Badpuppy Gay Today

Wednesday, 2 April, 1997

Establishing a rule that's better late than never, President Clinton, no doubt taking note of U.S. financial settlements with surviving families of citizens secretly used in government-controlled experiments, has now banned such tests. The United States Government, in the 1940's and 1950's, injected civilians with plutonium and uranium without obtaining their consent.

The purposes of such tests, presumably, was to gage the effects of certain toxins on unwitting subjects. Such testing was conducted using human guinea pigs, injecting radioactive, chemical or other dangerous materials. "If the Nazis were doing it and so were we, then what am I to think?" replied Anne Renwick, an elder, when asked by GayToday for her reaction as a senior citizen who remembers World War II.

"Compassion and concern are at the core of our response to human radiation experiments," Energy Secretary, Federico F. Pena, announced at the White House.

There are still a large number of cases against the government with damage-cost implications looming expensively on the horizon. Approximately 16 cases have been settled, closing chapters on events that began to trouble affected families almost a half-century ago. Hundreds of claimants may yet come forward, according to legal observers. "Today's taxpayers pay for yesterday's sins," said Ms. Renwick.

Some of the foremost cases have involved blasé experiments on prisoners (Washington State Prison and Oregon State Prison, 1963-1971) the irradiation of their testicles in an attempt to determine, if government scientists could, the precise degrees of radiation that would make them sterile.

Even more shocking were experiments that conscripted children in a state school in Massachusetts. The little ones were fed radioactive material in cereals, being told they were participating in a "science club."

Pregnant women were a third group used in a radioactive study at Vanderbilt University. Eight-hundred and twenty were given small doses of radioactive iron between 1945-1947. At a mid-western school, the University of Cincinnati, people were exposed from head to toe to measure radioactivity's effects. Forty-five "active living plaintiffs" now await court decisions on their cases.

The new anti-human-experimentation-rules follow closely the recommendations of an advisory panel appointed in 1994 after then-Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary declassified millions of pages of documentation on the experiments.

"If she hadn't declassified those experiments, we still wouldn't know about all this stuff," said Anne Renwick bitterly. "Prisoners, children and pregnant women. You always think the other side is bad. Why, we painted those Nazis as really bad, really ugly for the same things we were doing. What we were doing was just hypocrisy. At least the prisoners in death camp experiments knew where they were. We were naive. We expected decency to keep clean the hands of our America. Am I supposed to think a silly rule's going to stop these kinds of guys next time? How about the death penalty instead? Something with teeth in it."