
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 5, 1994                   TAG: 9401110250
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NUCLEAR TESTS

GIVE CREDIT to Hazel O'Leary for the kind of forthright leadership of the Energy Department that obviously has been lacking in the past. President Clinton's energy secretary is trying to hunt down the full, scandalous story of how our government used American citizens as laboratory rats to study the effects of radiation.

Some of this information has come out before, but not in anything like the scope revealed in recent days. Only now is the general public getting to know that, in the 1940s and '50s, government scientists fed cereal laced with radioactive material to retarded children; injected radioactive iodine into newborn babies; administered radioactive pills to pregnant women; and released nuclear radiation to study fallout.

All this without telling the subjects or their families anything about the tests or their potential side effects.

True, these were the early years of the Atomic Age and the Cold War, when there was great concern about learning the nature of the unleashed genie. And no informed-consent laws were then in effect. It may be, as well, that many at least of the estimated 800 individuals subjected to the tests suffered no harm.

None of these defenses excuse the outrage or its perpetrators.

Nazis experimented on humans in the Buchenwald concentration camp and elsewhere. It was in 1947, before most of the U.S. radiation tests were conducted, that the Nuremberg Code was drafted in response to the German atrocities. In a 1950 memo, one Atomic Energy Commission scientist conceded that the U.S. research might betray "a little of the Buchenwald touch."

O'Leary is taking the chance that more subjects may come forward and bring lawsuits. But some of them doubtless deserve compensation, and O'Leary is right in believing that the government should take responsibility for its actions.

The American people deserve to hear the full truth - not just for accountability's sake, but to discourage recurrence of unethical experimentation.

by CNB