Re: HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS

[Bernard L Cohen <blc+@pitt.edu>]

On Fri, 22 Nov 1996, Keith Welch wrote:

> At 10:44 AM 11/22/96 -0600, you wrote:
> 
> >---How about drafting men into the army and sending them into situations
> >where there is a good chance for them to be killed or badly wounded, all
> >without any informed consent. In the medical experiments, there was no
> >harm being done to the patients.
> 
> 
> Apples and oranges isn't it?  Drafting people into the armed services for
> purposes of national defense is a "little" different from taking advantage
> of a patient's trust to administer un-needed agents for purposes of
> scientific inquiry.

--These radiation experiments were very much directed for national
defense. Our national defense enterprise was preparing to use large
quantities of plutonium and needed to know how to handle it. That was the
purpose of the plutonium injection experiments, not basic "scientific
inquiry". Not informing them that they were being injected with plutonium
was a national defense necessity because everything about plutonium was
secret at that time. There was a war on at that time and American soldiers
were dying by the tens of thousands. None of the people injected were
harmed. 

> Keith Welch
> Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
> Newport News VA
> welch@cebaf.gov
>