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

DATE: TUESDAY, April 12, 1994                   TAG: 9404120139
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CINCINNATI                                LENGTH: Medium

SUBCOMMITTEE HOLDS HEARINGS ON UNIVERSITY RADIATION TESTS

At least 88 cancer patients, most of them poor and black, were involved in experiments administered by a University of Cincinnati radiologist between 1960 and 1971. The experiments were partially funded by the Pentagon.

Critics say the study aimed to help the government gauge how soldiers would respond to high doses of radiation on the nuclear battlefield.

A House subcommittee began hearings Monday in Cincinnati to determine whether the federal government should compensate families of those patients.

Relatives of some patients told the subcommittee that they were never informed the military had a role in the testing.

Joe Larkins, whose father, Willard Larkins, died in 1971, told the subcommittee the experiments might have shortened his father's life.

``My father did not know that he was being used as a guinea pig,'' Larkins said. ``My mother did not know, and as his children, we were not informed of the procedures to be used, nor of the risks involved.''

But another witness, Dr. James Cox of the American College of Radiology, supported the experiments.

The UC studies were ``based on a reasonable hypothesis'' and seemed to have used the accepted standards for that period, said Cox, a professor of radiotherapy at the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

``One might judge them harshly from a perspective 20 years later, but they were reviewed and repeatedly approved by peers of the investigators at the time the studies were conducted.''

All but one of the patients were terminally ill at the time, and all have been dead for years. Most suffered breast, lung or gastrointestinal malignancies, known as solid tumors. These did not respond to whole-body radiation, which was rare then and now is used only for cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.

Among those scheduled to testify at the hearing was Dr. Eugene Saenger, who ran the program at what then was General Hospital. Saenger and university officials have said the treatments were experimental therapy designed to ease the suffering of dying cancer patients.