SKULDUGGERY USED TO COLLECT HUMAN TISSUE FOR FALLOUT TESTS

In the 1950s, the government used secrecy and deception to collect human bones and tissue worldwide - including Utah - to measure effects of atomic fallout, new documents show.

That included collecting urine samples from Hill Air Force Base airmen and tissue from slaughterhouse animals in Salt Lake City - falsely claiming they were for "nutritional studies" - and a skeleton from a Utah stillborn baby, falsely claiming it was for a study on naturally occurring radon.Documents released Wednesday by President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments also reveal government discussions about why it considered using civilian prisoners for radiation experiments - where some questioned if that wasn't as bad as human testing by the Nazis.

That might have had bearing on radiation experiments conducted on some Utah State Prison inmates, which the Deseret News revealed last year.

The new documents show that Defense Department and Atomic Energy Commission officials kept the true purpose of studies on radioactive fallout a secret - and one doctor even misled his own father, a diplomat, about them.

The AEC, as it collected animal and human tissue samples from around the world, told doctors and health officials that they were studying naturally occurring radon. In reality, they were looking for strontium-90, radioactive iodine or other products of atomic fallout.

"We actually are providing for the measurement of Ra (radium) as well as Sr-90 (strontium-90) in many of all of the samples, so that the Ra story is merely incomplete, not false," Robert A. Dudley of the Atomic Energy Commission Biophysics Branch wrote on Dec. 9, 1953.

Documents show that the real purpose of the tissue collection in "Project Gabriel" and "Project Sunshine" by the AEC was kept secret to all but a few of its top officials.

Dudley even wrote to Shields Warren, head of the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine, asking him to reinforce the cover story about the experiments with another doctor.

"I do not know how much you have told Dr. Farber about the chief purpose of the collection; therefore, I am afraid to approach him with the story on the foreign collections.

"Perhaps it would be best if you would speak with him again about the foreign samples, telling a story not in conflict with the one which we are using in our contacts," Dudley wrote.