In 1995 President Bill Clinton Apologized for Secret Government Experimentation on Citizens

In 1995 President Bill Clinton Apologized for Secret Government Experimentation on Citizens

In 1995 The US Government admitted to radiation experiments performed on her own citizens. President Bill Clinton ordered his cabinet to devise a system of relief--including financial compensation.

Here, the former president explains the importance of informed consent and apologizes to the survivors and families of those unknowing subjects to those experiments.

“When the government does wrong, we have a moral responsibility to admit it,” Clinton said. “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.”

Clinton made the remarks as he accepted the recommendations of an advisory committee he appointed to study the secret experiments, which began in 1944 and continued for three decades.

Although the panel studied about 4,000 radiation experiments that took place during that period, it recommended that only a handful of victims receive compensation. Panel members specifically cited three experiments, including one project where 18 hospital patients, most of them terminally ill, were unknowingly injected with plutonium to determine how long the substance would remain in their body.

The work began when many such studies were undertaken in secret to help understand radiation risks to workers involved in the development of the atomic bomb. This was long before it became standard practice to issue “informed consent” to medical research subjects, laying out the risks and benefits of participation. The experiments ended in 1974.

As I post this I am reminded of the famous quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-10-04-mn-53213-story.html

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/10/04/clinton-apologizes-for-the-wrong-done-in-human-radiation-testing

US apologises for radiation tests on unaware patients
https://www.bmj.com/content/311/7011/970.2