COLUMN ONE : Science of Power and Weakness : In the name of the Cold War, researchers took the disadvantaged and made them subjects of risky radiation tests. Questions remain about the goals, the greed and the humanity.

They feared the threat of atomic war, of hostile superpowers firing nuclear missiles over the horizon, forever changing the lives of innocent civilians. But they never expected the radiation to come from their own government.

For the Inupiat of northwest Alaska, it came from the caribou, who got it from the lichen, which absorbed it from the radioactive debris scattered across the tundra by scientists. For a group of cancer patients in Cincinnati--mostly poor, mostly black--it came in the form of “treatments” administered by an eminent researcher in radiation. For children at the Fernald School for the Mentally Retarded, it came along with their breakfast cereal, served up by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From Alaska to Boston, one of the Cold War’s most chilling legacies is finally coming to light, dragged into the open by the very agency that zealously safeguarded the nation’s nuclear secrets for decades. At the direction of Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, her department has vowed to “come clean” on the human radiation experiments conducted under the sponsorship of the federal government over nearly three decades.

Beyond the shocking crudeness of some of the experiments lies another injustice: The subjects of the government’s secretive studies were not just guinea pigs in a series of potentially lethal experiments. Many were drawn from the ranks of society’s dispossessed, either by virtue of their race, age, income or intelligence.

In a sense, some were victims twice over: Already socially disadvantaged, they were used by a government and medical establishment that appeared to value science and prestige and military supremacy more highly than the rights of individuals on the fringes of society.

The picture that is emerging is one that, as a government scientist familiar with the testing put it in 1950, “has a little of the Buchenwald touch”--a reference to the Nazi concentration camp in which grotesque experiments were conducted on prisoners.

From 1945 until the mid-1970s--years of concern about the Soviet Union’s military intentions--the federal government underwrote a number of experiments that involved exposing human subjects to highly radioactive substances.

In several experiments, scientists injected toxic plutonium into gravely injured hospital patients. In another, they exposed indigent cancer patients to whole-body radiation 10 times more powerful than that recommended as treatment for leukemia. They dangled prison inmates’ testicles in irradiated water, and served poor pregnant women a drink containing radioactive iron filings. Although the research proceeded independently at different times and in different places, all of it ultimately was financed with tax dollars.

As the government and the scientific community scour files for evidence of such experiments, they are confronting ethical issues as old as the Hippocratic oath and as recent as the Nuremberg Code of 1947, which articulated international standards of informed consent.

So far, O’Leary has discussed details of only one of the experiments. Others have come to light as a result of congressional hearings or independent investigations. Altogether, information involving more than 30 experiments has been disclosed, and government officials acknowledge that many more are likely to be unearthed.

Of those cases for which specific information is available, roughly a dozen involve subjects drawn from the ranks of the disadvantaged. Ruth Faden, a medical ethicist at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University who will chair the review panel created by O’Leary, said “it would not be surprising” if the full body of experiments was to show a significant pattern of abuse of vulnerable and dispossessed people. “There is a pattern already existing” of such abuses in experiments outside of the area of radiation studies, she noted.

In fairness, most of the experiments were conducted at a time when far less was known about the long-term hazards of radiation exposure, and they are being judged by far more sophisticated standards than were available to scientists at the time. Even so, the revelations raise disturbing questions about the subjects chosen.

Did the researchers understand that some of their experiments might be ethically questionable? Some of the principals have defended the studies as reasonable and necessary in light of the apparent threat of nuclear warfare. Today’s critics say the choice of subjects suggests scientists knew even then that their research might not stand up to public scrutiny.

“The best evidence,” said Stanley Chesley, an attorney involved in several radiation compensation cases, “is that they were doing it to poor and black people. You didn’t see them doing it at the Mayo Clinic.”

Did they know their experiments might harm their subjects? A 1963 memorandum obtained by The Times suggests that in at least one case, scientists strongly suspected that it would.

Neatly hand-printed at the bottom of a proposal to irradiate the testicles of some Northwest prison inmates are the words of Dr. Charles W. Edington, a radiological expert who later participated in the study: “I’m for support at the requested level, as long as we are not liable. I worry about possible carcinogenic effects of such treatments.”

Were prospective subjects made to understand the known or likely effects of the proposed procedures? And if so, did they have a realistic option of declining? In several cases, the answer clearly appears to be no.

Faden said the independent panel established by O’Leary will focus on the standards used in choosing subjects and on the extent of informed consent by participants. In examining those issues, Faden said, members will consider whether Cold War anxiety--the sense of military urgency that clearly prompted support for many studies--is a valid excuse for any abuses that occurred.

In the view of some medical ethicists, that question already has been answered. “We heard that defense, and heard it loudly at the Nuremberg trials, and we rejected it,” said Arthur Caplan, author of “When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust.”

“It just won’t wash to invoke it now. In fact, I find it an even less persuasive defense now, because these people didn’t experiment on themselves or their families. They said, ‘Let’s round up the insane, the inane, the disabled, debilitated and vulnerable, and experiment on them.’ They rounded them up and put them on the altar of the Cold War,” he said.

Among the experiments already documented by congressional studies and independent investigators, a few follow the tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves, their colleagues and even their loved ones: In one study at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, 57 consenting adults--including the wife of the principal investigator--were fed tiny spheres of radioactive material to see how quickly it would pass through their intestinal tracts.

But as investigators comb the scattered records of government-sponsored experiments, they may find a disproportionate number of anonymous subjects who were disadvantaged.

Among them were pregnant women who sought free health care at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee. In 1945 and 1946, doctors at Vanderbilt gave 751 women in the later stages of pregnancy a radioactive tonic to see how they would metabolize radioactivity and to determine safe levels of radiation exposure. The doses--30 times higher than normal environmental radiation--were not considered safe at the time.

For five years starting in 1961, researchers at MIT injected 20 subjects, ages 63 to 83, with radioactive Radium-224 and Thorium-234. The subjects, drawn from the Age Center of New England, had volunteered to participate in “a variety of research projects on aging,” according to a 1986 report.

At the same time the search for victims takes investigators to the edges of American society, it is taking them to the pinnacles of medicine and academia.

“The most important field of investigation today is that of attempting to understand and mitigate the possible effects of nuclear warfare upon human beings,” Eugene Saenger, the University of Cincinnati radiologist who conducted whole-body radiation experiments on low-income subjects, told an interviewer in 1970.

“I’m a person who takes the defense of our country very seriously,” Saenger was quoted as saying in “The Great American Bomb Machine,” a book by Roger Rapoport. “I think it is important to find out the kind of things we are learning in this study.”

“Why didn’t they put their bodies where their patriotism was instead of applying for grants from the Atomic Energy Commission?” asked Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a watchdog group. “This whole thing was about power and money. That’s why it was easy to use subjects who were disempowered.”

Officials believe the government’s far-flung program of radiation experimentation, often involving unwilling or unwitting subjects, may have left an indelible mark on the lives of about 800 people and their families. And those numbers could swell as the Energy Department combs through about 32 million pages of information--a stack of documents three miles high--related to the nuclear weapon and energy program.

Over the next several months, the search will take federal investigators into prisons--considered by medical ethicists today to be one of the most questionable venues for medical experiments. It will reach into nursing homes and schools for the mentally disabled, into busy city hospitals where the nation’s poor are treated without charge, and into Native American communities scattered throughout Alaska and the West.

Some of the experimental subjects--like a group of comatose brain cancer victims injected with uranium--were critically ill at the time that doctors proposed untested radiation treatments on them. Others, like the Inupiat of northwest Alaska, were so perfectly adapted to their frigid environment that scientists were interested in determining whether white soldiers could handle the cold as well as the Inupiat.

Still others belong to groups placed under the extended guardianship of the government, making it much easier to monitor the results of experimentation over an extended period.

“We feel like we were used as guinea pigs,” said Ray Koonuk, an Inupiat from Point Hope, near where scientists in 1962 seeded the tundra with as much as 10 curies of radioactive debris. In the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident of 1979, by comparison, approximately 15 curies of radioactive material far less toxic than that apparently used in Alaska was said to have been released into the environment.

“I guess we just didn’t have very much knowledge of what was going on in the outside world, what kind of chemicals were in the bombs. We feel taken advantage of,” Koonuk said.

Like other subsistence hunters in the Point Hope area, Koonuk hunted and gathered bird eggs in the unmarked experimental area with his grandfather, who is dying of cancer, and with a friend who died of cancer at 36. After the issue was raised last spring by Alaskan lawmakers, the Clinton Administration promised to investigate.

“People are just frustrated and scared, asking, ‘Am I next?’ ” said Koonuk. “There’s no trust any more in the government.”

Indeed, since the revelations began emerging in early December, the sense of fear and distrust seems to have spread as insidiously as radioactive fallout after a nuclear blast. The Energy Department’s switchboards have been jammed with about 10,000 calls per day. Many of the calls are from people who probably received standard medical radiation treatments in recent decades but fear they may have been subjects of additional tests without their knowledge.

Their suspicions are understandable: At the time the experiments were conducted, many subjects were told little or nothing about the scientific objectives and possible effects. At the University of Cincinnati, many terminally ill subjects in one experiment were told that an experimental dose of full-body radiation was part of their “treatment.” Since patients in the study had a median IQ of 87, it is unclear whether further explanation of the study’s risks--if any--would have satisfied modern-day standards of informed consent. An IQ of 100 is considered to be average.

In a 1946-47 study conducted at the University of Rochester in New York, six patients were injected with increasing doses of a radioactive concoction in an effort to determine what levels of radiation would damage the kidneys. One patient was homeless and consequently “agreed willingly to enter the metabolic unit for special studies,” according to study reports. And three subjects were alcoholics--one of whom was admitted to the study while in a “hallucinatory state.”

Most subjects received little or no recompense for their participation: In 1957, the Eskimos and Athabascans of northern Alaska--few of whom even spoke English at the time--received an apple and an orange for allowing Army doctors to inject radioactive Iodine-131 into them.

For a decade starting in 1963, 131 state prisoners in Washington and Oregon penitentiaries were paid $5 per month to allow scientists to irradiate their genitals. The bizarre experiment was designed to gauge what levels of radiation exposure soldiers, astronauts and nuclear production workers could tolerate without reproductive side effects.

James Daughterty, a prisoner who participated in the experiments, told a researcher in 1980 that the money “meant an awful lot at the time,” when, without income, he had no cigarettes and none of “the little necessities.”

“You hate to be without toothpaste or anything,” Daughterty told researcher Arnold Levinson, whose notes are on file at the Center for Investigative Journalism in San Francisco.

Three decades later, the Clinton Administration is considering the possibility of providing compensation to some of the victims--at levels far above the cost of toothpaste and cigarettes.

Experts warn that a comprehensive program of compensation for experiment victims could involve payments of hundreds of millions of dollars, increase cynicism toward the government and open a Pandora’s box of demands from those who feel they are victims of the Cold War.

But Administration officials insist the issue could be a political boon--a sure-fire way to expose the wrongs of past administrations and a dramatic demonstration of President Clinton’s “putting people first” philosophy.

Moreover, Energy Secretary O’Leary has said that without a massive effort to flush out such nuclear secrets, there will be no redemption for the government--or her department--in the jaded eyes of American citizens.

“We have got to restore the ability of the government to do good things,” said Dr. Tara O’Toole, the assistant energy secretary for environment, safety and health who is overseeing the review of the experiments.

“That means trust, and that means we have to be honest and tell the truth about what happened,” O’Toole said. “We are not under any illusion that this will be easy or pleasant, but I don’t see any alternative. This is the right thing to do.”