Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 26, 1994 TAG: 9401260154
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The acknowledgment came in testimony to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which is investigating radiation experiments the U.S. government performed, often on unwitting participants, in the 1940s and '50s. O'Leary said the full extent and nature of those experiments probably would not be determined for at least a year. She added that all the information eventually would be made public.
In response to intense questioning, O'Leary said the Energy Department is either paying for or providing facilities for 200 to 260 experiments. Most of that experimentation involves the use of low tracer doses in nuclear medical research, she said.
None of the experiments is being conducted in secrecy or in violation of ethical guidelines in effect since 1991, she said. "We're pretty certain that everyone is following the spirit and intent" of the ethics guidelines.
O'Leary said President Clinton will issue a directive this week, as a precautionary measure, ordering an immediate halt to any classified experiments involving radiation and human subjects. She said she did not believe any such experiments were under way.
"As far as we have been able to ascertain, the department is not conducting any experiments that violate medical, ethical standards or the Nuremberg codes," she said.
The hearing is the first of what are expected to be several congressional inquiries into disclosures that unsuspecting subjects were used as guinea pigs for government-sponsored radiation experiments during the Cold War. O'Leary herself sparked the hearings when, in December, she revealed the once-secret research, which had been funded by the Atomic Energy Commission, a predecessor to the Energy Department.
The inquiry was called by committee Chairman John Glenn, D-Ohio, who said he wanted assurances there were no "rogue operators out there" who might still be conducting unethical experiments with radioactive or other harmful substances.
O'Leary promised that information on all the experimentation - past and present - would be released as soon as it is assembled, but added that investigators probably would need a year to track down all the details.
Similar searches are under way at the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, as well as the CIA, to determine whether any such experiments were performed under the auspices of those agencies.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown, who also testified Tuesday, said he had ordered an investigation into the VA's secret "Atomic Medicine Division," which was created in the 1950s, apparently also to conduct radiation experiments on humans.
Brown said he was trying to "piece together why this was done, what if any secretive activities it engaged in and what the consequences" of its experiments were. He added that he was "repelled" by the idea that veterans may have been "tricked" into taking part in experiments whose real nature may never have been disclosed to them.
by CNB