Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
- United States. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
- Date:
- 1996
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Source: Wellcome Collection.
51/662 page 15
![debate was decided in Shields Warren’s favor. Following Warren’s and DBM’s opposition, Cooney and the military agreed that “human experimentation” on healthy volunteers would not be approved. However, even as this policy was declared, the Defense Department, with Warren's apparent acquiescence, proceeded to contract with private hospitals to gather data on sick patients who were being treated with radia- tion. [he government’s use of sick patients for research, as we shall see in chapter 8, raised dif- ficult ethical questions of its own. Whether to Put Populations at Risk: The Debate Continues As the medical experts debated the issue of whether to put individual human subjects at risk in radiation experiments on behalf of NEPA, they were also engaged in secret discussions - about whether to proceed with the testing of nuclear weapons, which might put whole popu- lations at risk. It was also in 1950 that the decision was made to carry out atomic bomb testing at a site in the continental United States. President Truman chose the Nevada desert as the location for the test site. Shields Warren’s Division of Biology and Medicine was assigned the job of consider- ing the safety of early tests. Like the earlier tran- script, an account of a May 1951 meeting at Los Alamos, convened by Warren, provides a win- dow onto the balancing of risks and benefits by medical researchers. The meeting focused on the radiological haz- ards to populations downwind from under- ground testing planned at the Nevada Test Site. Those in attendance realized that the testing could be risky. “I would almost say from the dis- cussion this far,” Warren summarized, “that in light of the size and activity of some of these particles, their unpredictability of fallout, the possibility of external beta burns is quite real.””” Committee members considered the testing a “calculated risk” for populations downwind, but they thought that the information they could gain made the risk worthwhile. According to the record of the meeting, Warren summarized the view of Dr. Gioacchino Failla, a Columbia Uni- versity radiological physicist: “[T]he time has come when we should take some risk and get some information ... we are faced with a war in which atomic weapons will undoubtedly be used, and we have to have some information about these things . . . if we look for perfect safety we will never make these tests.”°° Worried about the potential consequences of miscalculation, the AEC’s Carrol Tyler observed, “We have lost a continental site no matter where we put it.” Still, Tyler argued, “If we are going to gamble it might as well be done where it is operationally conve- nient.”®! A proposed deep underground test did not take place, and a test evidently considered less risky was substituted. Ultimately, in a sum- mary prepared at the end of the 1951 test series, the Health Division leader of the AEC’s Los Alamos Laboratory recorded that perhaps only good fortune had averted significant contami- nation: “Thanks to the kindness of the winds, no significant activity was deposited in any populated localities. It was certainly shown how- ever,” he wrote, “that significant exposures at considerable distances could be acquired by in- dividuals who actually were in the fallout while it was in progress.” The NEPA debate and the advent of nuclear testing confronted biomedical experts with a set of conflicting, and even contradictory, objec- tives. First, they were called upon to offer ad- vice on decisions that might inevitably put people at some risk. The risk had to be balanced against the benefit, which in most instances was defined as connected with the nation’s security. In many cases, the experts agreed, it was better to bear the lesser risk now, in order to avoid a greater risk later. Second, these experts were also called upon, as in the 1951 Nevada test, to pro- vide advice on minimizing risk. Third, as in the Nevada test, these same experts saw the tests as opportunities to gather data that might ulti- mately be used to reduce risk for all. Whether and What the Public Should Be Told About Government-Created Radiation Risk Scientific research had a long and celebrated tradition of open publication in the scientific literature. But several factors caused Cold War researchers to limit their public disclosures. These included, preeminently, concern with national security, which necessarily required se-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32220558_0051.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
