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Dec 16, 2024 | 
sfpublicpress.org | Chris Roberts
In January 1947, the U.S. Navy was informed that plutonium was blowing around the docks at its San Francisco shipyard. The USS Crittenden, one of the target ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll the previous July, had been towed across the Pacific to the Bay Area for study and attempts at decontamination.
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Dec 12, 2024 | 
sfpublicpress.org | Chris Roberts
Part 5: FADING HISTORIES | Exposed, an investigative seriesHow did a celebrated Navy atomic research center nearly vanish from public consciousness? Many records were classified and others shredded, including documentation of human experimentation.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
sfpublicpress.org | Chris Roberts
The success of the atomic bomb program deeply unnerved some of the scientists responsible. Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer’s later qualms are well known. But even before the first atomic explosion, one of his junior colleagues, Paul Tompkins, risked his career to voice his own reservations. After earning a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, Tompkins spent the war years in Tennessee, working on the top-secret effort to build the bomb.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
sfpublicpress.org | Chris Roberts
Part 3: THE STUDIES | Exposed, an investigative seriesScattered government documents reveal 24 studies over 18 years in which Navy researchers experimented on at least 1,073 people. There is little evidence they gained lasting scientific insights.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
sfpublicpress.org | Chris Roberts
Part 2: THE DECISION-MAKERS | Exposed, an investigative seriesIn the late 1940s, the Navy towed ships wrecked by Pacific weapons detonations to San Francisco, where scientists monitored decontamination workers. Military and civilian leaders realized they could expand this effort into a wider program investigating radioactivity’s effects on people.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Chris Roberts
Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point is a special report by the San Francisco Public Press, an independent non-profit news organization focused on accountability, equity and the environment. In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt. Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
sfchronicle.com | Chris Roberts
A half-dozen current and former workers at a UCSF lab-animal colony in Hunters Point that sits next to the heavily polluted former U.S. Navy shipyard have said in workers’ compensation claims that they were exposed to “radiation and other hazards” that triggered lung problems, hypertension and other health complications.
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May 7, 2024 | 
emag.directindustry.com | Chris Roberts
Meet the new transfer standard calibrator, a digital standard offering accurate measurement, every time. By Chris Roberts, Senior Product Manager at DruckPACE Tallis is the new transfer standard calibrator from Druck designed for test bench, bench top, and panel mount calibration, test, and monitoring applications. It is a compact, robust transfer standard calibrator ideal for in-situ testing and interlaboratory comparisons.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
altaonline.com | Chris Roberts
With the 4/20 marijuana “holiday” upon us, it’s high season for hoary puns. Every April, news outlets big and small light up with the most dated and cringiest marijuana references imaginable in an attempt to capitalize on the buzz and bogart all the traffic. Take it from me. I’ve seen them all. I have been trying to cover cannabis seriously for a long time, and this cheesy ritual makes that task more difficult. This essay was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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Dec 8, 2023 | 
cotswoldjournal.co.uk | Chris Roberts
Musicians from the first event in St. Edmunds Church in Shipston-on-Stour. (Image: Chris Roberts/WiderView Visual Media) THE future of a popular music festival in the Cotswolds has been secured thanks to a fund-raising event. The Shipston Proms had hosted two fundraising events in a bid to help cover the cost of its two-week summer event, which totals over £30,000. The two-week festival is organised by a small group of volunteers whose sole aim is to bring music into Shipston.
