About Boldly Better
Boldly Better started in the summer of 2021 when a group of UC students and faculty realized the need for a group dedicated to organizing around the issue of the UC radiation experiments.
Students
Divya Kumar
Divya is a fourth-year history major and Spanish minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She began this research in the Spring of 2021 and has continued working on historical research and advocating for a new memorial.
ACRE Initiative
The ACRE (Actions on the Cincinnati Radiation Experiments) Initiative was started in the fall of 2022 by a group of medical students within the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Their work has been instrumental in starting dialogues within the College of Medicine and working towards curriculum changes, as well as involvement with the memorial project.
Past Student Involvement
Various alumni have been involved during prior stages of this project, including Maria Bobrowski-Artola (UC ’22), Grace Thomas (UC ’20), Maddie McCabe (UC ’22, College of Law 2025), and Olivia McDonald.
Faculty
Dr. Anne Delano Steinert – Assistant Professor of History
Gino Pasi – Archivist/Curator, Henry R. Winkler Center
The Whistleblower: Dr. Martha Stephens
In January of 1972, Dr. Martha Stephens, a professor in UC’s English department, wrote and released a report, analyzing the obscure experimentation happening across campus from her office in McMicken Hall. She got her hands on the files written by the physicians, and was horrified by what she read. She knew she needed to tell the campus community. She and her colleagues in the Junior Faculty Association held a press conference, but it garnered little local attention. However, Senator Ted Kennedy got ahold of the report and wanted to investigate. But political might got its way, and Kennedy made an agreement with UC President Warren Bennis and Ohio Governor John Gilligan not to investigate the experiments if they ended. With that, the story of the experiments began to fade away.1
Over twenty years later, in 1994, a WKRC reporter called Dr. Stephens. She’d found an old copy of the original report, and wanted to learn more. It was then that the full story began to reveal itself.2
Dr. Stephens’ work, on the original report that drew national attention and ended the experiments, and her subsequent research helping to find the patients’ families and share their stories, has been instrumental. Without her efforts, it is unclear if these experiments ever would have been known, let alone to the degree we understand them now. Without her work, the families of the patients may never have known what happened to their loved ones. To learn more, consider watching the various videos about her, as well as reading her book, all linked in the resources page.
