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The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent?

When details about a scientific study in the 1960s became public, there was shock, outrage and anxiety. But exactly what happened?

By Samira Shackle, Guardian, 11 Feb 25

In 2019, Shahnaz Akhter, a postdoctoral researcher at Warwick University, was chatting to her sister, who mentioned a documentary that had aired on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s. It was about human radiation experiments, including one that had taken place in 1969 in Coventry. As part of an experiment on iron absorption, 21 Indian women had been fed chapatis baked with radioactive isotopes, apparently without their consent.

Having grown up in Coventry’s tight-knit South Asian community, Akhter was shocked that she had never heard of the experiment. When she looked into it, she found an inquiry by the Coventry Health Authority in 1995 conducted soon after the documentary aired. The inquiry examined whether the experiment put the subjects’ health at risk and whether informed consent was obtained. But the only mention of the women’s perspectives was a single sentence: “At the public meeting, it was stated that two of the participants who had come forward had no recollection of giving informed consent.”

…………………………………… rather than putting out a public call for information, Akhter quietly asked around within her community for people who might know families that had been affected.

By chance, at about the same time, a historian and broadcaster, Dr Louise Raw, came across some old reporting about the radioactive chapatis – specifically, a 1995 story in India Today following up on the documentary, which jogged her memory of watching the film when it aired. Raw is interested in hidden histories and was immediately intrigued. 

……………………………………………………….The story provoked major anxiety in Coventry. Though the study only involved 21 women, Owatemi was contacted by scores of people terrified that their mothers or grandmothers had been affected. 

………………………………………Desperate for information, Kalbir – an articulate, assertive woman who sees herself as a fighter – tried to get access to her mother’s medical records, only to hit dead ends: the doctor’s surgery no longer existed and medical confidentiality still applied after death. Meanwhile, Akhter and Owatemi’s efforts were stalling too. The Medical Research Council (MRC), the public body that funds and coordinates research into human health in the UK, says it does not have any documentation relating to the study, not even a list of who was experimented on………………………………

The study took place more than 50 years ago, yet it still stirs up strong emotions, tapping into a host of broader anxieties about racial health inequalities and abuses by the medical establishment. After so many years have elapsed, sorting truth from panic is a complex task. What really happened in Coventry in 1969?

……………………………………………………..In the postwar period, doctors used radiation to treat everything from arthritis to ringworm. By the mid-1950s, it had become clear that exposure increases the chance of developing certain cancers and can cause infertility. The use of radiation was pared back, but medical researchers remained excited about the quick, precise experimentation it offered.

……………………………………..a new set of principles for ethical research on humans, known as the Nuremberg Code, had been introduced. The first of its 10 points is: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The code also sets out other principles: experiments should be for the good of society and carried out by qualified researchers, and the risk should never exceed the potential benefit. But at first the code didn’t have much effect on researchers in the UK and the US, who saw it as something that applied to evil war criminals, not high-minded doctors who wanted to further scientific knowledge. In 1964, the medical researcher Paul Beeson, who had been a professor of medicine at both Yale and Oxford, wrote that the Nuremberg Code was “a wonderful document to say why the war crimes were atrocities, but it’s not a very good guide to clinical investigation which is done with high motives”.

……………………………..There are countless other examples from the US, UK and Canada. A number of these involved radiation exposure: in the 1950s, pregnant women in London and Aberdeen were injected with radioactive iodine to test their thyroid function despite the fact that radiation exposure of any sort poses a risk to a foetus. In Massachusetts in the 1940s and 1950s, boys with learning difficulties at a residential school were fed radioactive oatmeal as part of an experiment to see how Quaker Oats were digested.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………. in Cardiff Elwood hired an Indian housewife to teach a group of Welsh women to make traditional chapatis. Using flour fortified with radioactive iron, they made 200 chapatis to freeze until needed. Meanwhile, Elwood looked for participants. He needed South Asian women who still ate a traditional diet. Eventually he settled on Coventry, where there was a community of migrants from the Punjab region of India. Elwood’s team enlisted a doctor’s surgery in Foleshill, the centre of Coventry’s South Asian community, to identify women who could take part.

………………………………………………………….Despite translation difficulties, and the possibility that the women did not understand what was happening, the study got under way. Every morning for four days, the women were asked to eat one of the irradiated chapatis, which were delivered on dry ice each morning. A few hours later, Tom Benjamin, a field worker on Elwood’s team, would return, visiting all 21 houses to check the women had eaten it and record what foods they’d had with it. Seventeen days later, the women were picked up and driven an hour and a half to Harwell Laboratory for testing,

…………………………………Kalbir finds it upsetting to imagine her mother there. “The terror these women must have gone through,” she said. “They were already struggling in England. Our homes were being attacked by racists, we would get abused on the street, and then the system does this to them.”

The study, published in 1970, found that iron was not absorbed any more effectively from chapatis and the fermented flour they use than from bread. No one informed the women about the results, and no one followed up to check whether the radiation exposure had impacted their health. 

………………………………………………In the 1990s, MRC officials insisted that it would be a poor use of public money to do a follow-up study on the women since the level of radiation exposure was so low. But to people who already feel misled, such reassurances can feel like a repetition of the “doctor knows best” mentality. “I feel anger, frustration and massive anxiety,” Kalbir told me. “I’m desperate to get answers and justice.” As it has surfaced and resurfaced, the story of the radioactive chapatis has come to represent something more than itself. “These women had a hard time in England,” said Kalbir. “They didn’t understand the way research and the medical professions worked. They had a great deal of trust. This shouldn’t have happened.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/feb/11/the-coventry-experiment-why-were-indian-women-in-britain-given-radioactive-food-without-consent

February 14, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK