Joseph Gilbert Hamilton

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton (November 11, 1907 – February 18, 1957) was an American professor of Medical Physics, Experimental Medicine, General Medicine, and Experimental Radiology as well as director (1948–1957) of the Crocker Laboratory, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hamilton studied the medical effects of exposure to radioactive isotopes, which included the use of unsuspecting human subjects.

He was married to painter Leah Rinne Hamilton.

Early work

Hamilton received his B.S. in Chemistry in 1929 from the University of California. He studied medicine in Berkeley and interned at the University of California Hospital, San Francisco. He was awarded his M.D. degree in 1936. At that time the cyclotron in Berkeley was among the first to produce useful amounts of radioactive isotopes which could be used in studies of their effects on living tissue. In a series of papers published in 1937 Hamilton detailed early medical trials using radioactive sodium, followed by papers detailing the use of the radioactive isotopes of potassium, chlorine, bromine, and iodine.

Three teams headed by Hamilton, Louis Hempelmann and Wright Haskell Langham carried out trials, injecting plutonium into 18 unsuspecting human patients and measuring its concentration in excreta. Joseph Gilbert Hamilton's team injected three of the subjects at University of California Hospital, San Francisco.

Albert Stevens, CAL-1, was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, which researchers soon found to have been an ulcer. Stevens is significant as he is recorded to have survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose of any human. He lived 20 years after the injection and died at 79 years of age.

Hamilton's studies of isotope retention in humans, especially of radioactive strontium and the transuranic elements, were the principal reason for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission setting of far lower tolerance limits of these substances than had been theorised before trials. He further warned that by using humans the AEC would be open "to considerable criticism," since the experiments as proposed had "a little of the Buchenwald touch."

Death and legacy

Hamilton died from radiation-induced leukemia at the age of 49. His name was added to the Monument to the X-ray and Radium Martyrs of All Nations erected in Hamburg, Germany.