Controversy sparks panel.To avoid any repeat of the sort of abuses some people suffered in federally sponsored radiation experiments before and during the Cold War, President Clinton last week set up a committee charged with setting clear ethical standards for human research. At a White House ceremony, Clinton described the National Bioethics bioethics /bio·eth·ics/ (-eth´iks) obligations of a moral nature relating to biological research and its applications. bi·o·eth·ics (b  Advisory Commission (NBAC NBAC - National Bioethics Advisory CommissionNBAC - National Brick Advisory Council NBAC - New Brunswick Arts Council (Canada) NBAC - Non-Blocking Atomic Commitment (protocol)), whose members will also comb existing federal research involving humans for ethical flaws. The President proposed the NBAC in response to the highly publicized reports of his Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. He accepted that committee's final report at the same event. Both the committee's preliminary release of details on government-supported radiation experiments from 1944 to 1974 (SN: 10/29/94, p.276) and like studies by the Department of Energy last year revealed a startling pattern of secrecy and "abuse of patients' trust," according to committee head Ruth R. Faden, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Some of the secret studies were part of the Manhattan Project Manhattan Project, the wartime effort to design and build the first nuclear weapons (atomic bombs). With the discovery of fission in 1939, it became clear to scientists that certain radioactive materials could be used to make a bomb of unprecented power. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded by creating the Uranium Committee to investigate this possibility. Progress was slow until Aug., 1942, when the project was placed under U.S., the World War II effort to build an atomic bomb atomic bomb or A-bomb, weapon deriving its explosive force from the release of atomic energy through the fission (splitting) of heavy nuclei (see nuclear energy). The first atomic bomb was produced at the Los Alamos, N.Mex., laboratory and successfully tested on July 16, 1945. This was the culmination of a large U.S. army program that was part of the Manhattan Project, led by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.. In these experiments, researchers injected plutonium into people with cancer or other ills to note how long they'd retain the radioactive material. The injections offered patients no known benefits. Last week's final report paints a more complete mural of the nearly 4,000 biomedical radiation studies. Most of them, the report states, involved radioactive tracers 1. a dissecting instrument for isolating vessels and nerves. 2. a mechanical device for graphically recording the outline of an object or the direction and extent of movement of a part. 3. a means or agent by which certain substances or structures can be identified or followed. in amounts similar to those used today, and "most . . . were unlikely to have caused physical harm." These included immune-linked tracers Tracers Refers to investment trusts which are populated by corporate bonds. In October 2001, Morgan Stanley's Tradable Custodial Receipts (Tracers) was launched. Tracers contain a number of coporate bonds and credit default swaps which are selected for liquidity and diversity. Lehman Brothers launched a similar product, Targeted Return Index Securities (Trains) in January 2002. Both contain investment grade bonds. for insulin, studies that spawned today's radioimmunoassays radioimmunoassay /ra·dio·im·mu·no·as·say/ (-im?u-no-as´a) a highly sensitive and specific assay method that uses the competition between radiolabeled and unlabeled substances in an antigen-antibody reaction to determine the concentration of the unlabeled substance, which may be an antibody or a substance against which specific antibodies can be produced. for trace hormones and other molecules. But the report contrasts this work to such quiet Manhattan Project experiments as those designed to find what total body irradiation does to people with tumors known to be unresponsive to radiation. Because the committee also found signs of "serious problems" in today's research--though nothing like what's in the Cold War cold war, term used to describe the shifting struggle for power and prestige between the Western powers and the Communist bloc from the end of World War II until 1989. Of worldwide proportions, the conflict was tacit in the ideological differences between communism and capitalist democracy. report--the NBAC will probably begin with those. Seriously ill patients, the report notes, may have unrealistic expectations about enrolling in studies because consent forms may be overly optimistic. |
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