WASHINGTON - Fifteen months after President Clinton created a commission to look into protecting human test subjects, seven federal departments and agencies agreed yesterday to provide money to get the job done.
At the urging of White House science adviser John Gibbons, five Cabinet departments and two agencies worked out a formula for sharing $1.1 million of the cost of operating the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.
The government sponsored thousands of human radiation experiments between 1944 and 1974 as part of its efforts to understand atomic weapons.
The commission was established after reports that some of the Cold War-era experiments were conducted on unwitting human test subjects, including patients injected with plutonium. Other tests involved the deliberate release of radiation into the atmosphere so that researchers could track the way it traveled.
The commission was given $500,000 in start-up money previously. Congress approved an additional $1.1 million last October, but left open where that money was to be found.
That left the commission largely dependent on volunteers and unable to hire a full staff. Its tasks include figuring out how much research the government is doing on humans and weighing whether the existing regulations on protecting human test subjects are stringent enough.
The $1.1 million will come from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and the departments of Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs, said Tim Newell, spokesman for the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Gibbons also intends to push for a two-year extension of the advisory commission's charter, now due to expire in October, Newell said.
Sen. John Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, introduced legislation yesterday that would create federal ``informed consent'' standards for research on human test subjects and, for the first time, criminal penalties for violations.
``We still don't have a law on the books saying it is illegal to experiment on Americans without their permission,'' Glenn said.
He called that ``astounding.''
The current rules often fail to guarantee that people get an honest portrayal of the risks involved in the experiments, Glenn said.
This story ran on page a11 of the Boston Globe on 01/23/97.