Harold Hodge
American toxicologist & radiation health effects researcher (1904–1990)
Harold Carpenter Hodge (1904–1990) was a well-known toxicologist who published close to 300 papers and five books. He was the first president of the Society of Toxicology in 1960. He received a BS from Illinois Wesleyan University and a PhD in 1930 from the State University of Iowa, publishing his first paper in 1927. He received a number of honors and awards during his career.
In 1931 he went to the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in New York where he pursued his interest in toxicology, which included researching fluoride and dental fluorosis. At that time, the government and medical associations were invested in fluoride removal from water supplies because of the incidence of dental fluorosis in communities with high levels of naturally occurring calcium fluoride, and the adverse health impacts from industrial air pollution involving fluoride. Hodge was chosen to head the United States Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology, with the help of Dr. K.L. Shourie (the AEC was the successor to the Manhattan Project), where he studied the effects of the inhalation of uranium and beryllium through the "Rochester Chamber".
Hodge's reputation was damaged by the publication of Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. It documented human experiments in which the subjects did not know they were being tested to find the safety limits of uranium and plutonium.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5661065. VIAF identifies the subject as 72639. The Library of Congress control number is n83064278. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1990, 1960 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harold Hodge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.