Atomic age spawned experiments on humans.

Throughout the first 3 decades of the nuclear age, radiation experiments involving humans were both common and widely debated -- at least within federal decision-making circles -- the 6-month-old Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported late last week.

President Clinton chartered the 14-member committee to investigate the research value and ethical underpinnings of 13 specific human radiation experiments -- and those of any others it could track down.

So far, the group has identified about 400 such experiments between 1944 and 1974. However, data suggest that the final tally will reach several thousand, notes committee head Ruth R. Faden, an ethicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Documents turned over to the panel by federal agencies now indicate that during the late 1940s and early 1950s, policy makers debated whether to involve humans in radiation experiments and, if so, whether they should restrict those studies to people who gave some kind of informed consent.

The conventional wisdom has been "that there was very little such active discussion at the government level," Faden points out.

In fact, however, such discussions led the Secretary of Defense in 1953 to issue a "top secret" policy directive stating that the Nuremberg Code's ethical guidelines for experiments must "govern the use of human volunteers by the Department of Defense (DOD) in experimental research in the fields of atomic, biological, and/or chemical warfare." But, Faden notes, "we have reason to believe, at least in some instances, that [such] policies were not followed."

Moreover, she says, "we are clearly concerned about the possibility that there may have been injustices in the selection of subjects... whether there was consent or not."

In this regard, the report points to studies in which researchers exposed people to plutonium and other radioactive materials "with no clear therapeutic or diagnostic potential," in which researchers irradiated the testicles of prisoners, and in which pregnant women received radioactive iron as part of a study on uptake of the metal by the fetus.

The report also makes passing reference to more than 300 tests that intentionally released radiation outdoors -- usually at national laboratories or military centers -- to investigate the effects of nuclear warfare or nuclear rocket and aircraft technologies.