Karen Silkwood was a nuclear power plant technician and whistleblower who reported on unsafe work conditions at the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Fuel Rod Production facility to the Atomic Energy Commission. She raised concerns about lack of employee training, failure to minimize contamination, inadequate protection gear and poor monitoring. During the course of her duties, polishing plutonium pellets used to make fuel rods for a "breeder reactor" (uses very small amount of uranium) nuclear-power plant, she observed faulty fuel rods ground down to obscure obvious defects. She died on November 13, 1974 in a fatal yet mysterious one-car crash. It was claimed that her death was premeditated (forced off the road by another car) , a manilla folder filled with compromising evidence which was to be presented to the Union Officials and the New York Times was supposedly missing, her phones were tapped and was placed under surveillance, and plutonium was planted at her home and subsequently ingested by her.
Operation Paperclip was a joint mission sponsored by US Military and Intelligence Officials to recover military, scientific and technological development research in occupied Germany at the close of the Second World War, so it would not fall into the hands of its former Soviet Allies. The program brought roughly 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) to the United States to work on America's behalf during the Cold War, who would help develop America's arsenal of rockets and other biological and chemical weapons.
In 1932, The United States Public Health Service conducted a study on 600 black men on the grounds of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama , entitled "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." Investigators were trying to understand the more advanced stages of the disease. The study was originally projected to last six months but spanned 40 years, and it was not stopped till Associated Press broke the story in 1972. In that time span, the participants were not told they were exposed or even had syphilis. Also, penicillin became the standard treatment for the disease in 1947, and was not provided to the human subjects. After congressional hearings, introduced federal legislation, and several out-of-court settlements, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology a $200,000 grant to help establish a center for bioethics in research and health care at Tuskegee University as part of a lasting "memorial" to the study's victims.
IRB is short for Institution Review Board. Under Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, an Institutional Review Board is group that has been formally designated to review and monitor biomedical research involving human subjects. In accordance with FDA regulations, an IRB has the authority to approve, require modifications in (to secure approval), or disapprove research
Plum Island is an island that can be found off the North Folk of Long Island, New York. An Animal Disease Center supervised by the USDA (Agriculture) and now by the Department of Homeland Security can be found there.