Abstract

KIE: Court Decision: 874 Federal Supplement, 796; 1995 Jan 11 (date of decision). The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, allowed the heirs and personal representatives of now deceased cancer patients to proceed on constitutional grounds against government and university physicians who used them in radiation exposure experiments without any or proper informed consent. Between 1960 and 1972, the Department of Defense funded research on radiation exposure to humans, which was administered by the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and performed at Cincinnati General Hospital. Their research subjects were cancer patients with life expectancies at the most for two years, and also primarily indigent, poorly educated, and of lower than average intelligence, with a majority being African-American. The patients were told that the radiation was for their benefit, cancer treatment, and were not told that the radiation dosage was determined by the experimental design of the research, "to study the effects of maasive doses of radiation on human beings in preparation for a possible nuclear war." No consent forms were used for the first five years. When consent forms came into use, the risk of radiation exposure to the patients was not stated. The court found that the defendants were not acting as physicians, but instead were acting "as scientists interested in nothing more than assembling cold data." Consequently, their actions were outside the scope of their hired duties to care for the sick and injured, and thus not immune to prosecution under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for violations of liberty and equal protection of rights.