From “Secret Soviet Cities,” a BLDG BLOG post about covert Cold War burgs and the outré medical experiments that were conducted within their invisible walls:

“Just last week, Nature looked at Soviet-era experiments in these closed cities, where ‘nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated’ as part of a larger medical effort ‘to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer.’ 

In an article that is otherwise more medical than it is urban or architectural, we nonetheless read of a mission to the formerly closed city of Ozersk in order to rescue this medical evidence from the urban ruins: ‘After a long flight, a three-hour drive and a lengthy security clearance, a small group of ageing scientists led the delegation to an abandoned house with a gaping roof and broken windows. Glass slides and laboratory notebooks lay strewn on the floors of some offices. But other, heated rooms held wooden cases stacked with slides and wax blocks in plastic bags.’ These slides and wax blocks ‘provide a resource that could not be recreated today,’ Nature suggests, ‘for both funding and ethical reasons.’ 

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the idea of medical researchers helicoptering into the ruins of a formerly secret city in order to locate medical samples of fatally irradiated mutant animals is a pretty incredible premise for a future film.”