ATTACHMENT D


Excerpt from Navy Bureau of Medicine and
Surgery, History of the Research Division, by
Charles W. Shilling re: 1932 policy


NAVAL DOSIMETRY CENTER


HISTORY OF THE
RESEARCH DIVISION
Bureau of Medicine and Surgery
U.S. Department of the Navy

by

Charles W. Shilling

Captain, Medical Corps, U. S. Navy, Retired


06/06/94
NAVAL DOSIMETRY CENTER


	Particularly pleasing to a research minded individual
was the spirit endorsement of the request for a research
laboratory at the new Naval Medical School prepared by CDR. 
C. S. Stephenson, MC, USN:9 "No record has been
found of an institution, anywhere, in the million dollar
class which does not a well organized program of research. 
Yet the Medical Department of the Navy spends over four
million dollars a year for supplies and equipment and has no
functioning research program.  True, we have had sporadic
fits of research, but none have fulfilled the meaning of the
word, and in the main have died of nonsupport, lack of
appreciation of the value of the research, or purely to
carry out the habit spasm policy of rotating personnel. 
Compared with industrial research as it is conducted by the
great electrical and chemical foundations, all medical
research is most haphazard, individualistic, and hence, not
highly efficient".  BUMED needs many more Stephanson!

	Experimentation with human subjects, and the question
of informed consent was much in the medical and lay press in
1974, but nine years before the Research Division was
formed, such experimentation was agreed upon for
physiological research with the submarine escape devise, the
"lung", and in deepsea diving activity conducted at the EDU
at the Navy Yard, Washington, D.C.  In 1932 BUMED wrote to
the SecNav, giving in detail the protocol for the planned
experiments and requesting approval10   SecNav approved the
request for the work, with the understanding that all
subjects should be informed volunteers; that the detailed
protocol be approved in advance, and that every precaution
be taken to prevent accidents.  It should be noted that the
work was entirely supported by the Bureau of Construction
and Re__ (BuC&R) but that BUMED had at least one medical
officer assigned with ___ priate assistants, and that there
was an advisory committee with a BUMED representative on it,
in the early days, CAPT E. W. Brown, MC, USN.

	But permission for animal experimentation was not so
easy.  The author will be forgiven, I trust, for augmenting
the formal history gleaned from the cold official letters
and formal reports by adding a personal experience.  We had
been doing an extensive biochemical experiment on dogs
breathing oxygen under pressure in the chamber at EDU,
attended by air breathing medical personnel, and were quite
well along when Irene Castle came to Washington and made an
emotional plea before a committee of Congress to stop all
animal experimentation in the U.S.  This antivivisectionist
tirade frightened the Chief, BuC&R, who ordered our work
discontinued.  Knowing that the months of hard and dangerous
work under high pressure were about to be lost, and 


9 Memorandum NC43/S-E(25)CO/elh dated 9 December 1939 to
Chief, BUMED  Subject:  Research laboratory for the new NMS,
signed by W. Chambers and enclosing a statement by Lt. A. R.
Behnke, Jr., MC, USN, proposing the laboratory.

10 BuM&S letter of 5 April 1932, S92(041) to SecNav via BuNav
with CNO, Subject: Hazards to personnel in physiological
research with submarine "lung" and in deepsea diving at EDU.

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