Radiation Exposure Tests Used Humans

Federal agencies conducted a 30-year series of radiation exposure experiments on human subjects, including injecting them with plutonium, radium and uranium, a House subcommittee reported Friday.

The experiments took place all over the country starting in the mid-1940s and ending in the 1970s, a report by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy conservation and power said.

The report is based on a review of thousands of pages of Energy Department documents obtained by the subcommittee in the past three years. Experiments conducted by the agency’s predecessors exposed hundreds of people to radiation, it concludes.

The experiments attempted to measure the biological effects of radioactive material, the doses from injected, ingested or inhaled radioactive substances and the time it took radioactive sub1937006958the report said.

‘Calibration Devices’

“American citizens thus became nuclear calibration devices,” the report said. Some of them were willing subjects, it said, but there is no record of informed consent for others. The subjects included prisoners, the elderly and the terminally ill.

The report says the government covered up the nature of the experiments to many families. It says some victims received doses 98 times the body burden recognized at the time the experiments were conducted.

“These experiments . . . shock the conscience,” subcommittee Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in a letter to Energy Secretary John S. Herrington. “Did the intense desire to know the consequences of radioactive exposure . . . lead American scientists to mimic the kind of demented human experiments conducted by the Nazis?”

Markey said present public and scientific officials are not responsible for the experiments, but he maintained that they represent a historical, institutional failure compounded by lack of follow-up.

Urges Compensation

He urged the department to try to find the living experimental subjects, look for increased incidence of radiation-associated diseases and compensate them for suspected damages.

The agencies sponsoring the experiments, the report says, were the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration.

Among experiments cited in the report:

--Fifty-seven adults were fed radioactive uranium and manganese at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in the 1960s.

--Twenty elderly adults were fed radium or thorium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s.

--Ten people were injected with radioactive phosphorus or fed Columbia River fish contaminated with radioactive phosphorus in 1963.