Rebecca Bowe is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She's done a mix of print and radio reporting on topics such as climate change, regulation of California utilities, social-justice movements, police violence and local politics. Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Public Press, KQED News, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Guardian UK, and the Mountain Xpress. She currently works full-time at a nonprofit environmental organization.
In the first of two podcast episodes of “Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point,” reporter Rebecca Bowe traces the soil contamination plaguing a Navy shipyard back to its origins — 20th century nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific.
Environmental justice advocates, scholars and military officials describe their experiences battling over land redevelopment, and reckoning with the legacy of a radiation laboratory that sometimes used human subjects.
In the second of two podcast episodes of “Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point,” reporter Rebecca Bowe lays out what we know from scattered documents and a few remaining eyewitnesses about a Cold War research program that pushed ethical boundaries in the name of national defense.
Bowe speaks with veterans who describe their experiences as guinea pigs in field decontamination exercises that yielded little useful data, and talks with colleague Chris Roberts about what the surviving record say about tests involving injection and ingestion of radioactive substances.
San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood has been hit especially hard by COVID-19, and residents sheltering in place in the area have for years faced elevated levels of air pollution from a variety of nearby sources. Recently, advocates have raised concerns about potentially toxic dust they fear is being generated by a nearby construction project.
At least two Bay Area startups are scrambling to address California’s testing shortage for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has unleashed a global pandemic and triggered economic freefall.
Oakland-based Renegade.bio, created just four weeks ago, has raced to obtain federal authorization and develop tests, while also formulating a plan to make it easier for people to access the tests. San Francisco-based Carbon Health, founded in 2015, started gearing up to offer COVID-19 testing in February, and created a free online symptom tracker to help more easily and quickly identify those infected with the virus.
