Defector Gift Link Promotion January 2024

Certain stories fit certain days of the week. A thorough but depressing investigation into political corruption? That’s a Tuesday story. An essayist making catastrophic personal choices? That’s a Thursday story, baby. But today is Friday, and so I have brought you a perfect Friday story.

This one is about a renowned Naval scientist who, in the 1950s, decided it would be a good idea to make some members of the San Francisco 49ers ingest radioactive material. The man who came up with this idea, Albert Behnke, is one of the most interesting Americans you’ve never heard of. Learning about him is an ideal way to spend time on a sleepy Friday as you glide into the weekend.

Tom Ley, EIC of Defector

In January 1955, a lifelong football fan approached Lou Spadia, the general manager of the San Francisco 49ers, with a peculiar request: Would his players like to participate in a science experiment at an atomic research lab?

It wouldn’t take much, the fan explained, just some radioactive material inside the players, who would then undergo a physical examination. The end result, he promised, would be “of mutual benefit and undoubtedly of interest to” Spadia, team owner Tony Morabito, head coach Red Strader—and to science.

The 49ers were almost certainly the most high-profile participants in a wider, decades-long research program at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, a specialized “atomic defense” outfit headquartered at a major naval shipyard in San Francisco from 1946 to 1969. But they weren’t the only ones: Scientists there exposed at least 1,073 people to potentially harmful doses of radiation in at least 24 experiments and technical exercises. All this, plus the 49ers’ involvement, is spelled out in government documents, scattered across the country, that I spent years combing through: