of the International Association for Dental Research in 1947, president of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, president of the Association of Medical School Pharmacologists.

In 1931 he went to the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester in New York where he pursued an interest in the use of fluoride for preventing cavities, although there was a public stigma against fluoride's use in public health because of its association with rat poison. He was chosen to head the United States Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology for the Manhattan Project, where he studied the effects of the inhalation of uranium and beryllium through the "Rochester Chamber".

Hodge's reputation was damaged by the publication of Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. It documented chilling human experiments in which the subjects did not know they were being tested to find the safety limits of uranium and plutonium. He attended a meeting where the experiments were planned in 1945, and an AEC memo thanks Hodge for his planning and suggestions in the experiment. The US government settled with the victims' families, paying $400,000 per family. Seven victims were injected with material smuggled into a hospital secretly through a tunnel. One unmarried, white 24-year old woman was injected with 584 micrograms of uranium; another 61-year old man was injected with 70 micrograms per kilogram of uranium. Hodge also arranged for Dr. Sweet to inject 11 terminally-ill patients with uranium for their brain tumors; however, these subjects may have known they were being tested.