Re[2]: MIT, Quaker Oats Settle Radiation Lawsuit

[Ruth Weiner <rfweine@sandia.gov>]

I too am old enough to remember what "informed consent" may or may not have been
in the 1950s and 1960s.  In the Fernald School case, the children could clearly 
not give consent of any sort, but the parents of those children ought to have 
been informed that trace (essentially negligible) amounts of a radioactive 
substance would be added to their children's food in order to study metabolic 
processes.  Moreover, the parents should have been allowed to withdraw their 
children from the experimental group if they wanted to.  Withholding this 
information from the parents was clearly contrary to accepted practice and was, 
I believe, really wrong -- it doesn't matter what the dose was.  That the dose 
was essentially negligible is, in retrospect, fortunate.  Whether financial 
compensation is justified is a legal question.  The important distinction for 
MIT to make is that they are compensating for having withheld information, not 
for having added radioactive tracers to food.



Ruth F. Weiner
Transportation Systems Department
Sandia National Laboratories
505-844-4791
505-844-0244 (fax)
rfweine@sandia.gov

Clearly my own opinion and not anyone else's. 
______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re: MIT, Quaker Oats Settle Radiation Lawsuit
Author:  denison.8@osu.edu at hubsmtp
Date:    1/5/98 3:37 PM


At 02:12 PM 1/05/98 -0600, Harold Reynolds wrote:
>Is anyone other than me disturbed by the fact that MIT is rolling over on 
this
>issue rather than trying to show that such minor doses probably had no 
>detremental effects at all.
     
Harold, I'm sure that a lot of us are upset about MIT's unwillingness to 
fight this.  Unfortunately, they are concentrating on the wallet and the 
public image, to the detriment of truth and good science.  McDonald's did 
the same thing -- they paid off the dumb broad who spilled the coffee in 
her lap rather than go to court to show that the problem was the result of 
the customer's own negligence.
     
It's the prevalent attitude these days.  Companies, universities, and 
high-profile individuals will settle suits out of court without officially 
admitting that they were wrong because it's cheaper than going to court. 
Considering the trend for juries to award astronomical sums for relatively 
minor "injuries," they're probably right.  What they don't seem to realize 
is that paying off the plaintifs still makes them look guilty.  It also 
feeds the trend toward suing over anything and everything.
     
Unfortunately for MIT, the issue of informed consent (regardless of whether 
the standard back then was comparable to present interpretation) would 
surely come back to bite them in the rear.  It would be virtually 
impossible to seat a jury in this country that would be capable of putting 
aside the anti-nuclear "all radiation is bad" hoodoo in order to judge the 
issue scientifically.  The plaintif lawyers would never let enough of us 
into the room at any one time...
     
Eric
     
     
Eric Denison <denison.8@osu.edu>
Radiation Safety Technician
Environmental Health & Safety
The Ohio State University