Today all funding agencies--certainly including the NIH, which led the way--insist on the detailed documented findings of such committees before they will even read a grant application in the field of clinical investigation.

I might note, incidentally, that Beecher's 1970 book, Research and the Individual (Little, Brown), hardly mentioned radiation experiments. He had worse fish to fry. Clearly, this is another case in which the ethical sensibilities of an earlier time have been made to look bad in the context of today's standards.

One needn't look far in the pages of The Crimson for other examples of the phenomenon. (See the recent piece headed "How [President A. Lawrence] Lowell enforced the Jewish quota.") I know many of the investigators mentioned in recent Crimson reporting. The ones I know are good people.

When I see regrettable attempts to sully their reputations without setting the context, I think to myself, "There, but for the grace of God, etc."

Third, it was unfortunately true that research ethics in those days allowed, even encouraged, investigators to use unfortunate members of society as guinea pigs. A great deal of medical research was done on the inmates of penitentiaries. Sometimes, prisoners had their sentences reduced as reward.

There was also, I regret to say, a widespread willingness to exploit seriously ill patients, feeble-minded children and all manner of unfortunates without their consent for purposes the investigators seemed worthy--even if you deduct for the inevitable impulse toward self-aggrandizement that accompanies most creative work. No one, in fact, had yet heard of the idea of informed consent and as far as I can tell everyone thought he was doing something of value in these studies.

Fourth, I have no factual details on what happened to the individuals given "radiation" without their knowledge--actions, I wish to repeat, that I would now deplore. However, on the basis of long experience, I suspect that no harm whatever befell them.

I'm also quite certain that if any of these people later checked in with this or that disability, the traditional dilemma of proving cause and effect would be all but insurmountable in these cases.

As a hematologist, I face that problem every day when a patient turns up with some blood abnormality--say, a low white count--and then is found to have taken drug A or drug B, though nowadays many are down to P or Q--and I am not speaking of recreational drugs.

How does one prove that one drug or the other was the culprit? This is not the place to delve into that knotty problem. I will simply say that there are only two approaches--and one may be unethical. That one is to stop the drug, look for improvement, then start the drug again to see if the badness returns. That, of course, requires the effect to be reversible (it often isn't).

Because a second exposure could be lethal, we do not use the second part of that approach--but without the second part the first part argues weakly.

The other approach is epidemiological and is much harder to come by, i.e., one seeks evidence that a drug regularly causes a certain effect. I feel reasonably sure that neither of those evidentiary elements are available in the cases at issue, just as they are unavailable in other cases we read about every day--the Agent Orange case, the high-tension electric wire case, the artificial sweetener case, etc. In all, we are left in limbo as we seek to reach firm conclusions-and in the end the final judges of what took place are lawyers, journalists and the putative victims themselves.

None of this in any way justifies what was done long ago. It is nonetheless an aspect worth mentioning. All new drugs have to be tested on human beings, as do all new surgical procedures, and other technologies.

We have become sophisticated in protecting the experimental subjects in these studies; more often the loudest criticism we hear today comes from those who say, "Ethics be damned. Skip the testing and give the drug."

My final point is opinion and speculation. I have long felt that one of the factors goading people into bold, even macho, actions with respect to nuclear energy and its scientific investigation was the political climate of the era.