Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments

                                    

                          AGENCY SEARCH PROCESS





     The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments

(ACHRE) was asked to evaluate information concerning the federal

government's role in sponsoring or conducting scientific and

medical experiments using ionizing radiation involving human

subjects.  The original expectation was that the agencies

identified as members of the interagency working group were those

that had pertinent records and that would be looking for and

providing documents for ACHRE review and evaluation.  It rapidly

became obvious, however, that information about what programs had

existed, where they had been located, and who had been

responsible, did not exist at a single location or in any summary

form and, in fact, that information about what records existed

generally was uneven.  Reconstruction of these histories thus

became necessary before focussed records retrieval could be

possible.  Furthermore, it also became clear that understanding

these histories also required information from other government

agencies and from non-federal institutions. Relevant records were

of course required to reconstruct these histories, so that the

development of historical understanding and records retrieval and

evaluation evolved jointly and in parallel, and were, indeed,

recursive.  For these reasons, the search process by necessity

became a joint effort of the agencies and ACHRE.



     The search process has generally focussed on establishing

the scope of activity (for example, who was involved, over what

period of time and where, with what support and what results) and

the policy context in which such activities took place (for

example, who made decisions and choices, what were the policies

and who enforced them), rather than on assembling a complete

record of particular experiments.  The limited time allotted to

ACHRE and the complexity of the records have meant that the

efforts of the agencies and the Advisory Committee have not

exhausted all the possibilities either for locating records of

interest or for evaluating and cross-referencing identified

records.  With the cooperation of the agencies and many non-

federal individuals and institutions, however, ACHRE has been

able to assemble as much information, or information about

information, as could be acquired, so that the essential

components of these histories are no longer lost.



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