[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 40 (Monday, October 9, 1995)]
[Pages 1756-1759]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

[[Page 1757]]

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 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

[[Page 1758]]

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 recommendations 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

[[Page 1759]]

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 at the Old Executive 
Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Ruth R. Faden, Chair, 
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.