Panel II

Remarks by Susan Lederer, Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine

Delivered at MIT, Cambridge, MA, March 29, 1999.

One of the critical issues about the human radiation experiments that came to public attention in December 1993, and that gave rise to an advisory committee on human radiation experiments on which I served, was this issue of secrecy and openness. The idea that the United States government had been conducting, or at the very least sponsoring, radiation experiments on human beings in secret, not surprisingly disturbed and continues to disturb many people. But, at the same time many people pointed out that these so called secret experiments were in fact not secret at all. Many had been published in the open academic literature. Some of the experiments had been reported in the popular press, both newspapers and magazines in the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s. At least seven years before Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary helped place the human radiation experiments on the national agenda, Congressman Edward Markey of Massachusetts sponsored a report prepared by the staff of the Energy Conservation and Power Subcommittee in 1986 entitled American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Human Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens. But, of course, in 1986 the Cold War was not yet over.

One of the things that members of the committee who were charged to look at the human radiation experiments assumed, and I include myself, was that one of the principal reasons for secrecy in the case of conducting human radiation experiments was the reason of national security. At the start of the Cold War, officials of the federal government followed regulations that allowed secrets to be maintained not only because their disclosure would endanger national secrecy, and this is what I was surprised to learn, but because such disclosure would be prejudicial to the interest or prestige of the nation. When it began operation in 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission expanded the practice of maintaining secrecy to encompass what they called public relations or embarrassment as well as issues of legal liability. For example, in 1946, Hymer Friedell, once the deputy medial director of the Manhattan engineering district, recommended declassification of some of the reports that described the plutonium injections into human beings that had been conducted during the second world war. Two months later in February 1947, his recommendation for declassification was overridden on the advice of AEC officials who noted, "the coldly scientific manner in which the results are tabulated and discussed would have a very poor effect on the public." Moreover, unless the necessary legal documents had been executed, the report left the experimenters and the United States government vulnerable to a devastating law suit with potentially far reaching consequences. It was these fears about legal liability and administrative embarrassment that continued to play a role in AEC decisions to keep secret or to reclassify things that had been declassified involving what researcher Robert Stone called "unwitting subjects" that is people who had no knowledge that they were being subjected to human radiation experiments.

In addition to maintaining the secrecy of human radiation experiments, the AEC adopted policies to forestall access to information related to health risks related to radiation that were posed for workers and for members of the general public. The insurance branch of the AEC, for example, routinely reviewed declassification decisions with the liability issue in mind, that is to the court. In so doing, they continued a practice adopted by Manhattan project officials, like Robert Oppenheimer, who in 1946 asked that all reports on health problems be separately classifed and issued at his request. The purpose being to safeguard the project from being sued by people who claimed that they had been injured during the research work. And here is where the human radiation experiments overlap with several other important domains of secrecy and openness. This would include the atomic veterans, the uranium miners, the Marshall Islanders, and the downwinders.

Decisions to classify research as secret resulted not only from policymakers at federal agencies, but also ensued at the request of individual investigators. It is not only top down, but also bottom up. There is one case in particular I found instructive. The experiments in question occurred at the Medical College of Virginia in the early 1950s in the laboratory of an investigator named Everett Evans. The MCV experiments themselves became important to the [human radiation experiment] advisory committee following what was an inflammatory op ed discussion in The Washington Post, a story called "Burning Secrets." Evans experiments were funded by the Defense Department and they dealt with the effect of thermal burns rather than radiation burns. As stories from the Richmond press from the early 1950s make clear, Evans’ research subjects at the time included prisoners, students from nearby colleges, hospital patients, and dogs. And it’s the dogs that are important here. In January 1951, Evans grew alarmed by reporters who were snooping into the dog studies he was conducting. As he explained in his request for classification, "There is much about these dog studies that I don’t like, but we’re doing it a manner that is as humane as possible. The issue here is one of national security." It’s here that Evans apparently feared that local humane societies were going to prevent his access to dogs that were necessary for his research program. Therefore, the army in response declared that all the MCV work would be classified or restricted. Thus, the desire to protect the secrecy of the dog research blanketed Evans’ human radiation experiments on prisoners, medical students, and hospital patients.

I’m grateful to Mr. Michaelson from the earlier panel for invoking an image from popular culture, because I’d like to do so now here. One image that frequently arose in the 18 months that the advisory committee spent trying to produce a comprehensive report on the human radiation experiments conducted in this country during the Cold War was an image from a popular film. It actually occurs at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the ark of the covenant is crated and placed in a sea of crates in a governmental warehouse. One of the reasons that this image remains so compelling is the sense that many of the documents that would make the story of Cold War radiation experiments clear had been preserved but that they couldn’t be located. The records that explain what was secret and the rules for governing the keeping of secrets were lost or missing or incomplete or marked by omission. In the film, the U.S. government label stamped on the crate containing the ark is burnt away, it evanesces; labels may evanesce, but not so the legacy of distrust, suspicion, hostility, and anger left by the American experience of the nuclear age and its research scientists.

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