Joseph Gilbert Hamilton

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton ( born November 11, 1907 † February 18, 1957 ) was a physicist and physician at the Faculty of Physics, University of California, who led the nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence. He was married to the painter Leah Hamilton.

His specialty was medical applications of radioactive nuclides. Together with the medical physicist John Lawrence ( Ernest's brother) he ran from 1942 the radiation laboratory at the University of Berkeley ( later renamed the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), especially the then most powerful cyclotron in the world.

Together with John Lawrence and the radiologist Robert Stone Hamilton treated healthy subjects and cancer patients with artificial nuclides from the cyclotron. The devised by him applications of radioactive phosphorus, strontium and iodine are still in use (see radiotherapy and radioiodine therapy ).

From 1944, he examined on behalf of the Manhattan Project the effect and distribution of plutonium in the body and produced plutonium for the secret laboratory at Los Alamos.

1945-46 led the Hamilton injections of plutonium in a number of seriously ill patients, including children, in his lab, and in partner hospitals of Rochester and Chicago. About negative consequences for the subjects is not known. This is not carried out with healing intention and without the consent of the patient experiments are still generally considered unethical. The Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1946 to cancel the test series. 1950 Hamilton himself wrote, the human experiments had the " smell of Buchenwald".

Around the same time Hamilton also examined on behalf of the Government, whether radionuclides are as weapon of mass destruction. The U.S. Defense Department had a research program at Dugway / Utah, which was set in 1953, to the disappointment of Hamilton. 1949-53 Hamilton was responsible for test security in this project.

Hamilton died in 1957 from leukemia. His colleagues agree that this disease he contracted during emergency lack of caution in dealing with the radionuclides.