Interview with Sheilds Warren -- 4/9/74
	  L. A. Miazga, Sidney Marks, Walter Weyzer


LAM:   Well, thank you very much Dr. Warren for taking your valuable
time to meet with us and talk to us about our problem.  As you
probably know, the Commission has aksed us to conduct an inquiry 
into this matter which involves the injecting of plutonium into
patients at a number of hospitals.

SW:    Right.

LAM:   In the conduct of our inquiry, we propose to develop what
happened, why it happened,  how it happened, and also the benefits 
to science from this program.  We will present the report to the 
Commission.  What the Commission will do with the report, we are in 
no position to say, but we are going on the premise that it will be 
made public.

SW:     Yes.

LAM:     In our discussions with you, I think there are two fields 
that we might touch upon: one is the things that happened in the 
Commission while you were a member of the staff and of which you 
have personal knowledge; the other field of interest would be 
things that happened before which you know from what others told
you, but which would be valuable to us in pursuing other avenues of
our inquiry.  Now when did you join the staff of the Commission, 
Dr. Warren?

SW:      In, I think it was November of 1947, and I stayed as a 
member of the staff until June 30 of '52.  Then I became a
consultant and was a member of the Advisory Committee on Biology
and Medicine for a five-year period.  And then I have stayed on
as consultant up to the present time.

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SW:      This was the use of some patients for radiation therapy
when there was not a clear consensus on the part of the medical
profession as a whole, that radiation therapy was the soundest
treatment for cases of this type.  These, as I recall it, were
cases that Bob Stone felt, in light of some of the experimental
work that had been done on animals, would be worth trying on
humans.  The weight of evidence was that radiation would not do
anything for them, and there was this issue was raised.
Incidentally, because of the course of these things, of the 
studies, some blood counts had been done on them and it was the
dangerously low blood counts on them that sort of set off an
alarm clock in ACBM's mind when they saw it.  No, this was not
anything to do.  And the reason Hamilton was in on this was, 
subsequently, was because we thought that there needed to be,
as these new sources of radiation became more widely available,
a better means of control than existed at the present time.
And since Hamilton knew more about metabolic pathways than 
anyone else, he was a logical member to be on this.  And in
this particular thing, there wasn't anything to do with the
injection of plutonium.

SM:  Was the issue of the injected people then ever brought
in any formal way to the attention of AEC or ACBM then or was
it just this informal discussion where you became acquainted
with it?

SW:  I think the way it was handled was that Alan Gregg and I
agreed that the best way to do was to see that the rules were
properly drawn up by the Isotope, Humans Applications Isotope
Committee, which had then come into being, so that use without
full safeguards could not occur, and that we saw no point in
bringing this up after the fact as long as we were sure that

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nothing of the sort could happen in the future.  This was 
because we assumed that those patients were all dead at that
time.  We hadn't realized that any of them were still alive.

LAM:    Was there any discussion as to whether or not the
patients had consented to be subjects for these injections.

SW:     Yes, because we were reasonably sensitive to these
things at that time and I'd always made a point in explaining
to the patients I'd injected what went on, and Hamilton told
me that he had explained to the patients that their, they
would receive, now I've got to try to put my thoughts in
order in this, that they would receive an injection of a 
new substance that was too new to say what it might do but
that it had some properties like those of other substances
that had been used to help control growth processes in patients,
or something of that general sort.  You could not call it 
informed consent because they did not know what it was, but they
knew that it was a new and to them unknown substance.  There
was not anywhere near the alertness to informed consent, of 
course, in those days that there is at the present time.  
I'm pretty sure that this was an accurate statement because
Hamilton was a very meticulous man, very high scientific and 
professional standards.

SM:    Dr. Warren, may I flip this over and .....

SW:    Surely

END OF FIRST SIDE OF TAPE

SM:     He had knowledge of the Chicago-Rochester patients at
that time.  He had three of his own that he was telling you
about.  Did the people in these various installations know that 
the others were doing that and was it a type of coordinated
activity or?

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