U.S. government-sponsored radiation research on humans 1945-1975.

the United States' cold war experience was reopened when Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary responded to news media reports about government-sponsored radiation research involving hundreds of human subjects, often without their informed consent. At a December 7 press conference on her initiative to declassify some of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) nuclear research records, O'Leary commented on a series of articles about plutonium injection experiments involving 18 subjects published a month earlier in the Albuquerque Tribune [1]. O'Leary acknowledged that these and other experiments beginning in the 1940s involved 600 to 800 subjects and that her department would soon begin to declassify and release documents concerning these and other experiments, which were sponsored by the DOE's predecessors, the Manhattan Project, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) [2]. In the following weeks, new details uncovered in media reports about radiation experimentation and the Energy Secretary's (Fig 1) call for "full disclosure" and her candid statement that "For people who were wronged ...it would seem that some compensation is appropriate," led to a crescendo of public interest and an escalation of the federal government's response [3]. The Energy Department opened a toll-free telephone number to collect information from people who believe they were subjects in improperly conducted radiation experiments. Thousands of people have been unable to get through to the hot line, which has been receiving as many as 700 calls an hour [4]. At the time this article was written, five Congressional committees had also begun inquiries into the disclosures [5,6]. The focus of the interagency investigations, Congressional interest, and news media coverage currently centers on a set of government-sponsored radiation experiments involving at least 695 human subjects from the mid-1940s into the 1970s, most of which were originally documented in a 1986 Congressional staff report issued by Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) [7]. These experiments include: 1) approximately 800 pregnant women administered radioactive iron at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, in the late 1940s [8]; 2) nearly 200 cancer patients exposed to high levels, up to 200 rads, of whole-body gamma radiation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee [9]; 3) 18 persons injected with plutonium at Oak Ridge, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at