Records of 18 Plutonium Tests Released : Medicine: All individuals received injections unknowingly. The documents are the first of the secret U.S.-sponsored experiments to be disclosed.

The Department of Energy on Monday released the medical records of 18 patients unknowingly injected with plutonium between 1945 and 1947 in one of the secret radiation experiments sponsored by the government during and after World War II.

The documents were the first to be released in the department’s effort to open its files on the series of experiments that were part of the government’s clandestine Cold War activities to gain nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary announced in December that the government had not publicly disclosed nuclear research tests on more than 600 people. Government agencies are now digging into records to determine the purpose of the research, the level of consent and how the subjects were chosen.

The 18 people whose records were released Monday were all hospital patients who have since died. They were part of a study designed to determine how long plutonium stayed in the body and how it was distributed. The research was conducted by the Manhattan District Corps of Engineers Project--a code name for the government’s effort to develop the atomic bomb.

The study was to have been conducted on individuals with limited life expectancy but the documents show that this was not always the case.

One subject, for example, a 53-year-old man, was the victim of a car accident and was hospitalized on March 25, 1945, at the U.S. Army Medical Corps’ Oak Ridge Hospital for treatment of multiple fractures. He received a plutonium injection on April 15 of that year.

Another subject was a 4-year-old Australian boy who had been brought to the United States for cancer treatment. His parents apparently thought that the injection was part of his cancer therapy. The child died soon after his return home to Australia.

Other patients included a man suffering from hemophilia, another with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--Lou Gehrig’s disease--and several teen-agers, among them a 16-year-old boy and an 18-year-old girl, both of whom had serious illnesses.

Many documents show that Argonne National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility that is part of the University of Chicago, attempted to trace many of the patients for a follow-up evaluation during the 1970s and 1980s and was not often successful.

In a series of letters to the parents of the Australian boy, for example, the lab urged them to provide additional information about the fate of their son and asked for details about his treatment.

“I must apologize for writing to you about your son . . . after so many years,” said one letter sent in 1987, more than 40 years after the child had been treated. “You or your family members may be the only persons alive, however, who remember certain things that happened immediately after the war and those events have become rather important in some official circles here.”

It went on: “Which family members accompanied the child? Was a family member in the room with (him) most of the time? Were you aware of any special treatments, injections or special tests? If so, what information was given to you and did you give approval verbally or in writing . . . ? Were you given any details as to precisely what substances were involved, or what was done?”

Several responses from officials in Australia stated that the child had subsequently died and that no autopsy was performed.

Some records indicated that many of the patients were not told of the nature of the injections until nearly three decades after they had taken place.

The documents include statements, signed by some of the patients in 1974, acknowledging that they were the subjects of a biological experiment.

The statements included the date each patient was injected and the hospital location.