Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die by Amy Gutmann

Author:Amy Gutmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS

In 1994 the Albuquerque Tribune’s Eileen Welsome won the Pulitzer Prize for documenting long-rumored injections of hospitalized patients with plutonium during and immediately after World War II. Their purpose: to determine how to detect plutonium in the human body, including by examining excreta. The decision to expose sick patients was the path of least resistance for the directors of the project to build the atomic bomb, since their laboratory workers were also being exposed to this new metal that is far more radioactive than uranium. Strange as it may seem, this was a worker safety experiment. Because the plutonium experiment was conducted by the federal government with eighteen vulnerable American citizens and covered up for decades, alarmed members of his administration brought it to President Bill Clinton. Other experiments involving ionizing radiation were also known to have taken place since the war years and up through the early 1970s. President Clinton appointed a commission under the leadership of bioethicist Ruth Faden.* The commission’s charge was both to find the facts and to determine whether such things could happen under the current regulations and ethical standards.

Working exhaustively for eighteen months, and with presidential authority to request rapid release of classified materials, the advisory committee found a dizzying array of government-sponsored radiation experiments. Not only plutonium, but also uranium, polonium, radioisotopes, and total body irradiation were objects of study. The affected populations and intentional human subjects included prisoners, military personnel, Native Americans, Spanish Americans, children, and cancer patients. In some cases, the advisory committee recommended compensation for the victims or their survivors, ranging from an official apology to financial compensation, depending on the severity of the ethical offense. None of the plutonium injection patients died of the radiation exposure, but their bodies were used as laboratories without their consent, justifying compensation. The Navajo who worked in the uranium mines and mills, many of whom died prematurely of lung cancer, were not warned of the radiation risks for many years. Not even inexpensive measures were employed to reduce their risks. The miners were entitled to financial compensation. The commission found that strengthened research protections like those in the Belmont Report would not be a guarantee of ethical conduct. They recommended that the government thoroughly examine the processes and the real outcomes of the research protection system.

One aspect of the radiation experiments sets them apart: they took place under the banner of U.S. national security. Had the lawyers for the Nazi doctors known about the plutonium injections, they would surely have added them to their list of defense exhibits, though judges would not have been fooled by the false analogy with a systematic and racist death industry. Yet the fact remains that these and many other experiments on radiation, as well as in other domains like chemical weapons, were rationalized by national security concerns and were covered up to prevent embarrassment to the government. National security claims continue to play a poorly understood role in rationalizing unethical human experiments. Often this can be seen most clearly in the rearview mirror.

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