Seven newborn infants were injected with radioactive iodine in 1953 in hopes of finding a medical test for thyroid disease, said a scientist who lost track of the children a few years later.
Lester Van Middlesworth, a doctor and researcher at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, said he felt the infants were in no danger, though thyroid cancer or other thyroid disease can result from overexposure to iodine-131, the substance used in the study.Van Middlesworth, who conducted the study, said the Atomic Energy Commission - predecessor of the federal Energy Department - financed it. He said the babies' mothers gave permission for the injections. The study was inconclusive, and he ended it.
"Since the use of radio-iodine to study thyroid function was a standard procedure at the time in adults, we figured let's try this in newborn infants," Van Middles-worth said.
Robert Summitt, dean of the state medical school, said current review standards for research on humans would likely prevent such studies.
"We followed federal guidelines then, and we follow federal guidelines now. Federal guidelines have changed in the interim," Summitt said.
The injections were given at John Gaston Hospital, a public hospital that drew a large number of low-income patients and was staffed by doctors from the medical school.
Van Middlesworth said he has lost his study records and no longer knows the names of his subjects. He said the injected iodine should have broken down in 30 to 40 days.
He said similar studies, some using orally administered iodine, also were conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in Detroit; Omaha, Neb.; Little Rock, Ark.; and Iowa City, Iowa.
Van Middlesworth said he and other researchers were looking for a test for thyroid disease in infants. The thyroid gland traps radioactive iodine.
Blood tests, not involving radiation, are now used.
If treated early, thyroid malfunction can be treated in infants. If not, it can cause severe mental retardation.
The federal Energy Department said last week it will declassify evidence of a dozen secret radiation experiments conducted over Utah, New Mexico and Tennessee from 1948 to 1952.
It was reported over the weekend that 751 pregnant women at Vanderbilt University in Nashville were given iron pills containing radiation in the 1940s to trace absorption of iron.