The Plutonium Files Read Online Free PDF

they thought, here was an independent panel of experts not connected to the nuclear weapons establishment who would conduct a complete and unbiased investigation of this chapter in Cold War history.
    A staff of about seventy people was hired to review documents, provide historical context, and help organize the monthly meetings. The staffers for the most part were young and liberal, but the fourteen peoplethe White House appointed to the commission itself were members of the nation’s scientific and academic elite. In fact, they bore a remarkable resemblance to the experimenters they were investigating: They came from the same socioeconomic class, attended the same colleges, and worked at the same universities that sponsored the experiments. Ruth Faden’s employer, for example, Johns Hopkins University, developed and refined the radium nasal treatments, which were administered by doctors throughout the country and significantly increased the subjects’ risks of cancer and other diseases. None of the victims of the experiments or their relatives were appointed to the panel, even though many presidential committees are required to include a representative from the affected community.
    Counting the staffers and the appointed members, the committee had about eighty-five people working on the radiation experiments, but it quickly became apparent that not even that large a group would be able to keep up with the tidal wave of documents. Almost immediately, the panel was deluged with tens of thousands of records that the federal agencies had uncovered in response to Clinton’s search directive.
    In all, an estimated 6 million pages related to the government’s little-known radiation studies were gathered up by the federal agencies and the military branches between late 1993 and 1997 and made available. 4 A small percentage of the documents had been declassified, but the majority were records technically open to the public but not readily accessible. They came from federal repositories, university archives, storage rooms, filing cabinets, personal files, and even family garages.
    Faden acknowledged in December of 1994 that the committee was overwhelmed by the documents. Despite this admission, she actually broadened the scope of the panel’s work to look at how well the rights of patients in
contemporary
experiments were being protected. At her direction, two large projects examining contemporary experiments were undertaken by outside contractors at a cost to taxpayers of several hundred thousand dollars. One involved interviewing 1,900 patients in waiting rooms throughout the country; the other was a detailed analysis of 125 contemporary research projects.
    The General Accounting Office in December of 1994 noted that the committee “had done little of the ethical and scientific analysis called for in its charter. 5 ” Yet, the GAO added, “Despite these difficulties, the Committee has chosen to expand the overall scope of its work.” Faden staunchly defended the expansion, saying the panel couldn’t make any meaningful statements about the past without investigating whether similarproblems were occurring in contemporary experiments. “We have to look at the contemporary situation and say, ‘OK, what is the likelihood that this could happen now?’ And if there’s any plausibility to the view it could happen today, what do we need to do to change it?”
    The committee attacked its assignment on several fronts simultaneously. 6 Some staff members reviewed, analyzed, and searched for documents while others crisscrossed the country interviewing the scientists who had conducted the experiments. At the monthly meetings, the appointed members listened to personal testimony from witnesses who had firsthand experience with the horrors being investigated or whose family members had been victimized. They then tried to develop an ethical framework that they could use to judge the experiments and make recommendations for medical