When medicine went wrong: how Americans were used illegally as guinea pits.

• Author: Braffman-Miller, Judith

Ms. Braffman-Miller is a free-lance journalist whose articles have appeared in Consumer Reports, The Humanist, Ms., Science Digest, New York, and USA Today.

IN JANUARY, 1946, a four-year-old Australian, Simeon Shaw, was diagnosed as having a highly malignant form of bone cancer. In a desperate effort to save the boy's life, his parents decided to bring him to the U.S. for further diagnosis and treatment. The family had been referred to the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.

Once in America, Simeon did not receive the life-saving medical treatment his parents desperately sought. Instead, he was ensnared in a hush-hush, extremely unethical medical experiment. Simeon was one of 18 supposedly dying patients injected with deadly, radioactive plutonium by scientists working for the Manhattan Project, the organization that produced the atomic bomb. Concerned about the dangers of radioactive material on nuclear workers, U.S. government officials wanted to discover how the human body eliminated plutonium.

Simeon was two months short of his fifth birthday when he was injected on April 26, 1946, with 0.169 microcuries of plutonium 239, a dose of radiation nearly 24 times what the average person receives in 50 years. About a week later, bone, blood, and tissue samples were taken from the child. Samples were collected at other times as well. Simeon Shaw died eight months after the injection.

Many unsuspecting Americans were exposed to radiation in experiments which provided no medical benefit to the subjects. In the years following the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military and nuclear weapons production industry sought data concerning the biological effects of plutonium and radioisotopes of the fallout resulting from atmospheric nuclear tests. Plutonium injections in human subjects, such as Simeon Shaw, had no purpose other than providing information for determining safety standards for weapons production. Plutonium has no medical uses.

According to Rep. Philip R. Sharf (D.-Ind.), former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, "For the public at large, the evidence that some of these experiments were scientifically and ethically irresponsible is chilling. Today, as in the 1940s, there are few settings in which any of us is more vulnerable than in dealing with the medical establishment."

Some human radiation experiments were conducted in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, but others were performed during the supposedly better enlightened 1960s and 1970s. It is possible that the program involved more than 1,000 people. These experiments were conducted by the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the Energy Research and Development Administration, all predecessor agencies of the Department of Energy.

During 1945-47, as part of the Manhattan Project, patients who were diagnosed as having diseases that gave them life expectancies of less than 10 years were injected with plutonium. Besides the University of Califomia Hospital, such studies were carried out at the Manhattan District Hospital, Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester, N.Y.; and the University of Chicago. Despite the original diagnoses, seven of the 18 patients lived longer than 10 years and five survived for more than 20. Internal investigations by the AEC found that informed consent was not granted in the initial experiments, since even the word "plutonium" was classified during World War II, and living patients were not informed that they had been injected with plutonium until 1974.

On July 18, 1947, three doctors and a nurse entered Ward B at the University of California Hospital and injected plutonium into 36-year-old Elmer Allen's left leg. Three days later, the leg was amputated at mid-thigh. His hospital chart states...