Researcher Wants Federal Officials To Come Clean On Radiation

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (August 14, 1997 01:58 a.m. EDT) -- Sandra Marlow calls the U.S. government's use of human subjects in radiation experiments, and the alleged cover-up of those experiments, "the Holocaust of American scientific integrity."

Marlow, founder of the Center for Atomic Radiation Studies in Boston, argues that, over four decades, American citizens repeatedly were exposed to radiation and studied without being told what was happening.

Marlow took this investigative track after her father, an Air Force colonel who worked with radioactive material in the 1940s and '50s, died of leukemia in 1977. She was stymied by the lack of data available on the connection between radiation and disease.

As she compared notes with other victims and their family members, she said she was appalled at official misinformation.

"One soldier assigned to clean up debris in Nagasaki was told that blood in his urine was due to stress," she recalled. Marlow wrote about her experiences in "The Daughter's Story," which was published in the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists."

To learn how to chase down the facts dispersed through thousands of libraries and archives, she returned to college and earned a master's degree in library science. Since then, she said, she has uncovered and connected thousands of records and documents pointing to what she calls "an all-too-common pattern of government denial and cover-up."

By Marlow's estimate, the exposures involved more than 1 million people. Some subjects were military, she says, but most were civilians, and almost none were informed about the risk. Worse yet, Marlow charges, the information that might help victims remains largely unavailable from a government reluctant to share the truth.

"Fallout from testing affected and harmed Americans of all kinds," she said.

"People who tried to find out whether radiation had caused problems for them couldn't get, and still can't get, objective medical information. It's been a massive scientific and medical cover-up."

Much of what her research has uncovered was presented to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments convened by President Clinton in 1994. The committee's final report, issued in 1995, confirmed that human subject studies repeatedly violated medical ethics. The committee found that experiments were conducted without the informed consent of the subject and had no intention of producing a medical benefit.

Marlow says that while in Alaska she has found links between what has happened in Alaska to what has happened in the rest of the country. Scanning a 1957 technical report from Fort Wainwright's Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory documenting that radiation experiments were performed on Alaska Natives, a reference popped out at her linking the laboratory to Massachusetts General Hospital, where orphans were subjected to similar experiments, she says.

"We have to connect all of these studies and bring them into the broader context," she said. "You can't treat these cases as separate issues because, I'm certain, they were being compared at the time they took place. People who knew better knew what was going on and said nothing."

Marlow is in Anchorage as the guest of the Alaska Public Interest Research Group, which has studied the impact of radiation on Native Alaskans for several years. "More recently we became aware of how general and prevalent the experiments were all over the country," said AKPIRG executive director Steve Conn.

Conn said Native claims of medical problems due to radiation have been attributed to genetics, smoking or the switch from a nontraditional diet in modern times.

"But when I attend conferences of victims from the rest of the country, what I see is a Norman Rockwell painting. All races are there. Mormon ranchers, Washington farmers, kids from New England. You can't say all these people are sick because of changes in diet or smoking."

Neither Marlow or Conn is satisfied with the final report of the President's advisory committee.

"It's a tragedy that only a fraction of the personal testimony by stakeholders was not disseminated with the report," Conn said. Nor is he happy with another recent commission that recommended restitution for experiment victims, "but only in the most horrifying cases."

"I think we need to have another set of hearings on behalf of the American civilian population," Marlow said. "I want to see the healing begin."

By MIKE DUNHAM, Anchorage Daily News