Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 9, 1994 TAG: 9401090033
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
For the Inupiat Eskimos of northwest Alaska, it came from the caribou, who got it from the lichen, which absorbed it from the radioactive debris scattered across the tundra by scientists.
For a group of cancer patients in Cincinnati - mostly poor, mostly black - it came in the form of "treatments" administered by an eminent researcher in radiation.
For children at the Fernald School for the Mentally Retarded, it came along with their breakfast cereal, served up by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From Alaska to Boston, one of the Cold War's most chilling legacies is finally coming to light, dragged into the open by the very agency that zealously safeguarded the nation's nuclear secrets for decades. At the direction of Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, her department has vowed to "come clean" on the human radiation experiments conducted under the sponsorship of the federal government over nearly three decades.
Beyond the shocking crudeness of some of the experiments lies another injustice: The subjects of the government's secretive studies were not just human guinea pigs in a series of potentially lethal experiments. Many were drawn from the ranks of society's dispossessed, either by virtue of their race, age, income or intelligence.
In a sense, some were victims twice over: Already socially disadvantaged, they were used by a government and medical establishment that appeared to value science and prestige and military supremacy more highly than the rights of individuals on the fringes of society.
The picture that is emerging is one that, as a government scientist familiar with the testing put it in 1950, "has a little of the Buchenwald touch" - a reference to the Nazi concentration camp in which grotesque experiments were conducted on prisoners.
From 1945 until the mid-1970s - years of concern about the Soviet Union's military intentions - the federal government underwrote a number of experiments that involved exposing human subjects to highly radioactive substances.
In several experiments, scientists injected toxic plutonium into gravely injured hospital patients. In another, they exposed indigent cancer patients to whole-body radiation 10 times more powerful than that recommended as treatment for leukemia. They dangled prison inmates' testicles in irradiated water, and served poor pregnant women cocktails containing radioactive iron filings. Although the research proceeded independently at different times and in different places, all of it ultimately was financed with tax dollars.
As the government and the scientific community scour files for evidence of such experiments, they are confronting ethical issues as old as the Hippocratic oath and as recent as the 1947 Nuremberg Convention, which articulated international standards of informed consent.
So far, O'Leary has discussed details of only one of the experiments. Others have come to light as a result of congressional hearings or independent investigations. Altogether, information involving more than 30 experiments has been disclosed, and government officials acknowledge that many more are likely to be unearthed.
Of those cases for which specific information is available, roughly a dozen involve subjects drawn from the ranks of the disadvantaged. Ruth Faden, a medical ethicist at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University who will chair the review panel created by O'Leary, said "it would not be surprising" if the full body of experiments were to show a significant pattern of abuse of vulnerable and dispossessed people. "There is a pattern already existing" of such abuses in experiments outside of the area of radiation studies, she noted.
In fairness, most of the experiments were conducted at a time when far less was known about the long-term hazards of radiation exposure, and they are being judged by far more sophisticated standards than were available to scientists at the time. Even so, the revelations raise disturbing questions about the subjects chosen.
Did the researchers understand that some of their experiments might be ethically questionable? Some of the principals have defended the studies as reasonable and necessary in light of the apparent threat of nuclear warfare. Today's critics say the choice of subjects suggests that scientists knew even then that their research might not stand up to public scrutiny.
"The best evidence," said Stanley Chesley, an attorney involved in several radiation compensation cases, "is that they were doing it to poor and black people. You didn't see them doing it at the Mayo Clinic."
Did they know their experiments might harm their subjects? A 1963 memorandum obtained by the Los Angeles Times suggests that in at least one case, scientists strongly suspected that it would.
Neatly hand-printed at the bottom of a proposal to irradiate the testicles of some Northwest prison inmates are the words of Dr. Charles W. Edington, a radiological expert who later participated in the study: "I'm for support at the requested level, as long as we are not liable. I worry about possible carcinogenic effects of such treatments."
Were prospective subjects made to understand the known or likely effects of the proposed procedures? And if so, did they have a realistic option of declining? In several cases, the answer clearly appears to be no.
Faden said the independent panel established by O'Leary will focus on the standards used in choosing subjects and on the extent of informed consent by participants. In examining those issues, Faden said, members will consider whether Cold War anxiety - the sense of military urgency that clearly prompted support for many studies - is a valid excuse for any abuses that occurred.
In the view of some medical ethicists, that question already has been answered. "We heard that defense, and heard it loudly at the Nuremberg trials, and we rejected it," said Arthur Caplan, author of "When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust."
"It just won't wash to invoke it now. In fact, I find it an even less persuasive defense now, because these people didn't experiment on themselves or their families. They said, `Let's round up the insane, the inane, the disabled, debilitated and vulnerable, and experiment on them.' They rounded them up and put them on the altar of the Cold War."
by CNB