Radiation experiments carried out at the University of Utah over a nearly 40-year period were ethical and valuable to medicine, says a former director of the program.
Most of the experiments were on beagles, which were followed over two generations, said McDonald E. Wrenn, professor of pharmacology at the U.'s School of Medicine. But some studies with radioactive material involved human subjects.However, when radiative isotopes were given to people, it was for medical purposes. Radiation tracers were used to check such things as metabolic function, Wrenn said.
The Department of Energy sponsored radioactive materials studies at the university from 1951 until about 1987. A scaled-down radiobiology lab is still operating.
Wrenn, director of the radiobiology program at the U. from 1979 through 1986, said the tracer studies used very little radiation. In that period, the U.S. Department of Energy's backing of the program grew from $1.1 million a year to $3 million a year.
At the time, the lab functioned both as a dedicated research facility of the DOE as well as a part of the U.
Asked if the human studies were carried out with full consent of the subjects, Wrenn said as far as he knows, nobody was injected with radioactive material without consent.
"I am virtually certain of that," Wrenn said. "Of course, I wasn't there the whole time period. . . .
"They (the studies) would have been under the control of the regulations of the day, but the scientists I know who were involved were all ethical people, who I think would never get involved in something that wasn't upfront."
The U. studies with humans didn't attempt to find out the effects of radioactivity; instead, they used radiative material to answer questions about medical conditions.
One study looked at how children with muscular dystrophy metabolized alkaline metals, such as potassium. Radioactive tracers showed how potassium was absorbed.
"Studies like this are done in medical schools all over the United States all the time," Wrenn said.
The experiments in which radioactive material was injected into animals - mostly beagles from a colony of dogs kept and bred at the university. From the 1950s through the '80s, about 2,200 beagles were used.
"They were lifetime studies of the biological effects of radioactive materials that were accumulated internally," Wrenn said.
The tests helped scientists to understand what would happen in the body in case of contamination by radioactive elements released in nuclear weapons explosions or by power plants.
"We knew that radium could make bone cancer. There was evidence in small animals, in the rat, that plutonium made bone cancer. Eventually the program gathered information that allowed scientists to estimate the danger of plutonium-causing bone cancer in humans.
"It's worse than radium . . . between 15 and 20 times more effective than radium" in causing sarcomas, Wrenn said.