Re: HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS

["Dale E. Boyce" <dale@radpro.uchicago.edu>]

One of the issues that is being missed in this thread is that it is
not known that these patients (or guardians) were not informed.  It
is only known that there is no documentation.

I cannot speak to the Pu experiments directly, it may be known one
way or the other.  However, for many of the other studies included
in the DOE report informed consent was given, but not in writing.
We were able to find a letter from the early 50's that clearly 
showed that it was policy at the U of Chicago to inform the subject
or guardian about the details and possible risk of being a subject
in such experiments.

The other issue where this thread seems to be propagating mis-information
is to continue to use "Human Radiation Experiments" to describe
what took place.  These experiment were uptake and excretion
experiments much the same as are used today in medical research.

There was no intent to use these experiments to study the effects of
radiation on humans.  There were no health effect expected.

There is a vast difference between experiments designed and intended
to cause no harm than experiments designed to study harm.  If we were
to ban legitimate studies because of infinitessimal risk, the world
would be worse off.

In the case of the Pu studies, I won't get further into whether or
not consent was given during the war.  However, if in a mythical
parallel universe, we had our current ethical standards and we
had just discovered this wonderful new fuel plutonium (it would be
wonderful because we hadn't educated the public in duck and cover)
do you not think that we would try to get uptake and excretion data
for the purposes of radiation safety??

Yes we could use animal studies, but only if we had already shown 
through other systems how to convert animal results to humans.
Somewhere, somehow, sometime, research on human subjects is necessary
to further improve medicine.

Can you believe that according to the DOE report that researchers at
The University of Chicago had the audacity to inject several
subjects (the researchers themselves) with Tc99m to determine if it
could be used for medical imaging?

dale@radpro.uchicago.edu