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Hazel O’Leary’s disclosures, President Clinton ordered all federal agencies to comb their records for any documents related to human radiation experiments and make them public. He also established the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to investigate the studies. With that action, the attention shifted from the Department of Energy and Hazel O’Leary to Ruth Faden and the Advisory Committee.
    Faden chaired the committee. She was a bioethicist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and a scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Forty-four years old and coauthor of an authoritative book on informed consent, Faden told a reporter she viewed the appointment as a chance to “rewrite the history of ethics and research on human subjects in this country.” 1
    Both of Faden’s parents were survivors of the Holocaust. 2 Her father spent two years in Auschwitz, and her mother was in Birkenau for two years. But Faden said she had a “deep aversion” to drawing any analogies to the Holocaust or trading in any way on that experience. “I don’t think I have any special claim to anything because of who I am, or more importantly, who my parents are and what they experienced. Nor do I want to draw any straight line analogies between what we’re studying and the Nazi experience. At the same time, obviously I am the product of that horrible event.”
    Because of what her own family had gone through, Faden said she recognized how important it was for the committee to leave behind an accurate historical record of the radiation experiments. “There’s nothingmore terrifying for survivors of a horrible event than to hear other people trivialize it, or even worse, raise skepticism about whether the event ever occurred. 3 Maybe my sensitivity to the importance of leaving the historical record irrefutably straight comes out of that experience.”
    The White House appointed thirteen other people to the panel. They included two more ethicists, five medical doctors, two lawyers, two scientists, a historian, and a bank vice president. The group met roughly once a month in Washington, D.C., for two to three days from April of 1994 to October of 1995. In general, the first hour or two was set aside for witness testimony; the remaining time was reserved for debate and discussion among the committee members themselves.
    The committee’s headquarters, located at 1726 M Street in downtown Washington, had the chaotic feel of a law firm on the eve of a big trial. The hallways were stacked with boxes of documents from various federal agencies. Desks and floors were piled high with records and paper coffee cups. In one room, two industrial-size copying machines ran twelve to fifteen hours a day, spitting out thousands of pages.
    The creation of the committee changed the way the media covered the controversy. Instead of digging up their own stories, reporters began relying on what the panel had found. The committee had two press spokesmen, and its executive director, Dan Guttman, was an affable Washington lawyer who enjoyed schmoozing with the media. Before each monthly meeting, the panel would gather up a package of the most sensational documents and release them to the press. This process guaranteed that at least once a month the group would be portrayed in countless news reports as “uncovering,” “revealing,” or “disclosing” some new Cold War horror. Although staffers did find many important documents, much of the work was done by the legions of anonymous Energy and Defense Department employees working in the bowels of various federal archives. The monthly releases also enabled the Clinton administration, whether intended or not, to regain control of the controversy and, as one of O’Leary’s aides explained, “slow things down.”
    None of this was apparent at first. The committee’s formation was viewed with great optimism by activists and the experimental subjects. Finally,