Health and Safety

The federal agencies and an independent advisory committee have been working diligently to disclose the details of U.S. government experiments that exposed human beings to radiation during the Cold War era. Although the federal effort is still evolving and thousands of experiments have been identified, it now appears that the full extent of these radiation experiments may never be known because of difficulty locating and analyzing all pertinent documents describing experiments that occurred 30 to 50 years ago. Furthermore, agencies have used inconsistent definitions for their searches and, for the most part, have not verified the accuracy of these searches. As a result, federal agencies are having trouble identifying persons involved in the radiation experiments. Thus, it may prove impossible to achieve one of the major objectives of this effort--to contact the subjects of the experiments or their relatives. Moreover, concern is growing that the advisory committee will not be able to complete its work within the current one-year time frame. The committee is having problems satisfying its original charters and has done little of the ethical and scientific analysis of Cold War experiments called for in its charter. Despite these difficulties, the committee has decided to expand the overall scope of its work.