A report issued at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass., last month could signal the end of a nightmarish chapter in the history of the University.

The report, which was compiled by state task force, documented numerous experiments during the 1940s, '50s and '60s in which Harvard researchers fed unwitting retarded children radioactive isotopes. The task force concluded that the tests violated the "fundamental human rights" of the experiment subjects. But the night mare may not be completely over.

As revelations continue about those and other government-supported experiments in which Harvard researchers participated, questions have been raised about whether such tests could happen again today.

A Frightening Chronology

Harvard Medical School instructor Dr. Clemens E. Benda, who died in 1975, supervised a series of experiments at the Fernald School from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s.

In the tests, MIT scientists fed scores of retarded children radioactive isotopes in their breakfast cereal.

In 1953, Benda, who was a Harvard faculty member until the late 1960s, wrote Fernald parents seeking permission to include their sons in the experiments. One letter says the children had "volunteered" to participate in the tests. In another, Benda says the absence of consent by parents or guardians would be taken as an assumption that permission had been granted.

Benda never mentioned that radioactivity would be used in the tests.

Then, in 1957, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Hospital researchers studied the thyroid function of 21 students and seven parents at Fernald using doses of radioactive tracer high enough to cause "serious concern," according to the state task force report.

And at a state school for the retarded in Wrentham, Mass., two Harvard scientists used children as young as one year old in a 1961-62 experiment to determine the human threshold for nuclear fallout.

In addition to its condemnation of the experiments, the state task force recommended that test subjects be compensated for their participation but did not say who should bear that cost.

Harvard is still reviewing the state's report. Acting Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Jane H. Corlette says Harvard's own committee to review human subject research, established by Provost Jerry R. Green in February, is currently evaluating the document.

"Each committee member is going through the report with his or her perspective of expertise," Corlette says. Harvard's in-house review committee is expected to present its report next fall.

Meanwhile, the state task force continues its work, digging for more information about the most troubling set of tests-the nuclear fallout experiments conducted at Wrentham.

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