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

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.”

When Akhter read this sentence, she burst into tears. “I just thought of my own mother,” she said. “It was brave of these women to stand up and disagree. And their memories were just discounted.” Akhter decided to try to trace the women and their families. But she was anxious. It was now 2020; the Covid pandemic had hit, and ethnic minority communities were among the worst affected. Akhter contacted the local Labour MP, Taiwo Owatemi. “I was completely horrified,” Owatemi told me. “I was like: why am I just hearing about this? And how do we identify these women?” Owatemi agreed with Akhter that, with high rates of vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minorities, it was risky to draw attention to this historic injustice at that moment. So 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. “I read this and thought it was outrageous and weird and sinister,” she told me. Raw felt the story deserved more attention than it had received – perhaps a parliamentary inquiry or compensation – and started tweeting about it. “You can’t believe how kind the British are,” read the first tweet in a thread she posted in August 2023. “Every morning, a van pulls up outside your house in Coventry. A friendly man brings you a freshly baked flatbread to eat. It’s just for you, not anyone else in your family. Every afternoon he comes back to make sure you’ve eaten it.” The thread went on to detail the key points in the documentary and India Today’s follow-up.

Effectively packaged for a social media audience, and arriving at a post-pandemic moment when trust in healthcare systems was low and awareness of racism and identity politics at an all-time high, the story went viral. That first tweet was retweeted 9,000 times and viewed by 7 million people. TikToks recounting the story racked up tens of thousands of views. It was also covered by the mainstream media – the Guardian, the BBC, the Daily Mail – with many reports focusing on efforts by Akhter and Owatemi to trace the women.

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. One of the people who saw Raw’s thread was a woman in her 60s named Kalbir, who grew up in Coventry’s Punjabi community. She forwarded it to her siblings, and within a few minutes her elder sister replied: “Oh yeah, Mum said about that. I thought you knew.” Kalbir was shocked to discover that after the documentary had aired in 1995, their mother said she was one of the participants. Kalbir had been living away from home and no one had mentioned it to her. Now she was devastated. Her mother had died two decades earlier, and Kalbir was left with so many questions: “What happened? What was the aftercare for them? What are the implications? Did this affect their health afterwards?” Food in their house was always shared, and Kalbir panicked that she or her siblings could have eaten the radioactive chapatis too.

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. Although subsequent inquiries into the study stated that the level of radiation the women were exposed to was very low, this has not been enough to dispel concerns. “I have vivid memories of Mum being very ill, feeling like she was going to die,” said Kalbir. “Without clear information, we build up a story in our heads.” Alongside fears about the health impact of radiation exposure is the nightmarish idea of humans being experimented on without their consent.

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 early 1960s, Peter Elwood was a young, ambitious epidemiologist living in his native Belfast. After his first few research projects, which he found “absolutely exhilarating”, Elwood started looking into how to tackle a major cause of ill health worldwide: anaemia. Commonly the result of iron deficiency, anaemia is a condition in which the blood produces an insufficient amount of healthy red blood cells, meaning that the organs don’t get enough oxygen-rich blood. The main symptom is fatigue, but in more severe cases it can affect children’s cognitive development, and in pregnant women it can contribute to premature birth and maternal mortality. (Even today, the World Health Organization classifies anaemia as a serious global public health problem.)

One day in Belfast, Elwood was in his car, chatting to a colleague about how to improve treatment for anaemia. “Giving tablets through GPs was obviously achieving very little – what could we do?” he recalled. Since the late 1950s, bread in the UK had routinely been fortified with iron, along with other minerals including calcium, but there hadn’t been much investigation into how effective this was, or how the type of iron or flour affected absorption. “And so the whole field, which lasted about 10 years and ended with the radioactive chapatis, all started with an idea in the car,” Elwood said. (Elwood, now in his 90s, declined to be interviewed for this article. All quotes from him are taken from an interview he gave to an oral history project in 2000.)

In 1963, Elwood moved to Cardiff to take up a role at the Epidemiological Research Unit, a division of the MRC. He set up new studies looking at iron in bread, testing different types of fortified flour and how iron absorption was affected by other foods eaten at the same time. Then, in the late 1960s, he began to use an exciting new research tool: radiation. Typically, iron absorption is measured by giving someone iron-enriched food or supplements and then checking levels of haemoglobin in the blood – a process that can take months. With radioactive iron isotopes, studies could be completed in weeks or even days. The radioactive element worked almost like a tag attached to the iron, allowing scientists to see and precisely measure what it was doing inside the body. (Radioactive tracers are still used today as a diagnostic tool for cancer and other conditions.)

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. This, along with other new technologies such as cell culturing and a massive growth in antibiotics, sparked a sense that medical science might even be able to defeat disease entirely.

At the time Elwood was working on his iron studies, the culture of medicine was paternalistic. Most doctors believed they were best placed to make decisions about risk on behalf of their patients. Consent was often seen as at best unnecessary, and at worst actively obstructive to the pursuit of knowledge. In 1947, after the Nuremberg trials exposed the full horror of the Nazis’ medical experiments on inmates at concentration camps, 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”.

But as details of experiments carried out throughout the 20th century emerged, it became clear that good intentions are not enough. The Tuskegee experiment, which ran in Alabama from 1932 to 1972, aimed to explore the prevalence of syphilis among black men. Participants believed they were being treated for their condition, but in fact they were given placebos even after penicillin emerged as an effective, readily available treatment for syphilis in the mid-1940s. Many died unnecessary deaths. In the 1960s, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook school in Staten Island were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, sometimes repeatedly, for research into a vaccine. 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 the 1960s, two physicians on opposite sides of the Atlantic – Henry Beecher in the US and Maurice Pappworth in the UK – separately sounded the alarm about widespread unethical practices. They highlighted two main issues: first, that studies were carried out without patients being given the opportunity to consent, and second, that some studies exposed them to unjustifiable levels of risk. “In their zeal to extend the frontiers of medical knowledge, many clinicians appear temporarily to have lost sight of the fact that the subjects of their experiments are in all cases individuals with common rights,” wrote Pappworth in 1967.

These interventions were hugely controversial, but gradually the medical establishment became alert to the risks of unethical research practices. This debate was rumbling on in the background as Elwood tested iron absorption in the 1960s. But at the time he was starting to use radioactive isotopes in his work, there were no guidelines or restrictions on using radiation on human subjects. Elwood had already made significant discoveries about how the body absorbs iron. “[It was a] fascinating set of studies, and again I just valued the opportunity to follow through an idea,” he said. Radiation was simply another tool to find out more.

In 1968, Elwood published a paper on an experiment in which volunteers – mainly colleagues and friends, Elwood said – were given a daily breakfast that included bread fortified with radioactive iron salts. “A fortnight later, we asked them to go to Harwell and have whole body measurements of the iron that had been absorbed from the bread,” said Elwood. Harwell Laboratory, also known as the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, was a government-owned lab just outside Oxford. It was the only place in the UK with technology sensitive enough to detect the low levels of radiation absorbed from the bread. Elwood’s study, which found that eggs inhibited iron absorption while fruit juice aided it, attracted media attention both in the US and in the UK. His research informs treatment to this day – when I was prescribed iron recently, the doctor told me to take the tablets with orange juice.

As a rising star within the field, Elwood was invited to join the World Health Organization’s Committee on Iron Deficiency. “One of the first things the committee said to me was that my work on bread was of some interest but really almost totally irrelevant to the countries where anaemia is undoubtedly a real problem, where chapatis or tortillas are eaten,” Elwood recalled. “They said: ‘We do not know what fermentation does to the iron. Would you repeat this study using chapatis?’”

So 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.

Dr Shah, the GP who referred women to the study, was well known in Foleshill. Kalbir remembers him as a friendly man who often visited patients at home. Exactly what Shah told the 21 women he referred for the study is a crucial matter of dispute, and since he died decades ago, it is impossible to ask him. But it would later become clear that at least two of the women went to Shah for advice – regarding migraines in one case, arthritis in another – and believed they were being put on a special diet to diagnose or treat the issue. Kalbir was only seven in 1969, so she has no idea what her mother was told, but she finds it hard to believe her mother fully understood the implications. “There was a lot of trust in doctors,” she said.

Once the women had been identified by Shah, they were passed on to Elwood’s team. According to a later MRC inquiry, a member of the team – usually Elwood himself – visited each woman to explain the purpose of the study and the fact that it would involve low levels of radiation exposure. They were also reportedly given letters explaining they’d be consuming radioactive isotopes to test their iron absorption. (When I asked to see these letters, the MRC said it does not have any documentation relating to this study in its archive.) But there was a problem. While the letters and meetings were in English, most of the women spoke only Punjabi or Pothwari, and some could not read at all. “We were visiting Asian people who were very suspicious and didn’t speak any English,” said Janie Hughes, a field worker who accompanied Elwood to Coventry. (All quotes from Hughes are taken from a 2000 interview for the oral history project.) Today, anyone taking part in medical research must provide written consent, and professional interpreters are required for non-English speakers. This did not apply in the 1960s.

When possible, the team was accompanied by the local health visitor, Mrs Butt, who spoke Punjabi but was not a professional interpreter. When there were translation issues or Butt was not available, the women’s children stepped in. For obvious reasons, it is not ideal for children to translate medical information, especially when it involves unfamiliar terms such as “radioactive isotope”. Hughes remembered that language was a challenge for Elwood. “He was trying to put over what he was trying to say. The ethics behind it – you have to sort of get consent, especially to take a blood sample, and you were sort of wondering: do they really understand what I am [on] about?” Later she added: “Can you imagine trying to explain all that to somebody who only speaks Urdu?” (The women did not speak Urdu, which is the lingua franca of Pakistan.)

Despite these 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. Remembering the study approximately 31 years later, Elwood had a glowing memory of the trips to Harwell. “Tom Benjamin really went over the top in making these women feel valued and welcomed. He arranged a visit to see something of interest during their trip to Harwell, which was a day’s journey,” he said. “He visited Oxford, took them round one of the colleges; he took them for tea, he arranged to have tea breaks on the way there and on the way back, and really I think I made 20 friends on that project – they were so friendly to us.”

It is impossible to corroborate this recollection, but the lab, an imposing building on the outskirts of Oxford, would have been at the very least a strange environment for the women. 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. This was standard practice at the time, and researchers believed the low level of radiation was unlikely to cause harm. “Everyone forgot about it,” said Elwood. It would be 26 years before it resurfaced.

In the mid-1990s, a filmmaker named John Brownlow was scouting around for his next documentary project when a story from the US caught his eye. Journalist Eileen Welsome had recently won a Pulitzer prize for her reporting on human radiation experiments, in which she had tracked down victims and put a human face to the issue. The studies she had found fit into two broad categories. The first had a military purpose, where unconsenting human subjects were used to study how radiation from atomic weapons would affect the body. In one of the most shocking examples, between 1945 and 1947, 18 hospital patients across the US, mostly uneducated and poor, were injected with plutonium. The second category of studies had a worthy medical purpose – studying iron absorption or thyroid function, say – but still exposed patients to risk without their consent. One had taken place in the 1940s, when 849 pregnant women attending a hospital clinic in Nashville were given radioactive iron isotopes to test the absorption of iron in the uterus. The hospital insisted that the doses were within safe limits – but any radiation exposure is risky for a foetus. Welsome found a woman whose child, exposed to radiation in the womb, had died of a rare form of cancer.

With research funding from Channel 4, Brownlow and a small team began looking into whether similar experiments had occurred in the UK. They trawled through documents at the public records office, and studies at the British Library, looking for records relating to the UK’s main atomic research labs. Some of their discoveries were shocking. For Project Sunshine, throughout the 1950s British doctors had sent the body parts of dead children, without the consent of their parents, to US scientists to test the impact of nuclear fission on bones. Brownlow came across studies that were very similar to those Welsome had found in Nashville. These studies, in Aberdeen, Liverpool and London, tested pregnant women’s thyroid function, iron absorption and placentas. The women were given radioactive injections or tablets, either without being informed at all or without having the risk explained.

One of the studies that caught Brownlow’s eye was titled: “Absorption of iron from chapati made from wheat flour”. “I just thought: what’s going on?” he recalled. With the help of Sukhbender Singh, a local Sikh Punjabi journalist, the team tracked down Pritam Kaur, one of the 21 women in the chapati experiment. The film-makers entered their first conversation with the family with an open mind. “They could well have said: ‘The researchers told us everything,’” he told me. “But either they hadn’t, or it hadn’t been understood.”

Kaur said that when she had gone to her GP for migraines, he suggested the cause might be anaemia. In the documentary, Kaur is elderly and looks fragile as she sits on a sofa next to her son, who translates for her: “He told her that this chapati will help you to find out what you’re really lacking. He said: ‘Somebody will come and see you at your house and give you this chapati, and you eat it for a few days, then we will take you and check you out.’” Kaur interjects in Punjabi and her son adds: “My mother just told me right now, if she knew about it, she would not have eaten it.”

Brownlow did not think the experiment in Coventry was the worst he’d found. In Wales, he had tracked down a couple who had been unable to dress their baby for her funeral because her leg bones had been removed for Project Sunshine. By contrast, the chapati experiment had a clear, benign medical aim: studying how to reduce cases of anaemia. But the way it was conducted fit with what Brownlow was finding elsewhere. “This was a vulnerable population – in this case, a minority community which had difficulties with English – with a layer of people doing the consenting for them,” he told me.

On 6 July 1995, the documentary Deadly Experiments aired on Channel 4. The first half of the film explained the roots of radiation experiments in the development of atomic weapons. The second half focused on studies in the US and UK that exposed people to radiation without their consent. Elwood was contacted before the documentary went out but does not appear in the film. When he sat down to watch it, he was “absolutely incredulous”. The documentary is soundtracked with ominous music, and at a few points shows footage of mushroom clouds to signify the link between radiation and nuclear weapons. Every time this was shown, Elwood’s daughter-in-law, who was watching with him, nudged him and said: “That’s another one of your chapatis has gone up.”

Elwood had long since moved on to other research, and his career had been a distinguished one. Most notably, his team proved the life-saving benefits of taking daily aspirin after a heart attack – a huge medical breakthrough. To see his old research presented in this dark light was a shock. The segment on the Coventry experiment comes at the end of the film and lasts only five minutes. Elwood watched aghast at what he thought were “extraordinary claims” about his research processes. Kaur’s account is intercut with an interview with an MRC representative who insists that informed consent was obtained and that “where there were language difficulties” the conversation was conducted “with the assistance of a family member who was fluent in English”. Off screen, Brownlow puts it to the MRC official that one woman said she was never told the experiment involved radiation. “That’s clearly unethical, isn’t it?” he says. The MRC official responds: “Well, if that is correct, yes.”

The documentary generated news coverage, political debate – and huge anxiety. “People panicked and thought it might have happened to them,” said Brownlow. The Coventry story was picked up by the Indian media. India Today spoke to the daughter of Danti Sohanta, Kaur’s neighbour, who said she had been brought into the study after seeing the GP for arthritis. “The doctor told her: ‘If you’re put on a special diet, perhaps you’ll get better,’” said her daughter. “She believed him. You didn’t question a doctor in those days.” The article also featured an eye-popping encounter with Paul Fawcett, an MRC spokesperson, who insisted that “a Gujarati-speaking health visitor always accompanied the doctor”. The journalist pointed out that the women spoke Punjabi, not Gujarati. (Punjab and Gujarat are 1,000km apart.) According to the article, “Fawcett rechecked his notes and promptly repeated himself.”

As concerns spiked, Coventry council set up a helpline for worried residents, and the Coventry Health Authority conducted an inquiry. Elwood found it a bruising experience. “I went up to Coventry and I was met by the chief medical officer, who told me: ‘Look, let’s go in by the back door. There’s a huge crowd of reporters, and Asians, and they are out to get you – they really are very, very difficult,’” he recalled. Elwood gave an explanation of the experiment before taking questions. “One or two of the people there were very, very hostile,” he said. One Asian man “beat the table, and he shouted at me that I had been in league with the war department and the Ministry of Defence, that these poor women had been duped, that I had deceived them … they were all in ill health. Mind you, they were all in their 80s by then and one or two had died, and everything that was wrong with them was put at my door.”

Elwood was clearly unprepared for this wave of anger. He even disputed that the women had trouble understanding English, although this was widely corroborated. “They said these women were illiterate, that I had purposely chosen them so that they wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Well, I had letters from about three of them thanking me for the most interesting study, written in perfect English.” (I asked the MRC whether Elwood still has these letters and was told he has not kept any correspondence relating to the study.)

Although Elwood found the experience unpleasant, the final Coventry Health Authority report came down strongly in his favour, concluding that it met ethical standards of the time, and that the level of radiation exposure – as assessed by an independent expert – was very low, equivalent to a single extra chest X-ray at that time. The report criticised the film-makers, saying they’d “caused considerable unnecessary concern to the Asian people in Coventry”. One thing was notably lacking in the report: the voices of women who were experimented on. The report said the MRC no longer had a list of participants in the study, so they could only speak to “a small number” who came forward as a result of the documentary. It’s not clear what efforts were made to reach out to these women, but no one contacted Kalbir’s mother, who was unaware of this local investigation. The only mention of the women’s perspectives is the single sentence saying two of them did not recall giving consent.

In the wake of the documentary, the MRC commissioned its own inquiry, which looked into all the MRC-funded experiments featured in the film. It was published in 1998 and concluded that all the experiments were fine by the standards of the time. Once again, the women did not feature in the section on the Coventry experiment; the report said that none came forward “despite numerous avenues being pursued”. Since researchers had personally explained the experiment to the women – which was not the norm at the time – the report singled Elwood out as “a researcher of the highest integrity” and said this was a “model study in which research practice exceeded the prevailing standards of the period”. It also noted that since many of the women did not speak English, and children ended up translating for them, “it is possible that, despite the best intentions of the research team, full details of the study were not grasped by the women involved”. The report does not dwell on this beyond acknowledging that “the needs of ethnic minority research subjects generally are now better recognised and accordingly treated more sensitively”.

In the US, Eileen Welsome’s reporting triggered Bill Clinton’s administration to set up a full inquiry into human radiation experiments. Clinton apologised to victims. A series of class action lawsuits in the 1990s led to hefty compensation. Some of these cases were remarkably similar to the chapati experiment and others that Brownlow uncovered in the UK. They were experiments that had a relatively benign medical aim, and in which the crucial issue was lack of consent rather than evidence of actual harm caused by radiation exposure. The pregnant women given radioactive iron in Nashville received more than $10m, even though the hospital maintained that the level of exposure was low. Researchers who did a follow-up study of these women found a “small but statistically significant” increase in cancer in their children. A group of the students in Massachusetts who were fed radioactive oatmeal without consent won a settlement of $1.85m, despite researchers once again making similar arguments to their UK counterparts about the low levels of radiation.

In the UK, there were no follow-up studies of the health impacts, no lawsuits, no compensation. There was not even an apology.

When the Coventry experiment was suddenly catapulted back into the public consciousness in 2023, there were calls for a public inquiry and compensation for the women. But it is difficult to see how any of this can happen when basic details, such as the names of the women experimented on, are so hard to come by. Even in 1995, the MRC said it did not have this information. “As a scientist, I find that very bizarre,” said Owatemi, who was a pharmacist before becoming an MP. “This researcher is still alive, and I don’t believe it’s been long enough for the MRC to have got rid of all those archives.” (In response, the MRC pointed me to its policy document, which states that the retention period for clinical research is 20 years, and to more recent GDPR rules, which require that data is not retained longer than necessary.)

Efforts to trace the identity of the women involved have been slow. Akhter, the Warwick researcher, is in contact with a number of families who believe their mothers or grandmothers were part of the experiment, and plans to conduct interviews with them about their experiences. Meanwhile, the MRC has commissioned its own independent research into the Coventry experiment and other historical trials “where research processes, specifically consenting procedures, would not meet the ethical standards expected today (even if they met the ethical standards of the time)”. It has commissioned a team at the University of Leicester to interview families and the wider community with the aim of looking at “trust within ethnic minority communities”. Owatemi hopes to identify the women so there can be an official apology as well as a morbidity study to see what health impact the radiation might have had.

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.”