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Human Radiation Experiments - Government Coverup
Human Radiation Experiments - Government Coverup
204 Clandestine nuclear blasts in addition to 800 publicly announced blasts.
A brief sampling of some of the macabre, secret human experiments uncovered by Welsome and
others is chilling.
Following is that article:
DUCK AND COVER(UP): U.S. RADIATION TESTING ON HUMANS by Tod Ensign and
Glenn Alcalay
If you have any lingering thoughts that the government's failure to disclose radiation
experimentation on humans was driven by misguided national security concerns, throw them in
the nearest nuclear waste dump. At least some officials knew what they were doing was
unconscionable and were ducking the consequences and covering their tails. A recently leaked
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) document lays out in the most bare-knuckled manner the
policy of coverup. It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with
humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents
covering such work field should be classified `secret,' wrote Colonel O.G. Haywood of the AEC.
*1 This letter confirms a policy of complete secrecy where human radiation experiments were
concerned. The Haywood letter may help explain a recently discovered 1953 Pentagon
document, declassified in 1975. The two-page order from the secretary of defense ostensibly
brought U.S. guidelines for human experimentation. in line with the Nuremberg Code, making
adherence to a universal standard official U.S. policy. Ironically, however, the Pentagon
document was classified and thus was probably not seen by many military researchers until its
declassification in 1975.2 As these and a steady stream of similar reports confirm, for decades,
the U.S. government had not only used human guinea pigs in radiation experiments, but had also
followed a policy of deliberate deception and cover up of its misuse of both civilians and military
personnel in nuclear weapons development and radiation research. While the Department of
Energy (DoE) has made some belated moves toward greater openness, there are clear indications
that other federal agencies and the White House have not yet deviated from the time-honored
tradition of deceit and self-serving secrecy.
CRACKS IN THE WALL OF SILENCE
The Clinton administration's first halting step toward taking responsibility for past government
misdeeds occurred on Pearl Harbor Day 1993, when DoE Secretary Hazel O'Leary confirmed
that the AEC, her agency's predecessor, had sponsored experiments in which hundreds of
Americans were exposed to radioactive material, often without their consent. That O'Leary had
decided to break with her agency's long tradition of secrecy and deception was something of a
surprise. After all, she came to the job after a career in the nuclear power industry. But,
confronted by a media firestorm over the government's Cold War nuclear experiments, O'Leary
was left with few options. Her decision to confirm some government abuses and reveal others
was precipitated by a series of reports by journalist Eileen Welsome in the Albuquerque Tribune
last November and the nearly simultaneous release of a Government Accounting Office (GAO)
report on radiation releases. *3 Following a six-year investigation, Welsome uncovered details of
five experiments in which plutonium was injected into 18 people without their informed consent.
The GAO report, meanwhile, is an important finding that government scientists deliberately
released radioactive material into populated areas so that they could study fallout patterns and the
rate at which radioactivity decayed. It profiles 13 different releases of radiation from 1948-52.
All were part of the U.S. nuclear weapons development program. The report concludes that other
planned radioactive releases not documented here may have occurred at ... U.S. nuclear sites
during these years. *4 The disclaimer suggests that a good deal of information about radiation
experiments remains locked away in government files. Top DoE aide Dan Reicher pulled
O'Leary out of a meeting last November just before the story broke to warn her that People were
injected with plutonium back in the 1940s, and there's a newspaper in New Mexico that's about
to lay out the whole thing. *5 O'Leary provided information about experiments at major
universities, including MIT, the University of Chicago, California, and Vanderbilt.
Experimenters exposed about 2,000 Americans to varying degrees of radiation. These numbers
may grow as more information about experiments is released.
INCIDENTAL FALLOUT
When O'Leary confirmed the human experiments, she also revealed two other important
activities. First, she admitted her agency had secretly conducted 204 underground nuclear tests in
Nevada from 1963-1990. These clandestine blasts were in addition to the 800-plus nuclear tests
publicly announced during that period. DoE's secrecy may have deceived only Congress and the
U.S. public. In 1990, the Soviet Union's minister for atomic energy produced an estimate of U.S.
detonations that was very close to the actual number including the secret ones. O'Leary's other
significant disclosure concerned DoE's massive stock of weapons-grade plutonium: 33.5 metric
tons of stockpiled plutonium and another 55.5 metric tons deployed in nuclear warheads and for
similar uses. *6 This admission calls into question DoE's past claims that national security
required the continued operation of unsafe plutonium processing plants to produce unnecessary
stockpiles of plutonium. O'Leary's disclosures about the human experiments have produced a
torrent of publicity. Much less attention has been paid to her admissions about secret nuclear
tests and plutonium stocks, which have much greater long-term implications for nuclear weapons
policy.
DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE
O'Leary's promises of full disclosure by DoE aside, *7 one well-placed source within the agency
suggested that the Pentagon, NASA and the CIA were just going through the motions. *8 For
example, the CIA announced in January 1994 that after searching its files it could locate only one
reference to human experimentation with radiation. Former CIA official Scott Breckenridge
charged that in 1973, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the chemical division of the CIA's Technical
Services Division, may have destroyed many secret files, including those on human radiation
experiments. *9 The history of partial revelation and near complete inaction is long. In 1975, the
Rockefeller Commission first revealed that the CIA may have conducted radiation experiments,
*10 but the records if not destroyed have yet to be uncovered. William Colby, CIA director from
1973 to 1975, recently said, I recall the various drug tests, which were scandalous, but nothing
about radiation. *11 So far, the institutional memories of the implicated agencies appear to be as
conveniently spotty as Colby's.
SECRET EXPERIMENTS
While officials have dallied, dedicated reporters, angry victims, and a handful of government
whistleblowers have exposed a pattern of secrecy and deception. A brief sampling of some of the
macabre, secret human experiments uncovered by Welsome and others is chilling. * In 1945,
Albert Stevens, a 58-year old California house painter suffering from a huge stomach ulcer, was
injected with doses of plutonium 238 and 239 equivalent to 446 times the average lifetime
exposure. *12 Doctors recommended an operation and told his children he had only six months
to live. For the next year, scientists collected plutonium-laden urine and fecal samples from
Stevens and used that data in a classified scientific report, A Comparison of the Metabolism of
Plutonium in Man and the Rat. There is little doubt scientists knew of the danger: The problem
of chronic plutonium poisoning is a matter of serious concern for those who come in contact with
this material, the report concluded.13 AEC officials in 1947 refused to release the information
because it contains material, which in the opinion of the [AEC], might adversely affect the
national interest. 14 * In 1947, doctors injected plutonium into the left leg of Elmer Allen, a
36-year-old African American railroad porter. Three days later, the leg was amputated for a
supposed pre-existing bone cancer. Researchers analyzed tissue samples to determine the
physiology of plutonium dispersion. *15 In 1973, scientists summoned Allen to the Argonne
National Laboratory near Chicago, where he was subjected to a follow-up whole body radiation
scan, and his urine was analyzed to ascertain lingering levels of plutonium from the 1947
injection. *16 * Beginning in 1949, the Quaker Oats Company, the National Institutes of Health,
and the AEC fed minute doses of radioactive materials to boys at the Fernald School for the
mentally retarded in Waltham, Massachusetts, to determine if chemicals used in breakfast cereal
prevented the body from absorbing iron and calcium. The unwitting subjects were told that they
were joining a science club. The consent form sent to the boys' parents made no mention of the
radiation experiment. *17 * In 1963, 131 prison inmates in Oregon and Washington state were
paid about $200 each to be exposed to 600 roentgens of radiation (100 times the allowable
annual dose for nuclear workers). They signed consent forms agreeing to submit to X-ray
radiation of my scrotum and testes, but were not warned about the possibility of contracting
testicular cancer. Doctors later performed vasectomies on the inmates to avoid the possibility of
contaminating the general population with irradiation-induced mutants. *18 * From 1960-71, in
experiments which may have caused the most deaths and spanned the most years, Dr. Eugene
Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, exposed 88 cancer patients to whole body
radiation. *19 Many of the guinea pigs were poor African-Americans at Cincinnati General
Hospital with inoperable tumors. All but one of the 88 patients have since died. *20 There is
evidence that scientists forged signatures on the consent forms for the Cincinnati experiments.
Gloria Nelson testified before the House that her grandmother, Amelia Jackson, had been strong
and still working before she was treated by Dr. Saenger. Following exposure to 100 rads of
whole body radiation (about 7,500 chest X-rays), Amelia Jackson bled and vomited for days and
became permanently disabled. Jackson testified that the signa- ture on her grandmother's consent
form was forged.21
WATCHING THE BOMB
While researchers were running tests on relatively small numbers of hapless civilians, the
military was conducting a series of potentially lethal experiments on a massive scale. From
1946-63, the military ordered more than 200,000 active-duty GIs to observe one or more nuclear
bomb tests either in the Pacific or at the Nevada Test Site. The 195,000 GIs who served as part of
the occupation force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may also have suffered the effects of radiation.
A vast body of information about nuclear bomb testing and its effects on humans has yet to see
the light of day, but some individual accounts are harrowing. One atomic veteran, Jim O'Connor,
provided a detailed account of the Turk blast at the Nevada test site in March 1955. O'Connor
reported seeing someone crawling from a bunker near ground-zero after the blast: "There was a
guy with a mannequin look who had apparently crawled behind the bunker. Something like
wires were attached to his arms and his face was bloody. I smelled an odor like burning flesh.
The rotary camera I'd seen [earlier] was going `zoom, zoom, zoom' and the guy kept trying to get
up." *22 At this point, O'Connor fled and was picked up by AEC rad-safety monitors who took
him to a hospital where he was treated for radiation overdose. The Defense Nuclear Agency
refused to confirm or deny O'Connor's account, although there are reports which refer to a
volunteer officer program at several of the test blasts. Navy officer R.A. Hinners was another
nuclear guinea pig. *23 Only a mile from ground zero, he and seven other volunteers witnessed
the detonation of a 55-kiloton bomb (four times the Hiroshima blast) on April 25, 1953. While
the Army's report, Exercise Desert Rock VII and VIII, covers the 1957 test series and notes that
the observers suffered no adverse effects, the Pentagon has not released any material relating to
the use of volunteers at any other tests. *24
DELIBERATE ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION RELEASES
Nuclear researchers did not limit themselves to small groups of selected guinea pigs or large
groups of soldiers under orders. The U.S. government also deliberately released radioactive
materials into the atmosphere, endangering military personnel and untold numbers of civilians.
Unsurprisingly, the people exposed during these tests were not informed. In four of these tests at
the AEC's facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, bomb-testers set off conventional explosives to
send aloft clouds of radioactive material, including strontium and uranium. When the AEC
tracked the clouds across northern New Mexico, it detected some radioactivity 70 miles away.
According to a Los Alamos press officer, there may have been as many as 250 other such tests
during the same period.25 Nor was this intentional release the largest. During the December
1949 Green Run test at the Hanford (Washington) Nuclear Reservation, the AEC loosed
thousands of curies of radioactive iodine-131 several times the amount released from the 1979
Three Mile Island disaster into the atmosphere simply to test its recently installed radiological
monitoring equipment. Passing over Spokane and reaching as far as the California-Oregon
border, Green Run irradiated thousands of downwinders, as civilians exposed to the effects of
airborne radiation tests are known, and contaminated an enormous swath of cattle grazing and
dairy land. *26 A team of epidemiologists is now looking into an epidemic of late-occurring
thyroid tumors and other radiogenic disorders among the downwind residents in eastern
Washington state. The plant's emissions control systems were turned off during the experiment,
releasing into the atmosphere almost twice as much radioactive iodine-131 as originally planned.
The GAO report notes that the off-site population was not forewarned [nor] made aware of the
[test] for several decades. It also notes that although adverse weather patterns kept the radiation
from spreading as far as expected, monitoring Air Force planes detected hot clouds over 100
miles northeast of the site. *27
SACRIFICIAL LAMBS
Even when the government took steps to create the appearance of openness, it was less than
candid. You are in a very real sense active participants in the Nation's atomic test program,
proclaimed a 1955 AEC propaganda booklet widely disseminated to downwind neighbors of the
Nevada Test Site. Some of you have been inconvenienced by our test operations, and at times
some of you have been exposed to potential risk from flash, blast, or fallout. You have accepted
the inconvenience or the risk without fuss, without alarm, and without panic. *28 The AEC's
concern for inconveniences or honesty, however, did not extend to the 4,500 Utah and Nevada
sheep who died mysteriously in 1953 after exposure to fallout. The AEC denied any causal
connection between the sheep's exposure to radioactive fallout from the 1953 Upshot-Knothole
tests and their deaths. *29 In a 1956 trial, Utah and Nevada sheep ranchers lost their lawsuit
against the government. But years later, Harold Knapp, a former AEC scientist who analyzed the
1953 sheep deaths, challenged the AEC's accounts. The simplest explanation, he told a 1979
congressional committee, of the primary cause of death in the lambing ewes is irradiation of the
ewe's gastrointestinal tract by beta particles from all the fission products ingested by the sheep
along with open range forage. *30 In a 1982 retrial, A. Sherman Christensen, the same judge
who presided over the 1956 trial, noting that fraud was committed by the U.S. Government when
it lied, pressured witnesses, and manipulated the processes of the court, ruled for the ranchers.
*31
PARADISE LOST
U.S. government callousness and deception extended halfway around the world. Another nuclear
experiment was underway in the Marshall Islands a de facto strategic colony of the U.S. located
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. exploded 67 atomic and
hydrogen bombs at Bikini and Enewetok, two Marshall group atolls. Once again, the full impact
and consequences of this experiment would not be disclosed for decades, and then only
reluctantly. The largest and dirtiest of the Marshall Islands blasts was code-named Bravo. At 15
megatons more than 1,000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb Bravo rained lethal radioactive
fallout over thousands of unsuspecting islanders under circumstances which remain mysterious.
The people of Rongelap atoll were especially hard-hit. They were evacuated from their home
islands two days after Bravo, following the absorption of massive doses of high-level fallout.
Following the Rongelap evacuation, the AEC considered repatriating the islanders to their home
atoll in order to gather vital fallout data. In 1956, Dr. G. Failla, chair of the AEC's Advisory
Committee on Biology and Medicine, wrote to AEC head Lewis Strauss: The Advisory
Committee hopes that conditions will permit an early accomplishment of the plan [to return the
Rongelap people]. The Committee is also of the opinion that here is the opportunity for a useful
genetic study of the effects on these people. 32 Three years later, Dr. C.L. Dunham, head of the
AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine, reiterated the AEC's interest. Studying the Rongelap
victims of the Bravo blast will, he wrote, ... contribute to estimates of long term hazards to
human beings and to an evaluation of the recovery period following a single nuclear detonation.
*33 Having established the near-perfect longitudinal human radiation experiment in 1954, DoE
continues to compile data from their Marshallese subjects. It appears that AEC was guilty of
both negligently disregarding the well-being of the Marshallese and then lying about its actions.
On February 24, 1994, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Natural
Resources, convened a hearing on Bravo. Recalling weather data that demonstrated prior
knowledge that islanders would receive substantial fallout, and that winds had not unexpectedly
shifted, *34 Rep. Miller declared that We have deliberately kept that information from the
Marshallese. That clearly constitutes a cover-up. *35
A PATTERN OF IGNORED DISCLOSURES
The record of U.S. government lies, misrepresentation, and cover-ups to support its nuclear
research program is incontrovertible, if not yet complete. From the inception of the U.S. nuclear
program, government policy has placed military and scientific interests above both the well-being
of thousands of people and the truth. And, Secretary O'Leary's evident openness notwithstanding,
the government's record in responding to earlier disclosures is not reassuring. When faced with
damaging disclosures in the past, the government attempted to stonewall. When that would not
suffice, the government only grudgingly responded. A few examples: * In 1980, Congress issued
a stinging report, The Forgotten Guinea Pigs, which concluded that the AEC chose to secure, at
any cost, the atmospheric nuclear weapons testing program rather than to protect the health and
welfare of the residents of the area who lived downwind from the site. *36 * In 1982, the New
York Times provided evidence that policy-makers foresaw dangers and acted to cover them up.
The story included a statement by a former Army medic, Van R. Brandon, of Sacramento, that
his medical unit kept two sets of books of radiation readings at the Nevada Test Site during the
1956-57 tests. One set was to show that no one received an [elevated] exposure, Brandon told the
paper. The other set of books showed ... the actual reading. That set was brought in a locked
briefcase every morning, he recalled. *37 DoE officials simply denied Brandon's allegations, and
no further investigation was pursued. *38 * In 1986, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) released a
report detailing human radiation experiments that AEC and its successors conducted between the
1940s and the 1970s. Many were designed to measure the effects of radiation on humans, and
according to Markey, American citizens thus became nuclear calibration devices for
experimenters run amok. 39 The Markey report, American Nuclear Guinea Pigs, described 31
grisly experiments involving 695 people who were captive audiences or populations that some
experimenters frighteningly might have considered `expendable.' 40 When the Reagan
administration refused to investigate the disclosures, the Markey report was quickly forgotten.
There was a massive public relations relationship that existed between the [Reagan]
administration, the defense contractors and experimenters in America, charged Markey, that
worked very effectively throughout the 1980s. I'd say something, and I'd get attacked, and it
would be a one-day story. *41
A LONG, HARD ROAD TO JUSTICE
From the beginning of the nuclear age, the federal government not only ignored or suppressed
knowledge of abuses in the nuclear experimental program, it also fought all attempts to hold it
accountable for damages. A series of Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1950 bars both
atomic veterans and downwinders from suing the federal government. *42 Veterans are denied
the right to sue for injuries suffered while on active duty because the Court believes that this
would interfere with military necessity and national security. *43 Downwinders have also
encountered many obstacles in their long struggle for medical studies and compensation. One
group of Utah residents who lived under the fallout during the 1950s and early 1960s finally
succeeded in bringing their federal lawsuit to trial in 1982. They scored an important victory
when the trial judge found the bomb tests were responsible for their cancers and awarded them
damages. *44 But the appeals court reversed this verdict by re-defining the discretionary function
exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act to make the government immune from lawsuits of this
kind. *45 In essence, the court held that setting off nuclear bombs was within the discretionary
power of high-ranking officials and could not be questioned in a lawsuit for damages. After the
federal appeals court stripped the downwinders of their victory, in 1990, Congress finally stepped
in and adopted the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act for downwinders and some groups of
uranium miners. Claimants must document residence in the fallout area and that they suffer from
one of 13 cancers linked to radia-tion exposure. The program, administered by the Department of
Justice, places a ceiling of $50,000 per claim, although many awards were smaller. Justice
granted 818 claims out of 1,460 which were submitted as of January 1994.46 In 1988, Congress
acted on behalf of atomic veterans, forcing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to establish
a limited compensation plan with a $75,000 cap. It provides presumptive disability to veterans
who can prove that they suffer from one of a list of 13 cancers (e.g., bone, breast, skin, stomach,
thyroid, leukemia, etc.), and that they were present during one or more nuclear test blasts. Of
more than 15,000 veterans' claims filed as of January 1994, only 1,401 have been approved,
indicating that most claimants are unable to qualify under the terms of the program. *47 One
problem confronting many veterans is inaccurate or missing military records that omit service at
a nuclear test site. *48 Another is to prepare a radiation dose reconstruction that estimates the
amount of exposure the veteran received. Many vets have challenged the accuracy of dose
estimates prepared by a private contractor, Science Applications International. This privately held
research corporation includes among its stockholders Defense Department officials including
Secretary William Perry and Deputy Secretary John Deutch, and one-time nominee Bobby Ray
Inman. The Defense Department has little to say about potential conflicts of interest. We're going
to decline to comment on this. I don't think we would have anything that would be meaningful to
say, said Pentagon spokesman Capt. Michael Doubleday. *49 A final obstacle is that just having
cancer isn't enough; veterans must prove they are disabled by it.
WHAT WILL CLINTON DO?
The Clinton administration is about to undergo a test of its own. The key question will be how it
defines who will be considered a nuclear test victim for purposes of health research and
compensation. Given the decades-long record of coverup and callousness, there is little reason to
assume that the recent revelations concerning human experimentation will produce any lasting
benefit for the tens of thousands of veterans and civilians harmed by nuclear weapons testing and
radiation experiments over the past half century let alone the estimated five million U.S. citizens
exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during the Cold War. * Early indications are that the
White House will stake out a restrictive position. DoE head O'Leary also appears to be seeking
some remedy short of compensating all categories of victims. So, apparently, is the GAO. The
GAO's report on atmospheric radiation releases provides a glimpse of the emerging strategy. In
assessing the significance of the Green Run test, the GAO struck a cautious note. The test [was
not] intended to be a radiation experiment or a field test of radiobiological effects. [After]
examining still classified passages [we] found that they don't refer to any such intentions. *50
This interpretation could provide the basis for a restrictive reading of who is entitled to
compensation and follow-up health studies.
STACKING THE DECK
The Clinton administration may also be moving to head off potentially monstrous payouts to
victims. To deal with the predicted avalanche of claims, as well as to fend off adverse publicity,
the administration has established an advisory committee and an interagency working group to
define policy. The advisory committee's mission statement, as well as the backgrounds of some
of the people appointed to the panels, give victims cause for skepticism. The President's
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments is composed of scientists, medical
ethicists, and lawyers and is chaired by Dr. Ruth Faden of Johns Hopkins University. The White
House announcement stated that its mission is to evaluate the ethical and scientific standards of
government sponsored human experiments which involved intentional exposure to ionizing
radiation. *51 (emphasis added) When read in conjunction with the GAO report's cautious
conclusion, this language appears to sharply limit possible claimants. And one of the advisory
panel members, Washington, D.C. lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, has credentials that have raised
eyebrows. Feinberg played a controversial role in forging an 11th-hour settlement of the class
action lawsuit against Agent Orange manufacturers in 1984. Working at the direction of trial
judge Jack Weinstein in Brooklyn, New York, Feinberg helped ram through a $180 million
settlement. Although the figure seems large, it is grossly inadequate in light of the 250,000
veteran-claimants and the severity of their disabilities. Since the settlement, Judge Weinstein has
blocked every subsequent lawsuit against the Agent Orange makers even for veterans whose
cancer appeared years after the settlement was reached. * The Interagency Working Group has
representatives from every federal agency involved in radiation research and also includes a
lawyer member whose past clients raise questions about his impartiality. Joel Klein, recently
named White House Deputy Legal Counsel, was previously a partner in Klein Farr Smith &
Taranto, a Washington, D.C. law firm which represented a number of corporate defendants in
cases involving the due process rights of class action members. In 1985, Klein's firm won a
Supreme Court decision in Phillips Petroleum v. Shutts, which narrowly interpreted the rights of
claimants in class actions. Klein also has a case pending before the Supreme Court, Ticor Title v.
Brown, which experts expect will further diminish the rights of injured parties in class action
suits.
CLOUDED HORIZONS
It is too early to tell what role either Feinberg or Klein will play in determining compensation for
nuclear test victims, but their histories don't lend cause for optimism. And given the
administration's efforts at damage control, some advocates of radiation victims are dubious that
the recent disclosures will bring any more change than those in the past. Rob Hager, a public
interest lawyer in Washington, has been fighting the DoE for years. He has waged an 11-year
legal battle on behalf of the widow of Joe Harding, who developed cancer after working at a DoE
uranium processing plant in Paducah, Kentucky. The DoE's approach to compensation is a
scorched earth policy; settle no claims and litigate to the hilt, Hager charges. They've changed
their head, but it doesn't seem to be connected to the body. *52 Eileen Welsome agrees. The
Albuquerque journalist, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on this issue, was
asked what she learned. She responded, The DoE of today is no different from the DoE of 50
years ago. It's an obstructionist agency; it doesn't follow the law. I think it's an agency that bears
careful scrutiny and constant scrutiny. 53
THE BUCHENWALD TOUCH
***************************
The still-emerging history of nuclear experimentation raises important issues of medical ethics and calls into question the scientific community's sensitivity to and awareness of these issues. It also raises the question of whether these experimenters, in furthering the Pentagon's military and security demands, violated international standards on human experimentation. Even at this late date, it seems that some scientists involved are unable to see any problems with their behavior. Patricia Durbin, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California who participated in plutonium experiments, recently said: "They were always on the lookout for somebody who had some kind of terminal disease who was going to undergo an amputation. These things were not done to plague people or make them sick and miserable. They were not done to kill people. They were done to gain potentially valuable information. The fact that they were injected and provided this valuable data should almost be a sort of memorial rather than something to be ashamed of. It doesn't bother me to talk about the plutonium injectees because of the value of the information they provided. *1" And Dr. Victor Bond, a medical physicist and doctor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently defended the Fernald experiments, in which retarded children were deliberately given radioactive substances in their breakfast cereal. A question arose as to whether chemicals in breakfast cereals interfered with the uptake of iron or calcium in children. An answer was needed, declared Bond. In reference to the entire series of cold war nuclear experiments, Bond offered that It's useful to know what dose of radiation sterilizes; it's useful to know what different doses of radiation will do to human beings. *2 While Drs. Bond and Durbin rationalized such programs, other scientists have spoken out. Referring to the Cincinnati experiments in which 88 cancer patients were exposed to massive whole body doses of radiation, Dr. David Egilman, a former Cincinnati faculty member, said, The study was designed to test the effects of radiation on soldiers. It was known that whole-body radiation wouldn't treat the patients' cancer. What happened was one of the worst things this government has done to its citizens. *3 And Dr. Joseph Hamilton, a neurologist at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco, referred to his own human radiation experiments in the 1940s as having a little of the Buchenwald touch. *4 THE BUCHENWALD TOUCH is not limited to Cold War-related experiments. In what has come to be known as the Tuskegee Study, 412 African American sharecroppers suffering from syphillis were rounded up in Tuskegee, Alabama, in the early 1930s. For forty years, the men were never told what had stricken them while doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service observed the ravages of the disease, from blindness and paralysis to dementia and early death. Even after penicillin proved to be an effective treatment for syphilis, they were left untreated. *5 Nor are such experiments a thing of the past. Recent congressional hearings revealed studies on schizophrenia in the late 1980s where doctors intentionally worsened patients' symptoms, causing relapses and leading to the death by suicide of at least one of the patients. Dr. Michael Davidson, who led a study at the VA Hospital in the Bronx, defended the study, saying, it would not be advisable to [warn] the patients about psychosis or relapse. *6
Page Modified December 27, 1998