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The Quaker Oats company and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have agreed to pay $1.85 million to 30 victims of radiation experiments they conducted in the 1940s and '50s. About 130 developmentally disabled boys who were wards of the state at the Fernald School in Waltham, MA, U.S.A., were poisoned with cereal contaminated with radioactive iron and calcium "to prove that nutrients in Quaker oatmeal" travel throughout the body. Quaker Oats paid for the study and donated the cereal, while MIT committed the crimes. None of the scientists were named or indicted. MIT dared to say that the boys' exposure was "about equal" to the natural background radiation to which people are exposed every year. [This often heard palliative obscures the fact that ingested radiation doses are far more harmful than external doses.]