Lab Developed Arctic Innovations and Oddities

“Cleaning and Sterilization of Bunny Boots.” and “Comparative Sweat Rates of Eskimos and Caucasians Under Controlled Conditions.”

These are some of the studies completed by scientists who worked for the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Developed during the Cold War to “solve the severe environmental problems of men living and working in the Arctic,” the lab cranked out dozens of quirky and sometimes controversial publications in its two decades of existence.

Based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks, which later became Fort Wainwright, the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory was a group of about 60 military and civilian researchers charged with finding the best way to wage warfare in the cold. At the time, U.S. political and military leaders feared a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and thought that Alaska was a likely battleground.

Studies from the Air Force lab in Fairbanks included cold-weather gear development (as in Technical Report 59-4, “Walk-Around Sleeping Bag”); the body structure and function of bears, ground squirrels, and other animals that hibernate; and comparison studies of different races of people to see if Eskimos, for example, were better adapted to the cold than non-Native soldiers.

Many people later criticized one of those studies, one on the role of the thyroid gland in acclimation to the cold, because researchers in 1956 and
1957 gave capsules of iodine 131, used to trace thyroid activity, to 102 Alaska Natives from five northern villages and 19 military volunteers. In the 1990s, The National Research Council investigated and found ethical problems with the study but decided that the damage done by the capsules was probably “negligible,” and that scientists “held a genuine belief, justified at the time, that their research was both harmless and important.”

Less publicized was the lab’s “simulated survival trek” from Anaktuvuk Pass to the Arctic Ocean by an Air Force captain and staff sergeant in July 1962. The men were given an aircraft survival kit and instructed to hike and float their way to the Beaufort Sea. Their objective was to “provide field experience in this area and to determine the merits and deficiencies of the F-102 Aircraft Survival Kit.”