The Clinton administration strongly criticized its Republican predecessors Monday for failing to take action in the 1980s after disclosures about government research that exposed unwitting human subjects to radiation.
After a meeting of top aides from several agencies Monday, the administration said it had formed a working group to determine how widespread the experiments had been in the decades after World War II, how often the tests violated research standards and to what extent people who may have suffered harm should now be compensated.
Some tests involving hundreds of people were first disclosed in 1986 in a report to Congress by the General Accounting Office.
But at a White House news briefing Monday, a spokesman said the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush did not adequately respond to the congressional committee that requested the report and its chairman, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).
Markey had asked at the time for information on whether agencies other than the Energy Department or its precursors conducted similar experiments, about efforts to follow the health effects on people who were experimental subjects and about the need for compensation.
“Two administrations have failed to answer these questions,” said Mark Gearan, a White House spokesman. “We intend to step up to the plate.”
The meeting Monday produced little new information about the extent of the radiological experiments, participants said.
Its purpose, they said, was to coordinate efforts to reach into archives for information.
As a result of Monday’s meeting at the White House, other agencies, including the Defense Department, NASA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, will also examine their records on radiological experiments involving humans.
Among the tests revealed so far are cases where human were injected with highly radioactive plutonium and where retarded teen-agers at a state institution in Massachusetts were fed radioactive milk with their breakfast cereal in the 1940s and ’50s.
Details of the tests are still filtering out, and it has not been asserted that all violated ethical standards or that the subjects were harmed. But in some cases there is evidence that the subjects were not fully informed of experiments or risks.
For example, The Boston Globe reported last week that retarded teenagers were fed low doses of radioactive material in their breakfasts. In some cases permission was granted by parents, but radioactivity was not mentioned.
There also were tests involving prisoners and the terminally ill in which the question is whether researchers provided adequate information or obtained truly voluntary consent from the subjects.
Among the targets of the federal investigation are 14 veterans hospitals across the country, including the Hines facility near Maywood, west of Chicago.
On Monday, Veterans Affairs Department spokeswoman Donna St. John said that the Hines Veterans Hospital was on the list of primary targets of the department’s inquiry into possible radiation experimentation on patients, with or without their knowledge or permission.
Last week, St. John erroneously said that one of the Chicago veterans hospitals within the city limits-either Lakeside at 333 E. Huron St. or West Side at 820 S. Damen Ave., she was not sure which-was being probed as the possible site of human radiation experminents.
But on Monday she said that the earlier information was wrong and that Hines, not a city veterans hospital, was a current target of the probe.
