Human Guinea Pigs
- ️Fri Feb 01 20199
By MICHAEL SHERRY
ou must realize,'' one scientist said of an American medical official, that ''some people are patriotic enough to lie.''
In her expansive and valuable account of secret medical experiments in the cold war, Eileen Welsome finds many lies, and much else. From the early 1940's into the 60's, the armed forces, the Atomic Energy Commission
and collaborating universities and hospitals administered nuclear experiments to thousands of unsuspecting or poorly informed Americans -- some of them unharmed, others badly damaged and few helped. These experiments included
18 subjects injected with traces of plutonium and several hundred pregnant women given drinks of radioactive iron at a university clinic. And since the nuclear weapons program was -- and is -- in one sense a giant medical
and ecological experiment, Welsome's coverage extends to others: servicemen contaminated when ordered aboard warships blasted in nuclear tests or into fresh atomic test sites in Nevada and uranium miners working in
unventilated facilities, among others. Experiments of opportunity also arose when a scientist or worker was accidentally contaminated, then treated like a guinea pig.
There was little system to all this; it was more a grab bag of opportunities seized as one agency or another perceived some need, in an era when lavish federal grants ''spawned an orgy of human experimentation in almost every medical field.'' Some officials worried about specific physiological effects of nuclear weapons or of materials and processes that went into them. Others had grander goals: shown pictures of American G.I.'s marching through nuclear test sites, ''the nation's troops and 'Mr. and Mrs. America' would see that their foreboding about nuclear weapons was nonsense.'' Thus many experiments displayed the haphazard, inadvertent quality that often characterizes aggressive American actions -- no one intended harm. For the scientists, doctors and military officials involved, the goodness of their intentions, or at least the demands of national security, absolved them from responsibility, while their immense authority, their genuine hopes for nuclear medicine and their bureaucratic confusion and secrecy all shielded them from scrutiny.
Welsome won't let the experimenters off the hook, although she appreciates the pressures under which they operated. She finds no ''vast conspiracy,'' but something perhaps more insidious -- a culture of ''deception and denial'' accepted by ''scientists and bureaucrats who were inducted into the weapons program at a time of national urgency and never abandoned their belief that nuclear war was imminent.'' She shows they often violated ethical standards prevailing in the 1940's. Even if experimenters rarely intended harm to their subjects, it's clear they rarely intended good either; therapeutic benefits were at best incidental to experiments undertaken for military purposes. Patients' informed consent, though by the 50's a well-understood condition for experimentation, was either ignored or handled perfunctorily. Secrecy and lying proved necessary to keep a lid on it all.
The lid jiggled in the 70's and blew off in the 90's, thanks in part to Welsome's early work as an investigative reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune, which won her a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She celebrates efforts by Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary to halt weapons testing and dismantle the ''culture of secrecy'' in the nuclear establishment, whose defenders despised her. O'Leary's efforts led President Clinton in 1994 to appoint an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which uncovered a rich record but then, to Welsome's frustration, ''declared no one was harmed, no one was to blame and no one needed medical monitoring.'' Clinton, not known for courageous steps, overcame the panel's reticence, declaring some of the experiments ''unethical, not only by today's standards, but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted.'' Even then, victims had to go to court to secure compensation. Despite some tiresome journalistic cliches and a confusing way with chronology, Welsome tells this sprawling, technically complex story in an engaged, jargon-free fashion.
Protesting injustices, she does not measure their relative gravity. She is a journalist uncovering a story, not an ethicist examining comparative injustices. Insofar as radiation experiments were a synecdoche for the American effort in the cold war, does accountability rank higher for them than for other injustices committed in its name? Are the atomic injustices mitigated by the more barbarous practices featured in the Soviet nuclear program? Are 50-year-old injustices more important than continuing ones like bad medical care for many Americans or civilians abroad harmed by American bombing? Should state injustices distract us from corporate malpractice?
Some lawyers, ethicists and political activists will respond that justice is no zero-sum game: its pursuit in one arena stimulates its pursuit in others and vice versa. That expansive view perhaps builds on a model of social change in the 50's and 60's, when the civil rights campaign helped galvanize others. It's doubtful that this model holds in the more cacophonous, decentered and sensationalized culture of the 90's. As Welsome notes, news of the O. J. Simpson murder trial verdict came two hours after -- and eclipsed -- Clinton's public apology for unethical experiments, a fate impossible to imagine for a major presidential announcement before the cold war's end.
Clinton got no reward, and, as with his other challenges to the cold war past -- regarding defense budgets and gays in the military, for example -- he did not pursue this one long. Neither his own caution nor the competitive claims of justice wholly account for his retreat. He inherited the murky American triumphalism that set in after the cold war, in which justice was to be imposed only on losers: scholars rushed to newly opened Soviet archives while politicians shut down the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibition; movies like ''Saving Private Ryan'' asked Americans to remember the stark but comforting moral stakes of World War II, not the cold war's messy complexities. Welsome tells the engrossing story of a partial exception to that pattern. It seems unlikely that a bolder committee report or a delayed O. J. verdict would have made that exception last longer in our political memory.
Michael Sherry, who teaches history at Northwestern University, is the author of ''In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930's.''