Coming Clean After Decades of Dirty Science : Panel urges U.S. apology and payments to subjects of covert radiation tests

When the history of the Cold War is written, the record will show that the period was costly in its damage to basic American legal rights. The FBI aand other agencies ran roughshod over anti-war, civil-rights and other dissidents. But probably no governmental violation in that time is more infuriating than the radiation experiments conducted on unwitting subjects--many of them black, poor, imprisoned or gravely ill--without their knowledge or consent.

The President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments has now done a signal service in lifting the veil of unnecessary secrecy over an unpleasant reality that extended from 1944 until 1974. Refreshing in its candor, chilling in its implications, the panel’s draft report documents these three decades of ethical abuses by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Department and other agencies. And it recommends steps that governments rarely take: admit the mistakes, apologize and pay financial compensation--at least to some of the unwitting subjects or their families.

Scientists funded by the agencies injected subjects with plutonium, radium and other radioactive substances. Pregnant women were given radioactive potions to drink so researchers could trace the paths of the chemicals in their bodies. Prisoners were made to immerse their testicles in radioactive liquids. The Alaskan tundra near Eskimo settlements was seeded with radioactive debris to see how it spread in the environment. Doctors at the University of Cincinnati exposed indigent cancer patients to radiation 10 times higher than considered safe, and several died as a result. Some of the studies offered no prospect of direct benefit to the subjects to offset risks.

Although they were not direct subjects of experiments, many thousands more, including uranium miners and residents of the Marshall Islands, were exposed to radiation during the manufacture or testing of early atomic and nuclear weapons. American soldiers who occupied Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after the atomic bomb attacks there 50 years ago also were exposed.

It is perhaps unfair to judge those responsible by today’s more refined standards of medical ethics. But the report--demanded by Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary--found that the agencies violated even then-existing rules governing human experimentation. Perhaps even worse, officials later concealed the information, not out of national security concerns but to avoid embarrassment and legal liability. For example, full details of 250 intentional radiation releases near Pueblo Indian lands in New Mexico were not disclosed until 1994.

The committee recommended public apology and monetary compensation for those subjects of experiments in which the government covered up information to avoid embarrassment or liability and in cases where there was no possible benefit and subjects suffered physical harm. This will not satisfy the exposed miners, service people and their survivors. And, given the distance of time, it will probably be impossible to reconstruct the facts and identities in many cases.

But President Clinton should ratify this important report and ask Congress to appropriate funds to compensate victims. It goes too far to liken these studies to the grotesque medical “experiments” done on concentration camp prisoners by German Nazi doctors. Some of the Cold War studies did advance therapies for prostate cancer and cardiac disease. Scientists involved at the time justified them as crucial to understanding and mitigating the effects of nuclear war on humans.

But Cold War anxiety and hysteria are no excuse for these gross violations of both constitutional rights and basic medical ethics. In the words of the panel’s draft report, they undermined “the moral principle, deeply embedded in the American experience, that the government may not use its citizens as mere means to advance its purposes irrespective of citizens’ rights to bodily integrity.”