Unethical human experimentation in the United States
In 1953, the AEC ran several studies at the University of Iowa on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from of iodine-131, in order to study the women's aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In another study, they gave 25 newborn babies (who were under 36 hours old and weighed from ) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through an injection, so that they could measure the amount of iodine in their thyroid glands, as iodine would go to that gland.
Iodine-129
I is one of the seven long-lived fission products that are produced in significant amounts. Its yield is 0.706% per fission (U-235). Larger proportions of other iodine isotopes such as I are produced, but because these all have short half-lives, iodine in cooled spent nuclear fuel consists of about  I and the only stable iodine isotope, I. 
Because I is long-lived and relatively mobile in the environment, it is of particular importance in long-term management of spent nuclear fuel. In a deep geological repository for unreprocessed used fuel, I is likely to be the radionuclide of most potential impact at long times.