Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

  • United States. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
Date:
1996
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    data gathering conflicted with his or her com- mitment to the subjects’ well-being? Was the age-old ethical tradition of the doctor-patient relationship, in which the patient was to defer to the doctor’s expertise and wisdom, adequate when the doctor was also a researcher and the procedures were experimental? While these questions about the role of medi- _ cal researchers were fresh in the air, the Manhat- tan Project, and then the Cold War, presented new ethical questions of a different order. In March 1946, former British Prime Minis- ter Winston Churchill told an audience in Fulton, Missouri, that an “iron curtain” had descended between Eastern and Western Europe —giving a name to the hostile division of the continent that had existed since the end of World War II. By the following year, Cold War was the term used to describe this state of affairs between the United States and its allies on the one hand and the Soviet bloc on the other. A quick succession of events underscored the scope of this conflict, as well as the stakes involved: In 1948 a Soviet blockade precipitated a crisis over Berlin; in 1949, the American nuclear monopoly ended when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb; in 1950, the Korean War began. The seeming likelihood that atomic bombs would be used again in war, and that American civilians as well as soldiers would be targets, meant that the country had to know as much as it could, as quickly as it could, about the effects of radiation and the treatment of radiation in- jury. This need for knowledge put radiation re- searchers, including physicians, in the middle of new questions of risk and benefit, disclosure and consent. The focus of these questions was, di- rectly and indirectly, an unprecedented public health hazard: nuclear war. In addressing these questions, medical researchers had to define the new roles that they would play. As advisers to the government, radiation re- searchers were asked to assist military command- ers, who called for human experimentation to determine the effects of atomic weapons on their troops. But these researchers also knew that human experimentation might not readily pro- vide the answers the military needed. As physicians, they had a commitment to pre- vent disease and heal. At the same time, as gov- ernment advisers, they were called upon to par- ticipate in making decisions to proceed with weapons development and testing programs that they knew could put citizens, soldiers, and work- ers at risk. As experts they were asked to ensure that the risks would not be excessive. And as researchers they saw these programs as an oppor- tunity for gathering data. As researchers, they were often among the first to volunteer to take the risks that were unavoid- able in such research. But the risks could not always be disclosed to members of the public who were also exposed. In keeping with the tra- dition of scientific inquiry, these researchers understood that their work should be the sub- ject of vigorous discussion, at least among other scientists in their field. But, as government offi- cials and advisers, they understood that their public statements had to be constrained by Cold War national security requirements, and they shared in official concern that public misunder- standing could compromise government pro- grams and their own research. Medical researchers, especially those expert in radiation, were not oblivious to the importance of the special roles they were being asked to play. “Never before in history,” began the 1949 medi- cal text Atomic Medicine, “have the interests of the weaponeers and those who practice the heal- ing arts been so closely related.”* This volume, edited by Captain C. F. Behrens, the head of the Navy’s new atomic medicine division, was evi- dently the first treatise on the topic. It concluded with a chapter by Dr. Shields Warren, the first chief of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, who would become a major figure in setting policy for postwar biomedical radiation research. While the atomic bomb was not “of medicine’s contriving,” the book began, it was to physicians “more than to any other profes- sion” that atomic energy had brought a “bewil- dering array of new problems, brilliant pros- pects, and inescapable responsibilities.” The text, a prefatory chapter explained, treats “not of high policy, of ethics, of strategy or of international control [of nuclear materials], as physicians these matters are not for us.”? Yet what many readers of Atomic Medicinecould not know in 1949 was
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