
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, August 18, 1995                   TAG: 9508180071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

RESEARCH ESTIMATE DOUBLED

In a final tally, the Energy Department said Thursday that 16,000 men, women and children - nearly double the department's earlier estimate - were used in radiation experiments from World War II to the mid-1970s.

Though questions remain about the ethics of the experimentation, Energy Department officials said their inquiry has shown that most of the research with humans was for useful, even ``heroic,'' medical purposes.

``Much of it was to go after breakthroughs on the medical front,'' Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary told a news conference. But, she added, ``There is a dark side,'' too.

The department over the past 18 months has documented 435 experiments in which humans were used in radiation research conducted or sponsored by the Energy Department or its predecessors since the 1940s, she said.

It remains an open question whether the people used in the experiments gave their consent, and whether, in cases of volunteers, they knew the health risks.

Ellyn Weiss, director of the department's Office of Human Radiation Experiments, said the available documents left unclear the extent of subject consent.

Department officials declined to discuss the ethics of individual experiments. They said that issue - and whether subjects or their families should be compensated - was up to a presidential advisory committee that is reviewing all human radiation experiments, including those done by the Pentagon. The presidential panel is to make its recommendations in September.

Tara O'Toole, the assistant energy secretary for environmental safety and health, said that in her view, about 10 percent of the 435 confirmed experiments ``raise some troubling ethical questions.'' She cited three main concerns:

Some of the subjects were children, mental patients or prison inmates.

For example, at the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock in the early 1960s, mentally retarded children as young as 13 who were wards of the Arkansas Children's Colony were given small amounts of iodine-131 in a thyroid study. A similar University of Arkansas study in the 1950s used infants as young as nine months. A University of Washington study in 1954-58 used mental patients at Northern State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley.

Some people were given very high doses of radiation.

In experiments at Harvard Medical School in the early 1960s, for example, one patient received 650 rads of X-ray radiation over the whole body. Today's established safety limit for whole-body exposure is the equivalent of 2 rads per year. The unidentified Harvard patient died 28 days later; death was attributed to the radiation.

Aborted fetuses were used in some cases.

In 1947, for example, two Massachusetts hospitals and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collaborated on an experiment in which nine pregnant women were injected with small amounts of iodine-131 before undergoing scheduled therapeutic abortions. The thyroids of the fetuses were measured for radioactivity. The study showed that radioiodine could be given therapeutically until the fourth month of pregnancy without the fetus absorbing any.

The Atomic Energy Commission, a predecessor to the Energy Department, either approved or gave financial support to each experiment.

by CNB