    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [October 3, 1995]
    [Pages 1530-1532]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1530]]

    Remarks on Accepting the Report of the Advisory Committee on Human
    Radiation Experiments
    October 3, 1995

        Let me begin with a simple thank you to everyone who participated in
    this extraordinary project and to everyone who supported them.
        I am especially glad to see here today Senator Glenn, who's been so
    active in working on the medical ethics issue; Congressman Markey, who's
    worked on this issue for a very long time; Congressman Frost, Secretary
    Shalala; Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Hershel Gober; and of
    course, the Attorney General who basically tries to get us all to do the
    right thing all the time. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Secretary O'Leary for her extraordinary devotion to
    this cause. And you heard in her remarks basically the way that she
    views this. It's a part of her ongoing commitment to finish the end of
    the cold war. And perhaps no Energy Secretary has ever done as much as
    she has to be an advocate, whether it is for continued reforms within
    the Energy Department or her outspoken endorsement of the strongest
    possible commitment on the part of the United States to a Comprehensive
    Test Ban Treaty, which I believe we will achieve next year in no small
    measure thanks to the support of the Secretary of Energy.
        And of course, I want to thank Dr. Ruth Faden for her extraordinary
    commitment of about a year and a half of her life to this unusual but
    important task. And all of you who served on the Committee--I remember
    the first time we put this Committee together. I looked--I said, that's
    a pretty distinguished outfit. I wish I could give them five or six jobs
    to do. [Laughter] I'll expect you back next Monday and then we'll--
    [laughter]. I do thank you so much for the work you have done.
        Let me tell you that, just as this is an important part of the
    efforts that Secretary O'Leary outlined, I saw this Committee as an
    indispensable part of our effort to restore the confidence of the
    American people in the integrity of their Government. All of these
    political reform issues to me are integrated. When I became the
    President, I realized we had great new economic challenges, we had
    profound social problems, that a lot of these things had to be done by
    an energized American citizenry, but that our National Government had a
    role to play in moving our country through this period of transition.
    And in order to do it, we needed to increase the capacity of the
    Government to do it through political reform, but we also needed, as
    much as anything else, to increase the confidence of the American people
    that, at the very least, they could trust the United States Government
    to tell the truth and to do the right things.
        So you have to understand that, for me, one reason this is so
    important is that I see it as part of our ongoing effort to give this
    Government back to the American people: Senator Glenn's long effort to
    get Congress to apply to itself the same laws it imposes on the private
    sector; the restrictions that I imposed on members of my administration
    in high positions for lobbying for foreign governments; and when the
    lobby bill failed in the Congress, I just imposed it by Executive order
    on members of the executive branch. All these efforts at political
    reform, it seems to me, are important.
        But none of these efforts can succeed unless people believe that
    they can rely on their Government to tell them the truth and to do the
    right thing. We have declassified thousands of Government documents,
    files from the Second World War, the cold war, President Kennedy's
    assassination. These actions are not only consistent with our national
    security, they are essential to advance our values.
        So to me, that's what this is all about. And to all those who
    represent the families who have been involved in these incidents, let me
    say to you, I hope you feel that your Government has kept its commitment
    to the American people to tell the truth and to do the right thing.
        We discovered soon after I entered office that with the specter of
    an atomic war looming like Armageddon far nearer than it does today, the
    United States Government actually did carry out on our citizens
    experiments involving radiation. That's when I ordered the creation of
    this Committee. Dr. Faden and the others did a superb job. They enlisted
    many of our Nation's most significant and important medical and
    scientific ethicists. They had to determine first whether experiments
    conducted or sponsored by our

    [[Page 1531]]

    Government between 1944 and 1974 met the ethical and scientific
    standards of that time and of our time. And then they had to see to it
    that our research today lives up to nothing less than our highest values
    and our most deeply held beliefs.
        From the beginning, it was obvious to me that this energetic
    Committee was prepared to do its part. We declassified thousands of
    pages of documents. We gave Committee members the keys to the
    Government's doors, file cabinets, and safes. For the last year and a
    half, the only thing that stood between them and the truth were all the
    late nights and hard work they had to put in.
        This report I received today is a monumental document--[laughter]--
    in more ways than one. But it is a very, very important piece of
    America's history, and it will shape America's future in ways that will
    make us a more honorable, more successful, and more ethical country.
        What this Committee learned I would like to review today with a
    little more detail than Dr. Faden said, because I think it must be
    engraved on our national memory. Thousands of Government-sponsored
    experiments did take place at hospitals, universities, and military
    bases around our Nation. The goal was to understand the effects of
    radiation exposure on the human body. While most of the tests were
    ethical by any standards, some were unethical, not only by today's
    standards but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted.
    They failed both the test of our national values and the test of
    humanity.
        In one experience, scientists--experiment--scientists injected
    plutonium into 18 patients without their knowledge. In another, doctors
    exposed indigent cancer patients to excessive doses of radiation, a
    treatment from which it is virtually impossible that they could ever
    benefit.
        The report also demonstrates that these and other experiments were
    carried out on precisely those citizens who count most on the Government
    for its help, the destitute and the gravely ill. But the dispossessed
    were not alone. Members of the military--precisely those on whom we and
    our Government count most--they were also test subjects.
        Informed consent means your doctor tells you the risk of the
    treatment you are about to undergo. In too many cases, informed consent
    was withheld. Americans were kept in the dark about the effects of what
    was being done to them. The deception extended beyond the test subjects
    themselves to encompass their families and the American people as a
    whole, for these experiments were kept secret. And they were shrouded
    not for a compelling reason of national security but for the simple fear
    of embarrassment, and that was wrong.
        Those who led the Government when these decisions were made are no
    longer here to take responsibility for what they did. They are not here
    to apologize to the survivors, the family members, or the communities
    whose lives were darkened by the shadow of the atom and these choices.
    So today, on behalf of another generation of American leaders and
    another generation of American citizens, the United States of America
    offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens who were subjected to
    these experiments, to their families, and to their communities.
        When the Government does wrong, we have a moral responsibility to
    admit it. The duty we owe to one another to tell the truth and to
    protect our fellow citizens from excesses like these is one we can never
    walk away from. Our Government failed in that duty, and it offers an
    apology to the survivors and their families and to all the American
    people who must--who must be able to rely upon the United States to keep
    its word, to tell the truth, and to do the right thing.
        We know there are moments when words alone are not enough. That's
    why I am instructing my Cabinet to use and build on these
    recommendations, to devise promptly a system of relief, including
    compensation, that meets the standards of justice and conscience.
        When called for, we will work with Congress to serve the best needs
    of those who were harmed. Make no mistake, as the Committee report says,
    there are circumstances where compensation is appropriate as a matter of
    ethics and principle. I am committed to seeing to it that the United
    States of America lives up to its responsibility.
        Our greatness is measured not only in how we so frequently do right
    but also how we act when we know we've done the wrong thing, how we
    confront our mistakes, make our apologies, and take action.
        That's why this morning, I signed an Executive order instructing
    every arm and agency of our Government that conducts, supports, or
    regulates research involving human beings to review immediately their
    procedures in light of the rec-

    [[Page 1532]]

    ommendations of this report and the best knowledge and standards
    available today and to report back to me by Christmas. I have also
    created a Bioethics Advisory Commission to supervise the process, to
    watch over all such research, and to see to it that never again do we
    stray from the basic values of protecting our people and being straight
    with them.
        The report I received today will not be left on a shelf to gather
    dust. Every one of its pages offers a lesson, and every lesson will be
    learned from these good people who put a year and a half of their lives
    into the effort to set America straight.
        Medical and scientific progress depends upon learning about people's
    responses to new medicines, to new cutting-edge treatments. Without this
    kind of research, our children would still be dying from polio and other
    killers. Without responsible radiation research, we wouldn't be making
    the progress we are in the war on cancer. We have to continue to
    research, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. There are
    local citizens' review boards; there are regulations that establish
    proper informed consent and ensure that experiments are conducted
    ethically. But in overseeing this necessary research, we must never
    relax our vigilance.
        The breathtaking advances in science and technology demand that we
    always keep our ethical watchlight burning. No matter how rapid the pace
    of change, it can never outrun our core convictions that have stood us
    so well as a nation for more than 200 years now, through many different
    scientific revolutions.
        I believe we will meet the test of our times, that as science and
    technology evolve, our ethical conscience will grow, not shrink.
    Informed consent, community right-to-know, our entire battery of
    essential human protections, all these grew up in response to the health
    and humanitarian crises of this 20th century. They are proof that we are
    equal to our challenges.
        Science is not ever simply objective. It emerges from the crucible
    of historical circumstances and personal experience. Times of crisis and
    fear can call forth bad science, even science we know in retrospect to
    be unethical. Let us remember the difficult years chronicled in this
    report and think about how good people could have done things that we
    know were wrong.
        Let these pages serve as an eternal reminder to hold humility and
    moral accountability in higher esteem than we do the latest development
    in technology. Let us remember, too, that cynicism about Government has
    roots in historical circumstances. Because of stonewallings and evasions
    in the past, times when a family member or a neighbor suffered an
    injustice and had nowhere to turn and couldn't even get the facts, some
    Americans lost faith in the promise of our democracy. Government was
    very powerful but very far away and not trusted to be ethical.
        So today, by making ourselves accountable for the sins of the past,
    I hope more than anything else, we are laying the foundation stone for a
    new era. Good people--like these Members of Congress who have labored on
    this issue for a long time and have devoted their careers to trying to
    do the right thing and having people justifiably feel confidence in the
    work of their Representatives--they will continue to work to see that we
    implement these recommendations.
        And under our watch, we will no longer hide the truth from our
    citizens. We will act as if all that we do will see the light of day.
    Nothing that happens in Washington will ever be more important in
    anyone's life affected by these experiments, perhaps, than these reports
    we issue today. But all of us as Americans will be better off because of
    the larger lesson we learned in this exercise and because of our
    continuing effort to demonstrate to our people that we can be faithful
    to their values.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:07 a.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive
    Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Ruth R. Faden, Chair,
    Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The Executive order
    on protection of human research subjects and creation of the National
    Bioethics Advisory Commission is listed in Appendix D at the end of this
    volume.