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.
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![crecy. But they also included the concern that the release of research information would under- mine needed programs because the public could not understand radiation or because the infor- mation would embarrass the government. The tension between the publicizing of infor- mation and the limits on disclosure was a con- stant theme in Cold War research. When, in June 1947, the Medical Board of Review ap- pointed by David Lilienthal reported on the AEC’s biomedical program, it declared that se- crecy in scientific research is “distasteful and in the long run contrary to the best interests of sci- entific progress.”®? As shown by its organization of the medical isotope program, the AEC acted quickly to make sure that the great preponder- ance of biomedical research done under its aus- pices would be published in the open literature. However, recently retrieved documents show that the need for secrecy was also invoked where national security was not endangered. At the same time that biomedical officials, such as those on the Medical Board of Review, spoke openly of the need to limit national security restrictions, internally they sometimes sided with those who would restrict information from the public even where release admittedly would not directly endanger national security. Thus, as we shall see in chapter 13, Shields Warren and other AEC medical officials agreed to withhold data on human experiments from the public on the grounds that disclosure would embarrass the government or could bea source of legal liability. A further important qualification to what the public could know related to research connected with the atomic bomb—including the creation of a worldwide network to gather data on the effects of fallout from nuclear tests. In 1949, the AEC undertook Project Gabriel, a secret effort to study the question of whether the tests could threaten the viability of life on earth. In 1953, Gabriel led to Project Sunshine, a loose confed- eration of fallout research projects whose human data-gathering efforts, as we see in chapter 13, operated in the twilight between openness and secrecy. Finally, while documents show that medical experts and officials shared an acute awareness of the importance of public support to the suc- cess of Cold War programs, this awareness was coupled with concern about the American public’s ability to understand the risks that had to be borne to win the Cold War. The concern that citizens could not understand radiation risk is illustrated by a recently recovered NEPA tran- script. In July 1949, the nuclear airplane project gathered radiation experts and psychologists to consider psychological problems connected to radiation hazard. To the assembled experts the - greatest unknown was not radiation itself, but the basis for public fear and misunderstanding of radiation. “I believe,” General Cooney proposed, “that the general public is under the opinion that we don’t know very much about this condition [ra- diation].... We know,” he ventured, “just about as much about it as we do about many other diseases that people take for granted . . . even tuberculosis.” *4 Yet, said the Navy’s Captain Behrens, “there are some peculiar ideas relative to radiation that are related to primitive concepts of hysteria and things in that category... . There is such a unique element in it; for some it begins to bor- der on the mystical.”®° A good deal of the public’s fear of radiation, declared Berkeley’s Dr. Karl M. Bowman, a NEPA medical adviser, “is essentially the fear of the unknown. The dangers have been enormously magnified.” As Dr. Bowman and others noted, the public’s perception was not without reason, for “we have emphasized for purposes of getting funds for research how little we know.”8° The perspective expressed in the NEPA tran- script would lead, as shown in chapter 10, to the use of atomic bomb tests to perform human re- search on the psychology of panic and, as shown in other case studies, to decisions to hold infor- mation closely out of concern that its release could create public misunderstanding that would imperil important government programs. CONCLUSION In the atomic age, Captain Behrens’s Atomic Medicine pointed out, radiation research was both the agent and the beneficiary of dramatic developments at the intersection of government and medicine. When ethical questions were](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32220558_0052.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
