ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 20, 1996 TAG: 9611200052
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: Associated Press
The U.S. government will pay $4.8 million for injecting 12 people with uranium and plutonium without their knowledge as part of a Cold War-era radiation experiment.
``Never again,'' Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary said in announcing the settlement Tuesday. ``Never again should tests be performed on human beings.''
O'Leary said $400,000 apiece will go to the families of the 11 victims who are now dead, and a woman still living in upstate New York. Doctors are not sure whether any of the 11 deaths were directly related to the experiments.
``This settlement goes to the very heart of the moral accountability the government owes its citizens,'' the outgoing energy secretary said at a meeting of the American Public Health Association.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said the government has yet to compensate about 20,000 other people used for biochemical experiments in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.
The 12 victims in the settlement were injected during the 1940s - 11 with plutonium, one with uranium - to see how the human body would react to an atomic bombing. The tests sprang from efforts to develop atomic weapons.
At the time, scientists claimed that the people were terminally ill anyway and would not survive 10 years. But a number of them lived longer, and the plutonium is said to have caused urinary tract infections and painful osteoporosis, or thinning of the bones.
Autopsies on the patients injected with plutonium revealed bones ``that looked like Swiss cheese,'' said Raymond Heslin, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
Nine of the victims received the injections at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester as part of a research project conducted by the University of Rochester and the U.S. government. The three others were injected in Illinois, California and Tennessee.
The scientists performing the experiments ``had a code word for plutonium in medical records, so people couldn't figure out that these people were injected,'' said a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Leonard Marks.
``It was a rotten thing to do,'' said Luther Schultz, whose mother, Eda Schultz Charlton, was injected in 1945 at Strong Memorial. Charlton received a dose of radiation 43 times the amount an average person absorbs in a lifetime, but she lived another 38 years to age 85.
``If people had been notified and knew what they were doing, it would be a different thing,'' Schultz said. ``But this was just picking people out and shooting poison into them - I'm pretty bitter about that.''
The only survivor among the 12 is Mary Jean Connell, who is now in her 70s and lives near Buffalo.
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB