Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary is doing the nation a useful service by digging up some not-so-ancient history about the use of human beings as lab rats for scientists studying radiation. As shocking as those experiments sound now, it’s even more shocking to learn that at least some scientists knew that they were skirting the bounds of ethics.
In one series of experiments, from 1946 to 1956, retarded children were fed cereals laced with radioactive material. In the mid-1940s, 18 patients were injected with plutonium. In 1948, pregnant women got radioactive pills. And from 1948 to 1952, nuclear radiation was released to study the spread of radioactive fallout.
This research came during and shortly after the 1947 Nuremberg Code was drafted in response to Nazi experiments, many of which occurred at the Buchenwald concentration camp. One researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission said in a 1950 memo that the research might have “a little of the Buchenwald touch.”
O’Leary wants the full story behind the radiation experiments and knows that release of information will bring lawsuits. Surely, any who suffered deserve compensation and the truth about their health and their government.
As for science, it deserves both truth and accountability, and it needs a repeat of the lesson on how and how not to experiment with human beings.
