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Trnsc12a { March 15 1995 } UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS
(PUBLIC MEETING)
Executive Chambers
The Madison Hotel
15th and M Streets, NW
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday,
March 15, 1995
1:00 p.m.
Advisory Committee Members:
RUTH R. FADEN, PH.D., M.P.H. - CHAIR
KENNETH R. FEINBERG, J.D.
ELI GLATSTEIN, M.D.
DR. JAY KATZ
PATRICIA A. KING, J.D.
SUSAN E. LEDERER, PH.D.
RUTH MACKLIN, PH.D.
LOIS L. NORRIS
NANCY L. OLEINICK, PH.D.
HENRY D. ROYAL, M.D.
DUNCAN C. THOMAS, PH.D.
REED V. TUCKSON, M.D.
Staff Members:
DAN GUTTMAN
ANNA MASTROIANNI
A G E N D A
AGENDA ITEM: PAGE:
Opening Remarks 3
Ruth Faden, Chair
Approval of Minutes of February 15-17, 7
1995 Meeting
Public Comment 9
Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass 9
University of Pittsburgh
Elmerine Whitfield Bell 25
Dallas, Texas
Steve Schwartz 113
Washington, D.C.
Cooper Brown 36
National Association of Radiation
Victims
Dr. Oscar Rosen 46
National Association of Atomic
Veterans
Glenn Alcalay 61
New York, New York
Denise Nelson 70
Bethesda, Maryland
Chris DeNicola, Valerie Wolf 77
Claudia Mullen
New Orleans, Louisiana
Suzzanne Starr 102
Chimayo, New Mexico
Update on Knoxville Small Panel Meeting 124
Nancy Oleinick
Approach to the Final Report 133
Dan Guttman
Meeting Adjourned
P R O C E E D I N G S
1:00 p.m.
Opening Remarks
DR. FADEN: Good morning. Excuse me. I'm used to the
meeting starting in the morning. Good afternoon.
We have Phil Caplan from the White House to open the
meeting, please, officially.
MR. CAPLAN: Good afternoon. As the designated federal
official for the Advisory Committee, I declare this meeting open.
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Thank you, Phil.
I can't decide if we're happier to see him in the beginning, when
the meeting starts, or at the end when he closes it. When is he
more welcomed.
Well, welcome to everyone here. This is the 12th
meeting. Is it the 12th meeting? Yes, the 12th meeting. Okay.
Scary thought. This is the 12th meeting of the Advisory
Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Welcome, everyone
here. We've had a change of venue. So, I trust everybody could
find The Madison. We were almost getting to feel at home in the
last hotel we were in, and we're now here.
We have a very packed agenda. The meeting begins this
afternoon and goes through all day Thursday and all day Friday.
It's been typical for me to start the meetings with a kind of
quick overview of what we were hoping to accomplish in this
particular meeting, and let me just do that, run down and go
straight to our important subject for today, which is Public
Comment.
One objective of today's meeting, as is true for all
our meetings and for our small panel meetings throughout the
country, is to hear from members of the public, anyone who wishes
to tell us things that they think we need to hear. This is very
important to us, always has been very important to us.
We will hear later this afternoon a report from Nancy
Oleinick, and Henry represented the committee at a small panel
meeting at Knoxville, and we'll hear the results of that later
this afternoon, and, in addition, we have given over the bulk of
this afternoon to a public comment period, and we have a
substantial list of people who have taken time out of their lives
to come and talk to us, and we are grateful that they have done
that, and we are looking forward to hearing from all of you.
So, this afternoon is pretty much given over to our
hearing what members of the public want us to hear. We will have
a public comment period, and Nancy and Henry will give us a
report of what was heard at the Knoxville meeting, and then we
will begin a discussion of how we're going to tackle the actual
processing and thinking, committee writing or responding to
drafts of the final report as they're emerging.
So, we're going to do some housekeeping basically this
afternoon, if we have time, and clearly there's a possibility
that we may run short.
We will also hear tomorrow afternoon -- tomorrow
morning, excuse me, from Senator Wellstone, who will be making
some comments to us based on some events that have occurred in
his state that he thinks bear on the work of the committee.
After that, the rest of the meeting, Thursday and
Friday, is given over to this committee's deliberations. We have
a real shortage of time left, and we have some very tough things
that as a committee we need to deliberate together.
We will have two reports from the Contemporary Projects
that are on-going, and they will occur Friday morning. So, we
will be updated on the progress of the subject interview study
and the research proposal review project, but -- and we will also
hear on Thursday afternoon from the chair of a committee being
sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, looking at
radiation-related research in the state of Alaska in the '50s.
We heard a little bit about it from some public
representatives of the North Slope Borough in Alaska, and we will
be hearing more about that Thursday afternoon, but with the
exception of the items that I just mentioned, we're going to
spend the bulk of tomorrow and Friday deliberating about possible
recommendations that this committee may wish to make, and I want
to signal to our members of the public that are here and to
ourselves that we should realize that these are discussions.
We are not going to reach any conclusions about
recommendations yet. That would be premature. It would clearly
be inappropriate or imprudent, I'm not sure what the right term
is, for us to be finalizing recommendations when we haven't yet
completed our analyses.
So, the idea here is that these are recommendations,
drafts of recommendations, both forward-looking and backward-
looking recommendations, for the committee to begin to -- we have
been -- for the committee to continue to debate and discuss and
examine, so we can see what recommendations look promising, what
recommendations should be further developed, what additional
information we might want to review before we can conclude as to
whether we want to have this be a recommendation of the committee
or not.
So, we will not be calling for closure, that is, will
the committee recommend this, yes or no, but for debate and
discussion and deliberation by committee members about the
recommendations, and we will obviously hold off and finalize our
recommendations only after we've deliberated as much as we can
our analyses of the task before us.
So, that said, we have one piece of business before we
move immediately into the Public Comment period, and that is
approval of the minutes of the February 15th to 17th meeting.
Approval of Minutes of February 15-17, 1995, Meeting
DR. FADEN: Are there any comments or questions or
corrections for the record of the minutes of the February
meeting?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Is there a second to the
approval?
COMMITTEE MEMBER: Second.
DR. FADEN: All in favor.
(Chorus of ayes)
DR. FADEN: Any opposed?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: Thank you. The minutes of the February
15th to 17th, 1995, meeting then have been approved. I just do
that a little bit out of order to get it out of the way. I know
that's one thing that was done.
Public Comment
DR. FADEN: With that, we're going to move to Public
Comment period. It looks as if we have nine people who are here.
We have asked that our public presenters try to keep their
comments, if they possibly can, to 10 minutes. That leaves the
committee opportunity to ask the presenter questions, and this
has always turned out to be very important to the committee. It
allows us to learn more from the person than we might otherwise.
We appreciate that sometimes it's extremely difficult
to keep important comments to 10 minutes, but we would express
our appreciation for those of you who are able to do so and also
as a courtesy to the public commenters who come after you. So,
as much as possible, if you can keep it to 10 minutes, that would
be terrific.
I guess I should just start. Our first public
presenter is Dr. Ernest Sternglass. Is Dr. Sternglass here?
Thank you for coming. Would you please come to the table? And
we would ask you to speak into the microphone so that your
comments can be recorded for the record.
DR. STERNGLASS: Might I be permitted to stand over
there, because I have a few overheads to show?
DR. FADEN: Can we -- we need you to speak into the
mike. So, if you can lift the mike up, that would be fine.
(Pause)
Statement of Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass
University of Pittsburgh
DR. STERNGLASS: Dr. Faden and distinguished members of
the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you
today. My remarks will address primarily the question of
radiation doses and health effects of the radiation exposures
documented in your work so far, which is the area in which I've
earned -- carried out extensive research during the past three
decades as indicated in my vitae.
In fact, I spent essentially the last 30 years of my
life trying to reduce doses in medical procedures, including
radioisotope and x-ray procedures, at the University of
Pittsburgh, School of Medicine.
This subject is relevant to the question of
compensation for both individuals who were exposed in individual
experiments as well as for large groups of people living near the
facilities from which experimental releases took place.
My testimony also bears on the policy recommendations
your committee has been asked to make with regard to future
actions by our government involving both individual human
experiments and releases of radioactivity into the environment,
since there's evidence, as I will present, that government
agencies have continued to cover up the three -- the actual true
doses from environmental releases, and the serious effects of
such low-dose exposures. I will not try to read the entire
testimony.
DR. FADEN: We have it as part of the record.
DR. STERNGLASS: Right. And I will just simply
summarize the essential points for you, using a few overhead
projections to do this in a few minutes.
Basically, the argument that I'll be presenting is that
we have grossly under-estimated without realizing it how chronic
exposure over long periods of time due to internal doses from
long-lived Radium class, not the ones we use in medicine, which
are extremely short-lived and mainly give off penetrating
radiation, but beta emitters that stay in the bone like Strontium
90 for a long, long time, have an enormously greater effect than
we were led to believe on the basis of our experience with
Radium, which was the only material for which we had any human
data from the Dial workers that you know about back in the early
'20s and '30s.
The trouble is that Alpha particles have a very short
range of bone, and therefore stick in the bone and do not reach
the bone marrow to the same degree as has been experimentally
observed as a beta rate from fusion products, and these did not
exist on earth before the bomb, and this is really the basic
reason why we under-estimated the effect.
We thought we knew what Radium was doing. We thought
we knew what Cosmic rays were doing. We thought we knew what x-
rays were doing, and we even thought we knew what the short flash
of the bomb at Hiroshima had done.
All those studies, including hundreds of studies on
animals, all those studies have to be done at high enough doses
to be able to see an effect. You cannot have a million mice and
give them a hundredth of a rad and expect to see anything.
So, of necessity, all work had to be done at high doses
and high dose rates, and not until 1972 was it discovered quite
by accident, by a Canadian physician and researcher by the name
of Dr. Abraham Petgow, working in Penowa, Manitoba, for the
Atomic Energy establishment of Canada, working on radio-
protection, and he discovered that cell membranes, fatty cell
membranes of all types, break at much lower doses when the dose
is prolonged over a long period of time given in a short x-ray,
and that is only in 1972, 30 years after the first fusion process
and long after the bomb testing had begun, in fact ended,
atmospheric tests and long after all the nuclear facilities in
the world had constructed, and then only did we learn that the
chronic exposures to membranes dominate at low doses whereas the
DNA damage to the cell nuclei and to the genetic information
dominates at high doses, and therefore the repair mechanism of
DNA, which are very efficient, led us to believe mistakenly that
doses, if you extrapolate them down linearly, you would expect to
have practically no detectable effects from environmental
releases or tiny doses given in the course of diagnostic
procedures and so on, and that has in fact, if it hadn't been for
the fact that x-rays and gamma rays given in short intense bursts
have little effect, we could never have used radiology as a
diagnostic tool in medicine or could we have used radiation as a
way of treating tumors, because we would have killed everybody
whom we gave x-rays at these high doses.
It is fortunate, however, that cell membranes are very
strongly protected by enzymes in the body and the fact that the
free radicals, which are created, bump into each other and de-
activate each other at high doses, and therefore we can use
medical x-rays. We can use and we're tricked into believing that
the same thing is true for environmental and tiny doses given
over very long periods of time.
I want to emphasize this because I myself have worked
in the field of diagnostic medicine for 40 years and helped to
develop instruments that expose people deliberately to radiation,
but, of course, there was a very clear benefit to the individual
involved, and this, I think, is the important point; that when
you do individual, you know, treatment or diagnosis of an ill
person, then this individual receives both the risk and the
benefit.
But when you carry out an experiment in which you
release radioactivity into the environment for some experimental
purposes just to satisfy some instrumentalist desire to find out
how well he can read the meter at 50 miles away, then you see
you're exposing people who are not ill. You are exposing women
during pregnancy, and since Dr. Alice Stewart had already shown
in 1958 that the fetus is extremely sensitive, then we were
exposing the most sensitive members of the population for no
benefit to them whatsoever, without their consent and without
their ability to even know what was happening to them or to take
precautions or protect themselves or their children, and that, I
think, is the difference between the medical use on an individual
who is ill and the deliberate or often accidental distribution of
radio-activity in the environment for some purpose other than to
benefit the individual who receives the radiation.
Now, the tragedy is that during the Cold War, and
especially as you have already found with all your
investigations, there was great concern that the fact of fall-out
should not become too well known for all the military security
reasons that you know about. I don't have to go into that, but
it's evident that what happened is that the scientific community
as a whole, people like me, my friends, people who worked on
equipment and designed reactors, worked on the design of nuclear
reactors for space propulsion. I participated in many, you know,
developments of nuclear instrumentation.
We had no idea that early, already in 1945-46-47, at
the Argonne National Lab in Chicago, metallurgical lab, animals
were exposed to small doses of Strontium 90 during pregnancy, and
they knew that the dogs that were being examined were not able to
walk, and they died of pneumonia and cancers and all this in a
very short time. Sometimes it was five or 10 years before it
showed, but because all this was kept secret, we could not
benefit from it, and therefore what I have done here is to
provide you with the documentation that show the history of what
happened now, and now I can just explain to you what the latest
development is, because Dr. Petgow's findings mean that the dose
response curve -- in other words, the shape of the dose response
curve is not a straight line all the way down, and these graphs
are taken mainly from the material I'm showing you, and this is
extremely important because all the data at high doses you see
was on the flat part of the curve. That means a small increase
in dose produced very little extra effect, and as long as you're
way up on this curve, way, way up, then you will never find the
tiny part of the dose where you have very small amounts, and this
is taken from our paper, published in the International Journal
of Health Services, which, by the way, is published in your
department at Johns Hopkins University, and in this paper, you
see that if you go across the nation and take the nine census
regions and use the announced radioactive releases from nuclear
reactors and plot them up, it's not a straight line, and that, in
other words, shows that we grossly under-estimated it by using
that slope rather than this slope.
And the nature of this curve is such that if you
decrease it by 10, the risk per millirad goes up tenfold. If you
go down another 10, the risk keeps going up, and therefore we
have a strange situation that the weaker the radiation intensity
is, the more deadly it is, and nobody anticipated this and
present radiation standards do not believe in this and have not
accepted this because it goes against the existing regulations,
which govern all uses of radiation everywhere, and nobody wants
to touch this, although the BEIR Committee of the National
Academy called attention to it years ago in the earlier report,
BEIR III, and, so, we now find that we have a situation where we
have far greater health effects than we ever thought.
Moreover, we can tie this directly to Strontium 90
specifically because here we have the relationship which shows
the link between low birth weight and Strontium 90, and this is
human data, not extrapolated from high doses. This was gathered
by the AEC during their early years, where they gathered
skeletons from all over the world that you publicized, and then
you see that the number of babies born under-weight in New York
State is perfectly correlated with an extremely incredibly high
correlation coefficient of .96, which is totally unbelievable.
I mean it's just unbelievable that any experiment in
the environment can give such a correlation, and that is the
nature of this enormous tragedy that we're faced because of the
nature of secrecy.
So, the following point I need to make is that we are
in a situation where, unfortunately, our government had to -- had
to deceive the public in order to be able to continue the bomb
testing, and as a result, they did not realize, for instance,
that in Nevada, when the bomb tests went off in 1951, and the
story in today's Times indicates, they did want to find out what
would happen from bomb testing.
Well, they never looked at the low birth weight data
for Nevada. When you see this giant peak here which only comes
back down to the rest of the United States, after the end of
atmospheric surface testing, then you see that we have a far
greater problem from chronic radiation than anyone had expected,
especially since all standards have until now been said
essentially only on cancer and not on other conditions that
involve the immune system because the Strontium 90 goes to the
immune system where the beta rays reach and destroy the
progenitors of all the blood cells, and therefore lead to
children that are born immature, whose future is impaired because
low birth weight is associated with learning difficulties, with
neurological damage, with immune system damage, and we have
created a generation of children that are now born under weight.
We see the first peak that I just showed you in the
previous slide here, and now we see the tragic rise, which in New
York in recent years has exceeded the high point of fall-out from
bomb testing, and that is frightening. It followed some
accidents at the Indian Point plant, which released low levels
perfectly within present guidelines that caused apparently
Strontium 90 damage to the mother's immune system, which causes
her to reject the fetus as a foreign object.
We've only learned about the role of the immune system
in the critical aspect of pregnancy within the last decade or so,
and, so, you can see it was the inadequacy of our knowledge that
was so tragic because so much of it was concealed.
Unfortunately, the concealment still seems to be going
on, and this is one thing that I'm recommending your committee to
investigate; namely, the National Cancer Institute did a study in
1990, which was so arranged and the methodology used in such a
way that it was practically guaranteed to find no effects around
62 nuclear facilities, and this was in 1988 and '90, not in 1945
and 1950.
We are talking about today's deception that is still
going on, and in the material that I supplied you, you will see
what the nature of the deception is, but it's very simple. They
said, well, we'll look at the small population that's irradiated
in this county, and then we'll look to see -- anyway, we'll look
at this -- the facility which had a high dose here, and then
we'll pick some control counties, and it turns out that three-
quarters of the control counties were right adjacent, as if the
radioactivity stopped, but the latest DOE report submitted to you
in February shows that they were able to trace the radioactivity
50 to 200 miles away from a source.
So, the methodology used was guaranteed not to show
anything, and furthermore, and this is frightening, as one of the
criteria they used in order to select control counties, they --
aside from the normal demographic variables, like sex, race,
occupation, poverty status and so on, they used and picked
control counties that had the same infant mortality or low birth
weight, which was essentially guaranteed to show that there would
be no difference in cancer rates later, and, so, this is what I'm
planning to do, namely offering some recommendations to you of
things to do, and they are written down, and they relate to the
need to re-examine and to urge or to request or recommend to the
other departments that the newest data should be re-examined, the
NCI study should be examined by independent people who are not
involved in this cover-up, like this committee is an independent
committee, you can do it, or some subcommittee.
Secondly, I'd urge that a new way be taken to set
radiation standards, not by the users exclusively and the self-
appointed committee, but in a public manner where the public and
lay person can participate, who are the ones who have to run it,
take the brunt of the risk, and therefore the biggest thing that
you can do, I believe, is to recommend that we need to re-examine
the risks that were involved, and above all not to deny
compensation to the victims on the basis of the high dose risk
estimates which clearly, unfortunately, were so low.
The last slide that I wanted to show you is very
important, and I'll just take another minute. This one. It's
rather frightening because what the National Cancer Institute
did, which minimized or practically eliminated the effect of
radiation, is really very, very serious for the nation as a
whole, because of the rising cancer rate, and the continued rise
in low birth weight that nobody knows what's causing it.
But I'll now show you a graph that is really
astounding. This shows how mortality in the United States
unadjusted for age declined steadily from 1900 to 1945-50, okay,
and suddenly, beginning with the -- roughly the time of the Bravo
tests, the first hydrogen bomb test that released thousands of
times as much Strontium as the Hiroshima bombs, suddenly, there
was a rise, an abnormal rise, which stayed high, and a gap
developed between the projection and the actual number of deaths.
Then, after a short time, 10 years or so, it began to
try to come down again, but then there was another rise, and I
have to say the rises have continued in the last two years,
completely counter to what's going on in most other advanced
civilized countries.
Mortality is rising rather than declining, despite all
our medical efforts and all our expenses, and what this means is
that this gap here, which has developed, by 1993, this gap
represents 15.6 million people who died prematurely.
Thank you very much.
DR. FADEN: Thank you, Dr. Sternglass.
We have --
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: -- a limited amount of time. Are there
questions from the committee to Dr. Sternglass? Nancy?
DR. OLEINICK: Well, I think your presentation raises
many questions, and we will undoubtedly not be able to handle
them right now, and perhaps some of us could speak with you
afterwards.
DR. STERNGLASS: Be happy to do that. I'll stay
beyond.
DR. OLEINICK: I guess just one question that
immediately comes to mind is, in general, correlation does not
mean cause and effect.
DR. STERNGLASS: Right.
DR. OLEINICK: Right. And I just wonder, I'm sure this
is not something you can address in a minute, but I'd like to
hear what other cause and effect factors were considered and
ruled out in order to place the blame on Strontium 90.
DR. STERNGLASS: Right. First of all, the cause and
relation of -- cause and effect relationship between Strontium 90
has been established since as early as the early '40s and '50s on
animal studies. There's no question that Strontium 90 produces
leukemia and other types of cancers. So, there is no question
about that.
Secondly, we -- I pointed to the extremely close
correlation between Strontium 90 measured actually in bone and
the low birth weight in New York City.
Furthermore, there are many other studies which are
referenced in there, all of which point to the high toxicity and
the ability of Strontium 90 to affect the immune system, and once
you affect the immune system, you increase the chance of every
type of malignancy being accelerated, if it already exists, or
going out of control, due to the failure of the immune system,
and, so, there are also studies that I referred to which show
that the Strontium 90 in the milk by state-by-state with the
three to four-year lag, which is necessary for the build-up of
Strontium 90 in bone, and that is actually correlated from state-
to-state.
So that states with very low Strontium 90 and otherwise
similar diets and everything else had very low increases, whereas
other states that had high data, and, so, there's an enormous
amount of both human and animal studies that relate Strontium 90
to leukemia and all types of cancers, including also infectious
diseases.
DR. FADEN: Thank you very much, Dr. Sternglass. I'm
sure that we all --
DR. STERNGLASS: I'll be glad to stay after the
meeting.
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Be sure to take your materials
with you. We have -- all the committee members have copies of
your documents. Thank you very much.
Our next presenter from the public is Mrs. Elmerine
Whitfield Bell. Is Mrs. Bell here? Good afternoon, Mrs. Bell.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us.
Statement of Elmerine Whitfield Bell
Dallas, Texas
MS. BELL: Thank you.
I saw him as a depressing sight. Joyless, unanimated,
with a damaged head and a broken spirit. During his lifetime, I
saw him as a burden rather than as an asset to my grandmother, as
she waited on him, pampered him.
My mother, I recall, resented this treatment while she
contended that he didn't do his share for the family. She
recalled a life of living with a father who, when not on an
alcoholic binge, suffered from frequent seizures which had to be
endured by the rest of the family.
My uncle, on the other hand, did not seem resentful,
but I often felt he must have been disappointed in a father
incapable of playing a simple bat and ball game or merely
offering a positive life outlook.
My grandmother said it wasn't always like this. She
said my grandfather was once a vibrant and handsome Pullman
porter, a hard worker who wanted only the best for his family.
When I was younger, I liked to do puzzles from the
newspaper, where you find words hidden among randomly-arranged
letters. Since my grandfather spent most of his time sitting
alone, he would sometimes complete these puzzles -- we would
sometimes complete these puzzles together, and eventually he
began saving them in a neat stack and worked on completing them
himself.
In the springtime, I saw him take brown paper bags and
make kites for the kids down the street. He once made a pen for
my pet rabbit. He often talked of feelings in his missing leg
and would shudder and make comments like "they must be working on
my leg today".
Years later, when I was home on breaks from college,
the sight of my grandfather was horrible. He seemed useless and
frail. He had lost more of life's joy. He seemed angry and sad.
The pain was obvious, and he was sometimes furious and irate,
mean and spiteful.
I often have dreams about my grandfather. Before his
death, I had a dream that he was in his old house in a coffin,
open with the body in full view, dead, but alive somehow. After
his death, another dream revealed him through a doorway, sitting
in his wheelchair, looking feeble, yet in good spirits. He
seemed to have a newfound joy, laughing and joking with male
friends.
When Eileen Welsome presented my family with the fact
that this man was indeed CAL-3, a human nuclear guinea pig, I
wondered, could this be the reason, the origin, the root cause of
this depressed character that I considered all along to be my
grand-father. He lived over 40 years without a zest for life and
with a pain I imagine was without equal.
For I understand that the reality of life for the
African American man of the 1940s was already a pre-determined
bleak one, dictated by the white man's tyrannical power of
economics, politics, and, to a certain degree, basic freedom.
Being born a black male was already a handicap, having a limited
education was a further handicap. Then to add a physical
handicap, due to being basically tricked into donating a body
limb for science.
With all of this in mind, I now understand how alcohol
could relieve his reality, how depression and schizophrenia could
take control of his life, how his feelings of hopelessness
shattered such a promising future.
In my most recent dream, I saw my grandfather with both
legs, standing with confidence and strength of character I never
saw in real life. He had a young appearance. He had a look of
joy on his face, and he seemed content.
This statement is signed April D. Whitfield,
granddaughter of Elmer Allen, March 15th, 1995.
Good afternoon. My daughter, April Whitfield, and the
other survivors of Elmer Allen are determined that the truth
about his plutonium injection and subsequent leg amputation be
made a part of the public record.
We continue to be appalled by the apparent attempts at
cover-ups, the inferences that the nature of the times, the
1940s, allowed scientists to conduct experiments without getting
a patient's consent or without mentioning risks. We contend that
my father was not an informed participant in the plutonium
experiment.
He was asked to sign his name several times while a
patient at the University of California hospital in San
Francisco. Why was he not asked to sign his name permitting
scientists to inject him with plutonium? Why was his wife, who
was college trained, not consulted in this matter?
It is my hope that history will not be rewritten in
committees who claim that they do not understand the actions of
the scientists of the 1940s, those who claim that poor and
disenfranchised African American men could not be hoodwinked by
his doctors.
I hope you will understand that just as Jewish fathers
were placed in the ovens at Auschwitz, my father, Elmer Allen,
was placed in his own private oven here in the United States of
America. He was left there for 44 years, and the scientists
occasionally took a peek inside to see if he was still alive.
His survivors are pledged to tell the truth about this
experiment for the next 50 or even 100 years, if necessary, so
that future generations will have more than lies, half truths,
and inconclusive reports, when attempting to recount this real-
life horror story.
Thank you. I didn't know I had 10 minutes because I
would have a lot more to say, but I thank you.
DR. FADEN: Thank you very much, Mrs. Bell. Please
don't leave us. I'm sure there are questions of committee
members, or if you have a few more comments that you would like
to make, please feel free to make them.
MS. BELL: I just wanted to address the report of the
UCSF ad hoc fact-finding committee. There are so many
inconsistencies in here, I hope you all will look at them and
look at them again and again, and pay attention to the
biographies of the scientists involved and how they seemed to all
have some type of connection.
I believe I know what happened, and I hope, hopefully,
all of you will come to some conclusion that these folk were
wrong.
DR. FADEN: Lois?
MS. NORRIS: Thank you for your testimony. Did your
father ever express knowledge of the fact that he was an
experimental subject, and, more importantly, did he tell you then
what he was told before this was done or after it was done?
MS. BELL: It is my feeling that my father had no idea
that he was being used as an experimental subject in something
this important.
It's really hard to explain because of the things that
my father said, nobody paid attention to. It was known, and my
mother explained to us, about his initial accident, when he was
thrown from the train, and it was always our contention that the
leg had to be amputated because surgery would not permit it to be
healed properly.
So, we grew up, my brother and I grew up thinking that
the leg was amputated because it could not be repaired.
My father often said things that didn't make sense and
usually was when he was inebriated. He would say things like
that he knew that the doctors that were working on him didn't
know what they were doing. It was his contention that they were
young people, and knowing that UCSF was a teaching hospital, we
always thought he was talking about the interns that didn't know
what they were doing. But he said, you know, when you find
somebody that starts right in, and he would recall that they were
running in and out of his room on certain times, that perhaps
they didn't know what they were doing and made some type of
mistake.
But to go on with it, after reading my father's medical
records, the graphic charts that were written down during the
time that he was in the hospital, first of all, I took offense at
the fact that the doctors made most of his comments as to my
father's joviality, happy man, amiable, and that's spelled
incorrectly in his statement, and I can show it, also.
But he was like he was setting him up, but after the
biopsy on my father's leg, they put the leg in a full cast and
suspended it, and to me, living even in the '90s, if something --
if I had an injury to my leg and someone put it in a full cast
and suspended it, I would think that it was in the process of
healing, and I can just imagine if they came in three days later
and told he they need to split the cast, and they did something
to the leg, and then a couple of days later cut it off, I would
feel that someone made a mistake.
So, this is what I attribute his statements to mean.
DR. FADEN: Ruth?
DR. MACKLIN: Yes. Ms. Bell, you said that
-- you just told us now that you saw some of these hospital
records?
MS. BELL: Yes.
DR. MACKLIN: Your father's records, and in your
written testimony, you say he was asked to sign his name several
times while a patient at UCSF.
Do you know what -- did you see documents that he
signed, and were those consent to treatment, consent to surgery,
consent to research? What were they? What did he sign?
MS. BELL: I've seen two documents. One was the first
day he was admitted to the hospital, which was five days before
the injection. They wanted to do a biopsy on the leg, and he had
to be put to sleep by the anesthetic. There was a consent form,
and he did sign that.
After the injection, before they amputated the leg, he
had to sign a consent form for the leg to be amputated, and he
signed that. So, since there was no -- nothing wrong with his
hands between that time, this is why the family is concerned that
he was not asked to sign for something this important.
DR. MACKLIN: Hm-hmm.
DR. FADEN: Mrs. Bell, you were speaking about your
brother and you believing that your father had had the amputation
because the leg couldn't heal properly, and that -- was your --
what was your mother's understanding of why the leg had been
amputated? Was that the same --
MS. BELL: We got our information from our mother.
DR. FADEN: You thought that was what she thought?
MS. BELL: Yes, that's what she thought.
DR. FADEN: Okay.
MS. BELL: And another thing I wanted to mention, also,
and I'm not trying to be a doctor or a scientist or anything like
this, but one of the concerns that my mother had was the -- and I
do understand this is the '40s. I just said that. I know folk
didn't talk to folk, especially an African American, but at the
time, my father had had a viable job, but he had run out of
money. This is why his doctor, his private doctor, referred him
to UCSF, and you know and I know that the times did not offer
African Americans a chance to ask a lot of questions, especially
if you needed someone's assistance.
But my mother claims to this day that she does not
recall anyone even showing her a document or saying that my
father had cancer, and in all the documents here say that -- and
we've subsequently read that he's supposed to have had cancer,
but -- and I've also talked to experts who said that if he had
this type of cancer that they said he had, that he should have
been dead within 10 years, which was following the guidelines,
but he lived for 44 years.
So, actually, it had to be a mis-diagnosis. My mother
recalls hearing the word "cancer" for the first time when she was
-- when they were contacted by the scientists from Argonne in
1972 about coming in for the follow-up studies, and she offered
surprise at that diagnosis because that was the first time she
had heard, from 1947 to 1972.
DR. FADEN: So, the statements that are in the chart in
UCSF, your father's medical record, the two physician signatures,
your mother has no recollection of anyone ever talking to her
about any experiment or anything?
MS. BELL: She did not. She never heard of it, and I
know I'm not here to speak to my mother's health, but just --
you'd have to know my mother to know what I'm saying. This has
like really devastated her. She went from a person with -- that
was very viable, somebody who could come here and express herself
much better than I can today, to a person who's virtually an
invalid, who's a recluse now. She's really ashamed that
something like this could have happened, and she was not sharp
enough to catch it. She really thought she was a pretty bright
lady.
DR. FADEN: It's a terrible burden for her. Are there
other questions for Mrs. Bell? Yes, Lois?
MS. NORRIS: Just a very quick one. Did the medical
records show cancer that you received recently?
MS. BELL: There was -- I'm not a medical expert. So,
I'm not saying it said cancer. It said the sarcoma. So, that's
the cancer.
MS. NORRIS: Okay. Thank you.
DR. FADEN: Well, we thank you very much for your
taking the time to come and talk to us, and for your daughter's
testimony as well. Thank you.
MS. BELL: Thank you.
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: Our next presenter is Mr. Steve Schwartz.
Mr. Schwartz here?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: We'll reserve his place in case he stepped
out of the room.
Mr. Brown, Mr. Cooper Brown? Next on the list then.
Good afternoon.
Statement of Cooper Brown
National Association of Radiation Victims
MR. BROWN: Good afternoon.
Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you
once again for inviting me to testify or allowing me to testify.
What I have done, and I hope everybody's now seen this,
is I've provided recommendations that come not from myself but
from the task force in the leadership at the Radiation Victims
Survivors community, primarily focused on the issue of remedies,
and I think rather than read that, I'm going to leave that for
your digestion at a later point.
I'd just summarize briefly what -- where the task force
is coming from, and that is, when we look at the issue of rights
and remedies, we realized that at this stage in the game, perhaps
the best thing -- certainly it proves the best thing for us, and
perhaps it will prove the best thing for the advisory committee,
is rather than trying to deal with a lot of the detail that comes
up when you start talking about remedies, you focus on the issue
at the level of principles, and that's what we've attempted to do
in the presentation that has now been submitted to the advisory
committee.
I just want to stress, too, and I will come back to
them in a minute, but one fundamental principle revolves around
the issue of outreach, and I've stated our concerns before, and
I'll probably state them again.
The second fundamental principle revolves around the
issue of protecting the individuals' rights to remedy within the
justice system, and with that, what I want to try and do is
wrestle with four questions that I understand from Dan the
committee is particularly concerned about.
I hope that I -- that I articulate the questions
properly, and then I'm going to try to give you very quick answer
to each one of these. The questions as I understand them that
are of particular concern to the committee.
Are there special considerations when you address the
issue of remedies because of, for lack of a better word, the
cover-up that took place here? That's Question Number 1.
Secondly, where in -- here, I may be inarticulately
recharacterizing this question, but where -- I think what the
second concern is that if you have reason to believe that -- or,
you know, that there's some evidence to suggest an increased risk
of bodily injury, personal injury, because of the radiation
exposure, how do you define that? Who does it? You know, what -
- how do you assess damages in a situation like that?
The third, issues arising around the question of
notification, not the least of which is who do you notify, and
how, and fourth, what -- what do you do with people yet to be
discovered? You know, experiments have taken place, but nobody's
stepped forward.
The short answers to those questions are yes, it
depends, make a good faith effort, and government gets pro-
active.
More -- more to -- more to the point, special
considerations because of the cover-up, yes. I think that -- and
we make the point in our prepared testimony, this is the
importance of restoring the rights of individuals, and that
necessarily would require an act of Congress in a situation like
that, but I mean what -- what was going on here, we see from some
of the early documents, that there was a conscious -- there was a
concern and a conscious effort as a result to suppress
information about what was really going on in order to avoid not
only the adverse publicity but liability, and because of that,
the issue of restoration of rights becomes, we think, very
important.
The second issue about risk and how you define injury
and how do you define damages, it's very problematic, as you
know, but perhaps -- well, not perhaps. The -- we feel that the
question, and I think that Elmerine Whitfield's testimony perhaps
underscores this point better than anything I can ever say, but
looking at radiation health risks is simply -- is but only one
element of the question of what was the harm, what are the
damages?
What Elmerine Whitfield, Mrs. Whitfield was speaking to
was a fundamental notion under common law, and that's the
dignitary interests. Deprivation of rights. That has to be
taken seriously. It can't be dismissed because the dose due to
the radiation was "inconsequential" or the risk from such a dose
was minimal.
There's something far more egregious going on here, and
I think Mrs. Whitfield most eloquently spoke to that point, and,
finally, you cannot ignore the issue of exemplary damages, and
when we were wrestling with this among ourselves down in
Knoxville, and trying to figure out, well, what happens when
you've got the situation, you know, how do you -- how do you deal
with this issue of the -- there's no injury, but yet there's been
an unethical, unlawful experiment, an experiment without the
individual's consent.
Somebody pointed out that it's much like the situation
of you're gone for the week, somebody comes into your house, uses
the house, doesn't destroy anything, doesn't use any of the food
in the refrigerator, if they do, they put the same food back.
The house is clean, everything. You come back. Nothing's amiss.
Nothing's -- all right.
But this individual while he was there took a lot of
pictures, turned around, went out and sold the pictures and made
a lot of money and became famous. Now, what does he -- you know,
are there damages here? You know, what are you entitled to? Are
you entitled to the profit that this fellow made off of your --
the pictures he took of your -- he stole from your house?
I mean that's -- when this person crystallized it in
that fashion, then we felt that that made sense, and if you can
put that perspective into this issue, perhaps it will help in
wrestling that particular matter to the ground.
Then the question, who decides? What are the
standards? Who's the judge? Who's the jury? Well, we would
submit that absent clear evidence that the court system won't
accommodate the victims' claims, leave it to the existing civil
justice system, but now if there are persuasive arguments that
exist for establishing an administrative claims process, then
there are some fundamental principles that cannot be ignored.
One is it should be limited to the issue of damages,
bodily injury, damages related to the radiation health risk. It
should be based on presumptions. It should be a non-exclusive
remedy, and when we say that, we mean a number of things.
One is it would be limited to the radiation-related
claims only, but the victim or the family member would not be
required to give up his or her or their rights to pursue that
same cause of action in the courts initially.
They would also not be required to give up the right to
sue in court on the dignitary claims, constitutional rights
deprivation claims, privacy claims, and, finally, they should not
be forced to relinquish, as has happened to some of the radiation
victims, their claims against the private parties.
To the extent that private parties were merely acting
as agents of the Federal Government, there are court-created
defenses that they already have available to them. They do not
need a legislatively-imposed Warner amendment.
Now, so, that's a brief summary to the concerns as I
understand them to be for the committee.
I want to back up and just visit a couple of things.
One is the importance of one's day in court. I have been trying
for several years, and it's only become really apparent to me
over this last six or eight months, to figure out why it is that
the radiation victims survivors community, in particular groups
like the Atomic Veterans, are still angry.
There's been an administrative remedy. There have been
congressional hearings. There's been a lot done. Health care
provided. Yes, the system doesn't work well. Yes, there are
problems. But I think that what goes to the core of it for the
veterans as well as for others is the feeling that they were
robbed of their day in court.
I know that is particularly so for many of the atomic
veterans that I worked with, and the other concern, and this is
from the perspective of society, is that when you impose an
administrative remedy, what I've observed is what dies on the
vine almost immediately is the truth, because you don't have
access to it anymore, and that's the other concern.
Now, finally, what is -- when we talk about restoring
rights, restoring people's rights to their day in court, we're
talking essentially about removing procedural and hyper-technical
impediments to that day in court.
What's -- what are the merits of that? Because what
we're asking -- we're asking a lot when we ask that. Well, I'd
submit that the merits are similar to the -- how you are
assessing the issue with ethics and what standards apply.
I think the committee has agreed that the ethics
standards to be applied are the ethics standards that were in
existence at the time the experiments took place.
If you look, you will find that many of the procedural
and what I would call hyper-technical sovereign immunity defenses
that bar access for many to the courts, particularly against the
government, did not arise until the late -- until the mid to late
1970s. That had these people had knowledge of what happened, had
they not been deprived of the day in court back when the
experiments took place, many of those lawsuits would have been
able to go to trial because these defenses did not exist, and
it's those -- we submit that when you're evaluating this from a
legal perspective, the same standards should be applied as are
being applied when you're judging this from an ethical
perspective.
And, finally, and I mention this as an attorney, I know
that there are members of the committee that are concerned that
these issues and the victims not become another public trial for
avaricious plaintiffs' attorneys.
I have to tell you that since my first day in law
school, I've never been particularly enamored of the legal
profession. I actually may end up being a plaintiffs' attorney
in some of these cases as it now stands, but the point is that if
you get into that debate, you're essentially -- you're taking
sides then. You're taking sides against the plaintiffs'
attorneys and for the defendants' attorneys.
We discovered in doing some research there's a case
called Barrett v. United States in which the government's -- the
government attorneys were implicated in a cover-up of an
experiment that took place using not radiation but some form of
drug, and, anyway, the attorneys advised -- the Justice
Department attorneys advised on the cover-up.
They were held accountable under Bivens for a violation
of the constitutional rights. The claims against the attorneys
were allowed to go forward. I would submit that what we're going
to find as we dig into this further is that there were attorneys
at the Department of Energy and other agencies as well as in the
Justice Department that were advising with regard to the cover-
up.
So, if this -- and they should be held accountable, if
that is the case. So, you see, if you start taking sides against
raising concerns about plaintiffs' attorneys, you're ignoring
something here.
My personal feeling is that if you want to, you know,
keep the plaintiffs' attorneys at bay, limit the amount that they
can collect on any judgment or award. That would be how I'd do
it.
Anyway, thank you very much for your leniency. I know
I'm way over my time. I appreciate it very much, and if you have
any questions, you know where to reach me.
DR. FADEN: Thank you, Mr. Brown, and thank you for the
written document. Written documents are very helpful for us to
work with.
Mr. Brown has already left the podium, but are there
any questions for Mr. Brown before we go on?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: All right. Our next presenter is Dr. Oscar
Rosen. Dr. Rosen? Good to see you. Thank you for coming.
Statement of Dr. Oscar Rosen
National Association of Atomic Veterans
DR. ROSEN: Thank you. Thank you very much for
inviting me to speak.
I've been attending as many of these conferences as I
can, and I've learned an awful lot, and as you can see from the
cover of the newsletter, the Atomic Veterans newsletter that was
distributed to all of you, my thinking as the editor of this
newsletter has been enormously influenced by what I've learned
from attending these conferences and from the documents that you
have -- you have distributed to the public.
That's the greatest thing you could possibly have done
for us because with your resources, you have accomplished more in
a year and a half than we could have accomplished in a million
years, and you still have more time to do this.
The -- the Buchenwald touch article, I learned from a
document that I received from this committee, and I think it's
very appropriate, and I -- when I heard Mrs. Bell mention that
her father was, you know, figuratively put in an oven, just like
the, you know, millions of Jews at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and
other places, I felt a great, great compassion and empathy, and
then the article on the sterilization experiments on prisoners,
and the fact that they had to consent to have vasectomies after
the experiments because of the damage to their chromosomes, that
was -- that really hit home.
And then the -- the Atomic Veterans and Widows
testimony to this President's Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments, the thousands of test participants may
have been used as guinea pigs after all.
I know that when the committee first began its work, it
wasn't -- didn't seem to be particularly interested in the atomic
veterans and so on, just in the -- just in the human radiation
experiments, like the one that Mrs. Bell's father was subjected
to.
But because of the testimony, especially of Pat Broudy
and Cooper Brown and, you know, others, Charlie McKay, and the
Atomic Veterans and Widows, who have testified at Santa Fe, San
Francisco and elsewhere, I think this committee has finally
started moving in our direction.
Last -- at the last conference, I learned that only --
only Part 1 of the Pacific -- part of one of the test series was
deemed experimental by this committee, and that was Operation Red
Wing, but -- and I wrote a little bit about that in this -- in my
testimony, but then, when I came here, the first thing I did was
to get a set of the latest documents, and in it, I was amazed to
see all the material you have on Operation Buster Jangle, and
that you have -- that there is evidence now that Buster Jangle
was also experimental.
So, that's another big step in the direction that we
were hoping you would take.
I'll read through my written testimony as quickly as I
can, although I can talk forever on this subject.
The charge of this committee is analogous to that given
to the Manhattan Engineer Project. It took about five years to
develop the bomb under a crash program to which unlimited
resources were allocated. The best minds in nuclear science and
ancillary fields were brought together to accomplish the project.
This advisory committee was allowed little more than a
year or a year and a half in which to accomplish the daunting and
laborious task of illuminating all the shameful experiments
conceived to provide the planners of nuclear war and its
consequences with defenses against lawsuits and the other
negative results of their policies.
How can this committee be expected to clean up the
mega-tons of experimental garbage that took the years of the
Manhattan project, the human radiation experiments, the years of
atomic bomb testing, and deliberate exposure to ionizing
radiation of several hundred thousand servicemen to create?
And I might add because of Dr. Sternglass' talk, and
also the leakage from nuclear power plants, it might interest you
to know that when I told Dr. Sternglass, who by the way is the
scientific advisor to the National Association of Atomic
Veterans, that my mother died of bladder cancer in 1962 at age
62, you know, when I thought she was an old woman, and because
her hair was white and so forth, he told me that it had to have
been from the fall-out from the, you know, from the nuclear bomb
testing from 1945 to 1962, and he knows, and others know and have
written that fall-out from the tests came down in many parts of
the U.S., including Massachusetts, and she may also have been
affected by the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, for all we know.
We know that there have been lots of health problems
surrounding the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant. Like the civilian
guinea pigs, we, including military personnel and civilian test
site workers and down-winders, were the subjects of bio-medical
experiments, should call them homicidal experiments, to see how
we would be affected by ionizing radiation under every
conceivable aspect of military service in war and peace.
We were a captive population like a group of prisoners
who were deliberately exposed to gamma radiation to determine how
much it would take to make them sterile. In the consent form,
they had to agree to have vasectomies because of possible damage
to their chromosomes.
Then there were the Fernald children who were fed
Quaker Oats laced or flavored with radiation, take your pick.
What about the radiation experiments on the pregnant women at
Vanderbilt University Hospital or the 18 innocents, including
Mrs. Bell's father, who were injected with plutonium without
their knowledge or consent or the children who were experimented
upon by NASA at Oak Ridge or the children of the down-winders who
were badged to see how much radiation they were exposed to or the
children of the Los Alamos scientists we learned about at the
last conference and the thousands of military personnel, male and
female, who were stationed at Camp Hanford to guard the plutonium
production facilities?
As for military personnel at the Pacific and Nevada
Proving Grounds, some were badged but most were not. Even
Stafford Warren's so-called radiation safety monitors were
experimental subjects. Some of the men claimed that -- some of
the test participants, not particularly the safety monitors,
claim that when they went to sick bay after the test to complain
about illnesses, their illnesses were deliberately mis-diagnosed
as conventional ones, just as the DOD is doing about the Persian
Gulf illnesses, and some of them were given quickie medical
discharges.
How many men may have been court-martialed or otherwise
punished for refusing to be exposed to radiation during the
atomic bomb testing? Probably not many because not many knew
what the real dangers were.
Why were so many medical records lost, quote unquote?
Why were so many young men sent on temporary duty assignments,
TDY, to be guinea pigs in atomic bomb tests, and why were their -
- their assignments deliberately left out of their service
records, so that when they filed claims, they would be denied for
lack of proof of participation?
Why did the military and nuclear power industries adopt
the threshold of harmless exposure below a certain specified
amount of radiation? Again, when Dr. Sternglass was talking
about the, you know, the linear principle and so on.
Why did they also accept the linear hypothesis whereby
the more radiation one was exposed to, the more harm would result
as a strategy to deny the insidious long-range effect of low-
level ionizing radiation?
Why was Stafford Warren concerned about the large
number of lawsuits that might occur? Why was the Defense Nuclear
Agency created? Was it to help the veterans obtain justice or to
prevent them from obtaining justice? Why were less than adequate
radiation compensation laws passed?
Why were so many competent scientists like Dr.
Sternglass drummed out of government or denied funding for their
legitimate research or prevented from publishing their findings
when they sought to tell the truth?
Why is a
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