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Interview with Shields Warren 0- 4/9/74 IAM: Well, thank you very much Dr. Warren for taking your-%evaluable time to meet with us and talk to us about our problem. kuw, the Comnission has asked us t o conduct an inquiry into this matter which involves the injecting of plutonium'into patients at a nmber of As you probably why it happened, how 'it happened, and also the benefits to ecience from Cammission will do with the report, w e are i n no position t o day, but w e are going ou the premise that it will be made public. In the conduct of our inquiry, w e propose t o develop'what happened, I We will present the report tothe Comnissioa. What the might touch upon: In our discussfomwith you, *I think there are two fields that we one is the things that happened inthe Comnissioa while you werea member of the &xff-and of which you have personal bowledge; the other field of interest would be things that happened before which you knuw frodo the rst old you, but which would be valuable t o us i n pursuing other avenues of our inquiry. Now whea dfd you join the staff of the W : In, f think it was November of 1947, and I stayed a s a member of the staff until June 30 of '52. Then I became a consultant and wasa member of the Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine fora five-year period. And thea IIetayed on as consultant up t o t h e preeent time.
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that nothing of the sort could happen i n the future. w e assumed that those patients were all dead at that time. realized that any of them were still alive: LAM: Was there any discussion as t o whether o r not the patients had consented t o be subjects for these injections. time and I'd always made a point in explaining to the patients I'd injected what went on, and Hamilton told me that he had explained t o the patients that their, they would receive, now I've got totry to put my thoughts in order in this,that they woitld receive an injectiou of a new substance that was too new t o say what it might do but that it had some properties like those of other substances t h a t had been used t o help control growth processes .in patients, o r something of that general sort. Yes, because we were reasonably sensitive to these things at that not call it informed consent because they did not know what it was, but . they knew t h a t it was a new and t o them unknown substance. ZHHp4WU not anywhere neaz the alertness t o infonned consent, of course, in those days that there is a t the present time. I'm pretty sure that this was an accurate statement because Hamilton was a very meticulous man, very high scientific and professional standards. . He had three of his bm that he was telling you about. i n there various installations know that the others were doing that and wag it a type of coordinated'activity or? . Ha had knowledge of the Chicago-Rochester patients at that the. Did the people
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W : This was the use of some patients for radiation therapy when there was not a clear consensus on the part of the medical profession as a whole, that radiation therapy was the soundest treatment for cases of of some of t h e experimental work t h a t had been done on animals, would be These, as I recall it, were cases that Bob Stone felt,f nlf gh t worth trying on humans. not do anything for them, and there was this issue waa raised. because of the course of these thi a gs, ' o f the studies, some blood counts had been done on them and it w a s the dangerously low blood counts on them that a ort of set off an alarm clock i n ACBEI'r'mind when they saw it. No, thia was/anything t o do. subsequently,was because w e thought that there needed t o betas these new sources of radiation became more widely available, a better means of control ' than existed a t the present time. about metabolic pathways than anyone aha, he waa a log~cal'manbert o ba The weight of evidence was that radiation would not And the reason Baamilton was in on this was, And aince Hamilton knew more the injection of plutonium. I SM: Was the issue of the injected people then ever brought in any formal way t o / attention of pCor ACBH then o r was it ju at this infonnal di scurr la ' where you became acquainted with i t ? the best way t o do was t o see that the rules were properiy drawn $p by the Isotopq,IIrPsansApplications Isotope Committee, which had then cane into being, 80 that use wiphout full safeguard8 could not occul; and that we saw no point in bringing t h i s up after the fact ab long a8 wa were aura And in this particular thing, there wasn't anything t o do with I think the way it wad handled was thatA ~ M Cram and I agreed that