Re: Rumbles

[don@radpro.uchicago.edu]

The apparent fact that we cannot, today, locate signed informed consent
documents for "radiation" experiments done 40-50 years ago does not 
necessarily mean that neither the patient nor his next of kin were not
as fully informed as they would be today.  The absence of the documents
may be due to a number of benign factors: misfiling, inadvertent destruction,
etc.  Mostly, the absence is probably explained by a failure on the part
of the investigators to accurately predict how litigious we would become,
how unscrupulous the press would become, or the lengths that a testicularly
troubled public official would go to displace his hormonal hijinks from the
front page.

___________________________________________________________________

Don Jordan                          Tel. (312) 702-6299
Office of Radiation Safety          Fax        702-4008
The University of Chicago           email: don@radpro.uchicago.edu
1101 East 57th Street, Room 11
Chicago, Illinois  60637  
           -- Opinions expressed are soley the author's --