Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 22, 1995 TAG: 9506220056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: NATL/INTL EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the government was looking for people who could ``do a good job of body snatching'' to help scientists learn more about the effects of radioactive fallout.
Details of the worldwide search for dead bodies by the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, emerged Wednesday in newly declassified documents obtained by the presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Testing.
It was unclear how many remains were gathered through a network of AEC operatives, but investigators for the advisory panel said the number may have been 1,500 cadavers in the United States and a half-dozen other countries from Europe to Australia.
Code-named ``Project Sunshine,'' body collection was given top priority at the AEC as the government sought to learn the extent of radioactive fallout from bomb tests and what effect the contamination was having on human beings in the United States and elsewhere.
The searches, which focused particularly on urban areas and among the poor, were cloaked in secrecy. Doctors and relatives were told little or nothing about the purpose of the bone and tissue tests, according to documents released by the advisory panel.
``Human samples are of prime importance. If anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country,'' Willard Libby of the University of Chicago, one of the program's chief proponents, remarked at a secret 1955 AEC meeting.
A transcript of the Jan. 18, 1955, meeting of the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine was recently found and declassified by staff members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Testing.
At the meeting, participants called for the searches, which had begun in 1953, to be accelerated in light of the detonation in 1954 of a much more powerful hydrogen bomb in the Pacific. These tests intensified the need to learn more about radioactive fallout, the scientists said.
Libby, who in the 1960s won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, argued strongly that the examination of body tissues and bones from as wide a region as possible was essential to measure the worldwide health implications of nuclear bomb testing.
While the searches were alluded to in scientific literature as early as 1957, documents uncovered in February and new papers released by the presidential advisory panel Wednesday provide greater detail of the scope of the program and the importance given to it by senior government officials.
At the secret 1955 meeting, Libby described the difficulties of obtaining human samples, especially in the young age group.
While the project earlier had received a large number of stillborn infants, ``this supply has now been cut off,'' he told his colleagues, according to the transcript.
The scientists discussed the need to obtain samples from all age groups, from infants to the elderly. They cited a particularly fortunate find: a 29-year-old woman who died giving birth and her dead infant.
According to the transcript, AEC operatives had established a network of contacts in hospitals and among physicians in the United States as well as Canada, Europe, Australia, Latin America, Africa and the Philippines to collect the body parts.
A major source of cadavers was urban centers, especially New York City and Houston in the United States and Vancouver in Canada. The transcript did not say whether it was Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, or Vancouver, Wash. In these cities, as many as 20 bodies a month were expected, according to the transcript.
``Down in Houston, they don't have all these rules. ... They have a lot of poverty cases and so on,'' explained Dr. J. Laurence Kulp of Columbia University, adding that in some cities such as Houston ``we can get virtually everybody that dies.''
by CNB