Roundtable on Human Radiation Experiments - Readers Theater

Jean Maria Arrigo, Author

During the Clinton Administration, the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments attempted to expose the truth, bring justice, and restore trust in government. This moral endeavor is assessed in a dramatic compilation of testimonies drawn verbatim from historical sources.

Advisory Committee Chair, Ruth Faden, and member Ruth Macklin lay out the committee’s tasks and methods. They explain the difficulties in passing moral judgment on scientists from an earlier era and in obtaining records of experiments from the CIA. U.S. counterintelligence officer Ray Tegtmeyer speaks despairingly of his exploitation as an experimental subject but patriotically of his service as safety director at the Nevada Test Site. Willard Libby, Atomic Energy Commissioner (1950-1959) and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1960), presents an elitist world view and rationale for Operation Sunshine. This operation involved worldwide acquisition of children’s cadavers to measure bone uptake of radioactive Strontium 90 from atmospheric atomic bomb tests. Covert operator Ernest Garcia laments his role in criminal acquisition of the children’s cadavers, and cynically reinterprets the engagement of the Advisory Committee with the CIA. West German psychologist Stefan Hormuth took a lead role in the reconstitution of East German universities following German reunification in 1990. The major questions were whether to retain professors who had collaborated with the Stasi (secret police) and how to determine collaboration. His commitment and method in grappling with these questions point to weaknesses in the 1995 Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

The historical sources for testimonies are Mary Terrall's oral history of Willard Libby (UCLA Special Collections); Jean Maria Arrigo's Ethics of Intelligence and Weapons Development Oral History Collection (UCB Bancroft Library); the official conference recording of an Advisory Committee presentation to the 1996 American Association of Bioethics; and the Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiations Experiments (1995).

Performances

Southwest Oral History Association Meeting, Santa Fe, NM. With Santa Fe actors and members of the Southwest Oral History Association. 10 April 2005

Santa Fe Community College, Santa Fe, NM. Directed by Derek Werner with Santa Fe actors and members of the Southwest Oral History Association. 9 April 2005.

Institute of Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX. With IMH students. 23 April 2003.

The History of Science Colloquium, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA. With colloquium participants. February 1997.

Contact information: Jean Maria Arrigo, jmarrigo@cox.net Project on Ethics and Art in Testimony 110 Oxford St, Irvine, CA 92612.