AIDS: a faltering step.

A shocking American report with lessons for all A remarkable and chilling report from a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives detailed many experiments in which people were exposed to potentially toxic doses of radioactivity simply to satisfy scientific curiosity.'The people had no hope of benefiting themselves.In some cases they had given "informed consent," although it is doubtful that they had been well informed about the dangers of radiation.Those who were not asked to consent were prisoners or hospital patients including the mentally and terminally ill.The experiments took place between 1945 and 1971; the early experiments might be excused by the ignorance of the long term effects of radiation, or explained by the atomic hubris that followed the bombing of Hiro- shima, but some ofthe later experiments took place when the dangers were only too well known.Some examples will give the flavour of the report.Between 1961 and 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 20 elderly volunteers from the nearby New England Age Center were injected with radium or thorium to examine the metabolism of these substances.The subjects had volunteered to take part in experiments studying the aging process but not a study such as that done.There was no benefit to the volunteers and no long term follow up.From 1945 to 1947, 18 hospital patients with a short expectation of life were injected with plutonium to measure the quantity retained in the body.The subjects received between 1-6 and 98 times the permissible occupational dose at that time.One of the subjects was 5 years old.There was no informed consent, and many of the original diagnoses were inaccurate; seven of the patients lived for more than 10 years, four for more than 25 years, and one was alive 36 years after the experiment.The injections were represented as experimental treatments for the patients' illnesses-a state- ment that was palpably dishonest.Between 1963 and 1971 over 100 inmates of Washington and Oregon state prisons were subjected to testicular irradia- tion to determine a dose that Would sterilise them.