=Exposing almost 200 cancer patients to high levels of radiation from cesium and cobalt. The AEC finally stopped this experiment in 1974.
=Administering radioactive material to psychiatric patients in San Francisco and to prisoners in San Quentin.
=Administering massive doses of full body radiation to cancer patients hospitalized at the General Hospital in Cincinnati, Baylor College in Houston, Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City, and the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, during the 1950s and 1960s. The experiment provided data to the military concerning how a nuclear attack might affect its troops.
=Exposing 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to total body irradiation (100-300 rad dose) to obtain data for the military. This was conducted at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.
The Atomic Energy Commission
In 1995 the Energy Department admitted to over 430 radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission between the years 1944 and 1974. Over 16,000 people were radiated, some of whom did not know the health risks or did not give consent.
These experiments were designed to help atomic scientists understand the human hazards of nuclear war and radiation fallout. Because the entire nuclear arms buildup was classified secret, these experiments were all stamped secret and allowed to take place under the banner of protecting "national security."
Amazingly, these clandestine studies were conducted at the most prestigious medical institutions and colleges, including the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, V anderbilt University in Nashville, and the previously mentioned universities.
Uranium Mine Workers
In addition to these radiation experiments, workers who mined uranium for the AEC in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, were exposed to radioactive dust during the 1940s up to the 1960s. Although AEC scientists and epidemiologists knew the dust in these poorly ventilated mines was contaminated with deadly radon gas which could easily cause death from lung cancer, this lifesaving information was never passed on to the miners, many of whom were Native Americans. As a result, many miners died prematurely of cancer of the lung.
Stewart Udall, an Arizona Congressman and lawyer who also served as Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, represented the miners and their families in a class action lawsuit against the federal government for radiation injuries. In The Myths of August, Udall writes that some physicians who defended the decisions of the atomic establishment sought to justify these experiments by contending that little was known about the health risks associated with the various exposures. Others tried to put a positive face on tests conducted without obtaining informed consent by maintaining that these experiments nevertheless produced advance in medical knowledge. Some physicians argued that the conduct of the AEC doctors should be condoned because they were merely following the 'prevailing ethics' of the postwar period. When the miners' case finally came to trial in 1983, the federal court in Arizona dismissed the case by declaring the U.S. government was immune from lawsuit.
Medical Ethics of the Cold War
How could these physician-experimenters ignore the sworn Hippocratic Oath promising that doctors will not harm their patients? Did they violate the Nuremberg Code of justice developed in response to the Nazi war crimes trials after World War ll?
The Nuremberg Code includes 10 principles to guide physicians in human experimentation. In actuality, prior to the Nazi war crime tribunals, there was no written code for doctors; and lawyers defending the Nazi doctors tried to argue that similar wartime experiments were conducted with prisoners at the Illinois State Penitentiary, who were deliberately infected with malaria. During the Nuremberg trials the AMA came up with its own ethical standards, which included three requirements: 1) voluntary consent of the person on whom the experiment is to be performed must be obtained; 2) the danger of each experiment must be previously investigated by animal experimentation; and 3) the experiment must be performed under proper medical protection and management.
The records now show that many victims of the government's radiation experiments did not voluntarily consent as required by the Code. As late as 1959, Harvard Medical School researcher Henry Beecher viewed the Code "as too extreme and not squaring with the realities of clinical research." Another physician said the Code had little effect on mainstream medical morality and "doubted the ability of the sick to understand complex facts of their condition in a way to make consent meaningful."
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996, Jay Katz recalls an argument at Harvard Medical School in 1961 suggesting that the Code was not necessarily pertinent to or adequate for the conduct of research in the United States. Katz writes: "The medical research community found, and still finds, the stringency of the NC's first principle all to onerous." But patients in medical experiments expect the experiment to help them in some way - not to harm them! Patients also are often inclined to totally trust their physicians not to harm them." In The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, Katz concludes that many doctors view the Code as "a good code for barbarians but an unnecessary code for ordinary physicians."
The President's Advisory Committee
In January 1994 President Clinton convened an Advisory Committee to investigate the accusations surrounding the human radiation experiments. In their final report presented to the president on October 3, 1995, the Committee found that up to the early 1960s it was common for physicians to conduct research on patients without their consent.
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