Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

  • United States. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
Date:
1996
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    airplane (NEPA) project, AEC and DOD medi- cal experts in 1949 and 1950 engaged in debate on the need for human experimentation. The transcript of a 1950 meeting among AEC bio- medical officials and advisers and military rep- resentatives provides unique insight into the mix of moral principles and practical concerns.*” The participants in the debate included many of the key medical figures in the Manhattan Project and the postwar radiation research bu- reaucracy. For the Navy, for example, Captain Behrens, the editor of Atomic Medicine, made the point that an atomic bomb might contaminate, but not sink, ships. The Navy would need to know the risk of sending rescue or salvage par- ties into the contaminated area. There were questions of “calculated risk which all of the services are interested in, and not only the ser- vices but probably the civilians as well.”°8 Briga- dier General William H. Powell, Jr., of the Of- fice of the Air Force Surgeon General, added further questions: How does radiation injure tis- sue? Can equipment protect against the bomb’s effects? Is there a way to treat radiation injury? How should mass casualties be handled? These questions were hardly abstract. Opera- tion Crossroads had demonstrated that postblast contamination of Navy ships was a serious haz- ard. The use of the atomic bomb as a tactical weapon, declared Brigadier General James Cooney of the AEC’s Division of Military Appli- cations, “has now gone beyond the realm of pos- sibility and into the realm of probability.””° This meant that “we have a responsibility that is tre- mendous,” Cooney added. “If this weapon is used tactically on a corps or division, and we have, say, 5,000 troops who have received 100 R[oentgens] radiation, the Commander is going to want from me, ‘Is it all right for me to reassemble these men and take them into combat?’ I don’t know the answer to that question.””! Commanders needed to know “How much radiation can a man take?”’? Cooney argued that human experimentation was necessary. He invoked the military’s tradi- tion of experimentation with healthy volunteers, dating back to Walter Reed’s famous work on yellow fever at the turn of the century. Cooney urged that the military seek volunteers within its ranks—“both officer and enlisted”—to be exposed to as much as 150 R of whole-body radiation.’ The AEC’s Shields Warren took the other side in this debate. Warren raised two basic points in response to Cooney. First, human experimenta- tion was not essential because animal research would be adequate to find the answers. Second, data from human experimentation would likely be scientifically useless. “We have,” Warren de- clared, “learned enough from animals and from humans at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be quite certain that there are extraordinary variables in this picture. There are species variables, genetics variables within species, variations in condition of the individual within that species.” The dan- ger of failing to provide data had to be weighed against the danger of providing misleading data: “It might be almost more dangerous or mislead- ing to give an artificial accuracy to an answer that is of necessity an answer that spreads over a broad range in light of these variables.”/4 There were, moreover, political obstacles to the program Cooney had proposed. Satisfactory answers, Warren concluded, would require “go- ing to tens of thousands of individuals.” But America was not the Soviet Union: “If we were considering things in the Kremlin, undoubtedly it would be practicable. I doubt that it is practi- cable heresye At the heart of Warren’s objections to Cooney’s proposal was a concern about employ- ing “human experimentation when it isn’t for the good of the individual concerned and when there is no way of solving the problem.””° To Cooney’s invocation of Walter Reed, Warren responded that, in the case of yellow fever, humans were needed as subjects because there was no nonhu- man host to the disease. Cooney did not disagree with Warren “that statistically we will prove nothing.” But, he pointed out, “[G]Jenerals are hard people to deal with. ... If we had 200 cases whereby we could say that these men did or did not get sick up to 150 R, it would certainly bea great help to us.”’” Even then, Warren rejoined, the data might not be of great use: “I can think in terms of times when even if everybody on a ship was sea-sick, you would still have to keep the ship operating.””® The 1950 debate over NEPA provides clear evidence that midcentury medical experts gave thought before engaging in human experimen- tation that involved significant risk and was not intended to benefit the subject. On paper, the