ACHRE Report
Part II
Chapter 9
Introduction
The Oregon and Washington Experiments
Other Radiation Experiments
History of Prison Research Regulation
Ethical Considerations
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Chapter 9: Other Radiation Experiments
There is no comprehensive list of radiation experiments with prisoners as
subjects, but in the course of the Advisory Committee's historical research a
handful of such experiments other than those in Oregon and Washington has been
identified. In many cases there is only fragmentary information available,
which the Committee has not always been able to verify. To provide a sense of
what else might have been going on at the time (which may or may not have been
representative), consider the following:
- A former prison administrator in Utah has confirmed that experiments were
conducted on prisoner subjects in the late 1950s or early 1960s in which blood
appears to have been removed, irradiated, and returned to the body. Prisoners
at the time who were interviewed by the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City
newspaper, said they believed that about ten prisoner-volunteers were studied
in this way. One subject said, "They told us nothing about the tests. They
just said it wouldn't bother us."[50] In a
1959 confidential report to the president of the University of Utah, Lowell A.
Woodbury, the radiological safety officer said: "One group of medical
experimenters with authorization for human experimentation was administering
isotopes to volunteers at the state prison. This was in direct violation of
the terms of their license and while not an extremely serious violation was apt
to result in a citation [from the Atomic Energy Commission]."[51]
- Experiments were conducted at the Medical College of Virginia in the early
1950s under the sponsorship of the Army and possibly the Public Health Service
using radioactive tracers. The goal was to study the life cycle of red blood
cells. As discussed in more detail in chapter 13, Dr. Everett I. Evans, in a
letter to the superintendent of the state penitentiary, quoted from a letter
from Colonel John R. Wood of the Army surgeon general's office, which provided
that no information related to research being conducted for the Army surgeon
general be released without review by the Public Information Office of the
Defense Department. Dr. Evans said the reason for this was that "the problem
of the use of prisoner volunteers is not yet clarified."[52]
- During the 1960s "prison volunteers" in the Colorado State Penitentiary were
used as subjects in an experiment designed to determine the survival time and
characteristics of red blood cells during periods of rapid red cell formation
and during periods of severe iron deficiency. Red cells transfused into
normal recipients were tagged with either radioactive iron or radioactive
phosphorus.[53] In a 1976 report on the study, which used five subjects, the
investigators wrote:
The rights of the prisoners were respected in conformance with the Helsinki
Declaration of the World Health Organization and the Nuremberg Code. Approval
was obtained from the Governor, Attorney General, and Director of Institutions
of the State of Colorado, the warden and psychiatrist of the Colorado State
Penitentiary, and the nearest of kin of each volunteer.[54]
It is not clear from this publication or other documents available to the
Committee precisely what use was made of the principles stated in the Nuremberg
Code and the Declaration of Helsinki in obtaining the consent of the
prisoner-subjects in this experiment. However, if the investigators did accept
Nuremberg and Helsinki as standards for consent in the 1960s it adds weight to
other evidence (for example, the citation of Nuremberg by the Human Rights
Review Committee of the Department of Institutions in the Washington
testicular irradiation experiment) that these standards were
considered relevant to research on prisoners in the 1960s.
- Other federally sponsored experiments on prisoner volunteers appear to have
been conducted in Pennsylvania (Holmesburg State Prison, the effects of
radiation on human skin), Oklahoma (Oklahoma State Penitentiary, routine
metabolic studies of experimental drugs using tracer amounts of radionuclides),
Illinois (Stateville Prison, measurements of radium burden received from
drinking water), and California (San Quentin, tracking movement of iron from
plasma to red blood cells using a radioactive marker).[55]
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