Punjabi women were given chapatis laced with radioactive isotopes in the 1960s

A month ago, on August 19th, Dr Louise Raw sent out a series of tweets that took me aback. At first, I was confused - my eyes were drawn to the image of roti’s that accompanied the tweet, and soon, I was reading in disgust. Dr Louise Raw told us about the horror story of radioactive roti’s.

In 1969 the Medical Research Council (MRC) laced roti's with radioactive isotopes ready to be used on Punjabi women in Coventry, as human experiments. 

A few days ago, I was sitting with dad in his living room, watching TV and mentioned this story to him. 

“Oh it came on WhatsApp, I thought it was rubbish so I deleted it”, he replied.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s fake, no?”

“No dad. This happened”

It feels like a conspiracy theory - I didn’t question my dad for deleting the WhatsApp message, especially since those groups get sent so many unchecked videos and long paragraphs of made up stories. But our history is important, yet regularly erased and rewritten - we can not and should not let it happen. We should be able to tell our own stories, accurately.

So when I found out, via Dr Raw’s tweets, that Punjabi women were experimented on with radiation, I didn’t want the story to be mistold.

In a documentary from 1995 from John Brownlow, called Deadly Experiments, we hear from a Punjabi elder Pritam Kaur in Coventry, and her son who tell us about what happened to her. 

She went to see her GP about migraines she was getting, and her doctor diagnosed her with possible anaemia - he told her to eat particular roti’s that would be sent to her. The doctor told her to eat them for a few days and they will then check up on her.

But these roti’s were laced with radioactive iron by the MRC.

Every morning, a roti was delivered and every afternoon, someone would call to see if she had eaten it.

Photo credit: MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL/bbc

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have eaten it”, she says quietly, before her son translates quickly for the documentary. He continues, “the gentleman arrived at seven, came to your house in a van, he took her, my mother, Thanti and her girl to this Oxford place”.

Pritam and another woman were driven to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire. She was placed in a machine to measure the radiation she had absorbed in the roti’s. 

“At no time were they told they were told they were part of an experiment, they were told it would help them”, her son says angrily.

This was all happening during the Manhattan Project - while working on creating the atomic bomb, scientists wanted to know the effect it had on the human body.

People of colour, low income, mentally unwell, suffering from addiction - these people were targeted for these illegal experiments. In America, Project Sunshine was targeted to children and pregnant women, where they were injected with radiation to see its effects.

In England, it was inflicted on children’s corpses and the Cincinnati Experiment used radiation on cancer patients, killing them.

There are so many of these experiments, given project names, across America and England - so many people were given illnesses and killed for the sake of understanding radiation.

I spoke to John Brownlow, the producer of Deadly Experiments, about what the experiments were actually about: 

“There was (a) a concern about anaemia in South Asian populations and (b) a lot of excitement about using the relatively new radioactive tracers to do metabolic studies like this, plus (c) (white) doctors and researchers were seen as authority figures and (d) there was far less attentiont paid to the ethical design of human experiments. I think in this case the researchers were well-motivated, trying to see if iron added to chapati flour would be retained in the body and therefore combat anemia, but the design of the experiment and the way consent was (or wasn't) gained was at best extraordinarily sloppy and amateurish.”

In the documentary, Dr Alice Stewart, a physician and expert on the affects of radiation on the human body, calls it a “plane lie”, and “taking advantage of…not being able to understand the language…it should never have been allowed”

families attended a meeting in Coventry in 1995 to discuss the study - photo credit: bbc

The MRC is interviewed in the documentary saying that “it’s my understanding informed consent was attained in the presence of family member who was fluent in English”. But the son confirms that no one explained to anyone what had happened. The MRC do not intend to take any action on the scientists involved saying, “as long as the dose used was no greater than the standard investigative doses, I do not see if there’s a basis for a detailed investigation”.

John Brownlow comments on the outcome of the MRC inquiry:

“It became a national and to some extent international story in the couple of weeks after the film went out, and the MRC subsequently launched a (very limited) inquiry but there really weren't many consequences in the UK. In the US there was a Presidential Commission which held hearings but I'm not sure what the upshot of that was.”

It is said that the experiments were administered to understand why so many South Asians suffered from anaemia. They added the radioactive isotopes to the chapatis because it makes it easier to track iron in people’s bodies. But they did all this without the consent from these women.

The BBC on August 31st, published an interview with a daughter of a Punjabi woman who was sent these roti’s. The daughter, who wanted to stay anonymous said, “I know she thought that this was somehow connected to sorting out her knee problems…Chapatis were delivered to our house, I was only 14 at the time. I didn't really question it,” she says. "Every time we sat down for dinner my mum would open up her packet of chapatis."

Her mother moved to Coventry, from Punjab 1950s and did not speak English but relied on her children to translate. She died in 2000, at 78 with diabetes, cancer and organ failure. "My mum's health just drastically went downhill,” she says, “and yet we've got a good long history of longevity”.

West Coventry’s Labour MP Taiwo Owatemi - photo credit: David Woolfall

Since the tweet took off, Dr Raw sent an update, that West Coventry’s Labour MP Taiwo Owatemi will be raising this story in Parliament, and that University of Warwick is on a search for the Punjabi women who had been tested on.

Owatemi says she “will be calling for a debate on this as soon as possible after Parliament returns in September”. Owatemi added she will be following it up with an inquiry into why the MRC report, intended to identify the women affected, "was never followed up".

On Sep 4th the MRC posted a statement: “It is now clear we did not fully address community concerns regarding the participating women and their families following the conclusion of the independent inquiry in 1998. We would like to apologise unreservedly for that failure”.

Jim Brownlow says: “I personally think the worst part of this is that it destroys trust between the community and the scientific/medical establishment. The failure of the MRC to properly respond to the allegations in the first place is what caused it all to explode again a quarter century later. I hope they learn from that. People need to be able to trust their doctors, and the only way to regain that trust if it's been lost is to be honest about what happened and not sweep it under the carpet or minimise people's concerns.”

The latest inquiry is ingoing - we are waiting for the parliamentary inquiry Owatemi is calling for, so we can have a public hearing.