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INTERAGENCY SEARCH GROUP WEEKLY MEETING - APRIL 13,1994 Briefing book materials for Advisory Committee members in preparation for Advisory Committee public meeting Oral presentations by agency representatives at Advisory Committee public Debrief on Cincinnati hearings and lessons learned Working level contacts on records searches Update on Advisory Committee public meeting agenda Proposed agenda and date for next Search Gmnp meeting
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HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS Address: 1726 M Street, Northwest StafE Dan Guttman, Executive Director @io attached) Anna Mastroianni, Director Committee Affairs, Deputy Staff Director, Senior Poiicy and Research Analyst Jeff Kahn, Acting Staff Director Steve Klaidman, Public Affairs Director Jeremy Sugarman, Senior Policy and Research Analyst
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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS STAFF Dan Guttman has been a partner at Spiegel & McDiarmid, a Washington, D.C. law firm which represents public agencies, workers and consumers in energy, communication and environmental matters, and human rights issues. He has assisted local governments and worker representatives in the ongoing conversion of the nuclear weapons complex, and Nye County, Nevada, the site of the proposed nuclear waste repository. Following graduation in 1971 from Yale Law School, he co-authored the Ralph Nader sponsored book, The Shadow Government: The Government's Multibillion Dollar Giveawav of its Decisionmaking Powers to Private Management Consultants. "Exuerts." and Think Tanks. He served as special counsel to Senator David Pryor in the oversight and investigation of the Federal use of private expertise in the performance of the basic work of government. He participated on the National Academy of Public Administration's Standing Panel on Executive Organization and Management, and was the recipient of a German Marshall Fund grant to advise on energy conservation in Czechoslovakia. He has written for publications including The New Republic: The Washineton Monthlv, Public Power, and The Harvard Journal on Leeislation. He served as research assistant to Andy Rooney in the production of "Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington." an award winning CBS news documentary. He was graduatedplri beta kappa with highest honors from the University of
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ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS Ruth R. Faden, Ph.D., M.P.H., is Professor of Health Policy and Management in the School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Faden is also Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown Dr. Faden is Director of the Program in Law, Ethics, and Health of Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health. She is the author of many books and journal articles on biomedical and research ethics, health policy, and health behavior, including A Historv and Theov of Informed Consent, co-authored with Tom L. Beauchamp, Ph.D. In addition to her extensive publications, Dr. Faden has served on numerous national task forces and committees. Dr. Faden holds a Bachelor of Arts in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Arts in Humanities from the University of Chicago. She received a Masters in Public Health (M.P.H.) and a Doctorate (Ph.D.) in Attitudes and Behavior from the University of California-Berkeley.
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RADIATION TESTING - UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI The Department of Defense has been engaged in an extensive effort to discover the facts surrounding DoD sponsored human radiation With the complete support of Secretary Perry, the Department has pledged its unqualified commitment to a thorough and complete search of all available records and the full public release of the pertinent information in those records. Retrieval of records has required time intensive "detective work" -- we are well into that process now and beginning to make excellent headway. All retrieved information will be turned over to the interagency working group and the Independent Advisory Committee The Department of Defense played a role in the human radlation experiments conducted at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine between 1960 and 1972. 0 The experiments conducted at Cincinnati call into question the adequacy of informed consent and evidence of non-therapeutic In September 1958, Dr. Eugene L. Saenger of the Department of Radiology, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, as the principal investigator, submitted an unsolicited research proposal to the Research and Development Division of the Army Surgeon The original goal was to try to develop a simple urine test to detect the amount of radiation exposure.
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DoD review of the proposal took over a year and involved a number of medical corps officers. In 1959, the Department agreed to a contract with the University of Cincinnati for the study of the metabolic changes in humans following total body irradiation. At that time, DoD was interested in determining the biological, statistical and clinical features of radiation injury based on field commander needs to predict fatalities and injuries resulting from ionizing radiation of a nuclear weapon blast. Cincinnati submitted ten reports to DoD between 1961 and 1972. The entirely unclassified Cincinnati studies have been previously reported in ten technical reports, 17 publications and 26 presentations at scientific meetings. 0 All the information that DoD has compiled -- technical reports, some contract information and other related documents -- from the Cincinnati experiments will be provided to the Independent Advisory Committee recently established by President Clinton. A major goal of DoD's research regarding the Cincinnati experiments is to provide a complete record for review by the Source: ATSDIAE (Dr. Gordon Soper) A/O: Maj Bob Potter
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More radiation tests uncovered WASHmGTON Sent is ta .]Ho ia. tiazy, Dr. John Colmore, k dead. w e d radioactive materials to tar- Disc7mure of the Oklahoma ex- Both the pnikntiary and the y out medial rcsch on Okh- perimenb wmes in the wake of a mtak de pm mt Of corrcctiona homa prison inmattb and mental massive d O r t by the government ray &CY hqve DD mbrds of any patienb during the 1960s and to declassifP Cold War-cra d w - medical PIDJ& mnduckd in t h e 197b, attording to offitiah urd ments. The mads describe how 19608 and 701. Test 8ubjecb documents unco ved by the p v - rc ien tia in num emu parta of muld not be determined from cmmtnt. the cauntzy conducted testa ujng available documenta. ing until the mid-19709, inmates nant mothem, mentally retarded di&e that Colmorc m d at l e u t were human guinea pigs for m- m o n g othen. krcd nrdioactive tracers to inwatchera at the Vnivcrsity Of maks a part d their audiu of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma have sporra~rcdbill8 that would newhp. Medical Resear& Foundation, a e = a ~ pea ple who were us cd Reagan Bradfad, ~ oFs rat the private group located on the uni- in s t audits eth out their fuIl Oklahoma Medical versity'r Oklahoma City campus. knowledge cr ament. S jen tis b from the university's The Oklahoma studies a n de- Foundation, n5embem doing a health sciences center in Oklaho- h b e d in documents made public rtudy Of about lo inm~wthat ma City tested the absorption of rrcently by the Nuclear Regula- a drug using radioacnew drugs by iqjecting subjects toy Commission, whose predc- trve calcium. with radioactive t r a c e n and nssor agency, the tomie Ene Dr. Carl Bagardus, who headed tracking their mute thmugh the .Cornmissionbhad license-insfitu- a University of Oklahoma cornAt the same time, univemity The documents, coupled with rible for supervising dl proJecuj scientists ioneered radiation intervie- of scientists connected that used radioactive matenais, disorders, cancers and tumors tu- of the testa but leave questions tive byproducts "on patients who ing penitentiary inmates and unanSa.ed about work conduct- rcquird this for medical mamental patients a t what was then eci 30 years ago. uI111." treatment Por thyroid and liver With the =earth, desm*be wome raid most p r o j d used radioac-
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DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ACTIVITIES ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS REVIEW Under the direction of Secretary Perry, the Assistant to the Secretary of Gordon K. Soper, lead DoDs efforts to discover and disclose to interested parties the nature and extent of the Department's involvement in human radiation experimentation. A Department of Defense Steering Committee, chaired by Dr. Smith, composed of high-level Department officials and supported by scores of DoD personnel, has met regularly to structure and guide the Department's efforts. A 31 January 1994 memorandum from Dr. Smith to all DoD components provided detailed guidance on locating, identifymg, reviewing, and declassifying records pertaining to human radiation experiments. This guidance instructed DoD components to preserve existing records; manage records in accordance with Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act and security classification procedures, directing that records were to be declassified to the maximum extent; and, if there were a question on an experiment, to err on the side of inclusion in the initial identification of a possible experiment. To assure the quality, comprehensivenessand integnty of the search process, components were directed to submit a report, consisting of two parts. In Part I the agency was required to report: each organization under its control that may have conducted or sponsored experiments; the location(s) where records might be stored; a description of the efforts undertaken to confirm if records were at the location(s) identified; and if records were found. Part 11 required a description of each experiment identified as a result of activities described in Part I. Each experiment was to be described as follows: identification of experiment or possible experiment; where and when it took place; name of primary researcher@); DoD organizations grantees, or contractors involved in the experiment; number of human subjects (including available information on subjects); summary of experiment; records location; estimated nature and quantity of records; and whether the records are classified, and, if so, what actions have been or will be taken to review the A massive search effort has ensued. Following the dictum to err on the side of inclusion, reports thus far have identified approximately 1,760 DoD conducted or supported activities from 1944 to present that possibly fall within the scope of the
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Interagency Working Group definition of human radiation experiments. It appears that the overwhelming majority of these are clinical research activities conducted by DoD medical components since 1974, involving therapeutic investigations in whch radiation was used solely in accordance with established, non-experimental diagnostic procedures. These activities will be further reviewed and analyzed and eventually categorized as either clinical procedures, therapeutic programs, research protocols, etc. Additionally, some components reported file volumes in the hundreds of feet, and that there are millions of individual service records at the Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri for personnel that served during the last 50 years. To coordinate the Department's efforts, a Radiation Experiments Command Center (RECC) was established. The RECC is the Department's central repository and point of contact for matters related to human radiation experiments. The RECC has developed an automated database for information on the status of ongoing actions that respond to inquiries from the public, other Federal agencies, and Congress, and analyze information received ftom these, and other, sources. A second RECC automated database is the "event file,'' to capture information on each experiment identified by DoD records search. This will allow reviewers to expeditiously match experiments with inquiries fiom the Advisory Committee, Congress or the public. DoD's efforts to date have hghlighted several issues on which guidance from the Advisory Committee would be helpful. The major issue is the prioritization of records retrieval and review of the large number of possible experiments that have been preliminarily identified. DoD suggests that pre- 1974 experiments not clearly outside the scope of interest be considered for high priority attention. Guidance is also needed on identifying lead responsibility for resolving inquiries from individuals that fall within multiple agency jurisdictions. Finally, we suggest the need for a uniform, responsive, integrated and cost-effective approach to satisfy both near- and long-term requirements to provide information to the Advisory Committee, the Congress, human subjects or their next-of-lun, and the public. DoD is fully committed to the task of discovering and documenting the extent of its participation in human radiation experimentation over the last 50 years. Carrying out this task will remain a high priority of Secretary Perry and the Department of Defense.