Manhattan Project

From 1945 to 1947, Strong Memorial Hospital was the site of non-consensual human experimentation programs under supervision of the Manhattan Project and its successor, the United States Atomic Energy Commission. A building adjacent to the hospital and connected to it via tunnel, dubbed the "Manhattan Annex," was constructed in 1943 as a field office for the Manhattan Project.

Over a period of two years starting in 1945, a total of seventeen patients admitted to Strong for unrelated ailments were injected with a plutonium or uranium solution without their knowledge. Stafford Warren, in his capacities as a U.S. medical officer (radiologist) and medical faculty member at the University of Rochester appears to have had primary responsibility for the now infamous plutonium injections performed on innocent patients at Strong Memorial Hospital (Teaching Hospital of the University of Rochester) in 1945 along with Colonel Hymer Friedell (also a M.D.). In Welsome book,

"Each patient was assigned the initials "HP" followed by a number. According to one document , the "HP" stood for "human product". The doctors were on the look out for patients who had relatively normal metabolisms."

The Atomic Energy Commission tracked the patients for the rest of their lives; after their deaths, the Commission exhumed their remains for testing. Three of the eleven Rochester patients died within one year of the injection; but three others lived for thirty years or more. Those surviving patients were informed of the true nature of the experiments in 1974. By 1977 only one survivor, Jeanne Connell remained, to tell the tale. That same year Connell, and the heirs of the other human subjects, each received $400,000 from the U.S. government with an official apology. The building where the experiments were conducted was destroyed some time after World War 2.

Sources:
Strong Memorial Hospital
Human Experimentation, Plutonium, and Colonel Stafford Warren
Eileen Welsome (1999). The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. New York: Dial Press. pp. 90–91. ISBN 0-385-31402-7.