Science: Back to the Laboratory

For the last six years, the Army Quartermaster Corps has been boasting about steaks, eggs, and other perishable foods preserved by the glamorous atomic-age process of putting them in plastic envelopes and shooting gamma or beta rays through them. The foods looked fine, tasted pretty good, and they could be kept edible without refrigeration practically forever, because all the microorganisms in them had been done to death by radiation. The Army proudly fed irradiated meals to newspapermen, top brass, and 20 Congressmen. Last week, with some embarrassment, the Army announced that it was shelving a $7,500,000 irradiated-food plant at Stockton, Calif, (on which $1,300,000 had been spent).

Concern started soon after Richard S. Morse, the Army’s civilian Director of Research and Development, took his job last June. None of the VIPs had suffered any ill effects; neither did human volunteers who ate the foods for short periods. But experimental animals put on a long-term diet of irradiated foods had shown some alarming symptoms. Rats developed abnormal eyes, or bled, or died before their time. Bitches bore smaller-than-normal litters. Mice developed enlarged left auricles in their hearts, which interfered with their breathing and sometimes burst.

The irradiated foods are not at all radioactive, and no poisonous materials have been found in them. Suspicion is that the radiation may completely destroy natural vitamins (biotin, riboflavin. etc.), since the test animals show classic symptoms of severe vitamin deficiency. But the tests were haphazard and incomplete, so no one is sure that this is really the reason or how irradiated foods can be made assuredly safe. Director Morse has concluded that the whole program had better be restudied.