|
In the service of his country, Army Pvt. Thomas M.
Kopko sat on a platform in the middle of the Utah salt flats, amid
cages of noisy, scratching guinea pigs, and waited for a germ cloud to
waft through the darkness. Soon, the 20-year-old soldier and the other
medical research volunteers from Fort Detrick in Maryland were
inhaling infectious Q fever bacteria.
Today, at 59, Kopko can still remember how he instinctively held his
breath as his commanding officers slipped on their gas masks during
the 1955 project. He can still recall the bacteria moving like "a soft
damp mist" across the desert and the pre-dawn flight home to Fort
Detrick, the headquarters of the military's biological warfare
research in Frederick County.
For nearly two decades, Seventh-day Adventists like Tom Kopko were
volunteers in America's little-known Cold War fight to protect its
troops from germ warfare.
They took part in experiments like the secret
open-air test in Utah - one of the few conducted beyond the fenced,
barbed-wire perimeter of the Army's research and development center
for biological warfare at Fort Detrick. Code-named Project Whitecoat,
2,200 soldiers were involved between 1954 and 1973.
Decades later the extent of harm done to the soldiers still is not
certain - the Army has done no follow-up on the volunteers.
But now, as a presidential panel and congressional committees
investigate government-financed Cold War experiments on humans -
particularly those involving radiation - Project Whitecoat may well
serve as an example of military propriety and care in the area of
human testing, according to interviews with more than 30 former
participants, seven physicians familiar with the program and a review
of military, church and historical documents.
The Adventist soldiers, who served as noncombatants in observance of
their religious conviction against bearing arms, were used to help
develop vaccines to treat American troops exposed to a biological
agent or an infectious disease. By the time the program ceased in 1973
with the end of the draft, Whitecoat volunteers had participated in
studies on Q fever, tularemia, Venezuelan encephalomyelitis, typhus,
Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other exotic diseases.
"They said you wouldn't die. And I didn't die," Kopko recalled of his
participation in a study on Q fever, a flu-like, body-aching disease
that could cripple a platoon. "I figured this was one way to serve my
country. That's why I did it."
Kopko, a former Adventist chaplain now living in Florida, never
contracted the fever during Project Whitecoat, one of the few
conducted in a mock battlefield setting. But dozens of Project
Whitecoat subjects
did become ill. Treated with antibiotics, most recovered with no
recurring health problems. But a few veterans today worry that their
Whitecoat service compromised their health or may yet. Many of those
same experiments, however, expanded the world's knowledge of
infectious diseases.
"A number of vaccines were developed and refined there, and they had
terrific civilian applications," said Dr. Frank Calia, vice dean of
the University of Maryland medical school and a military physician at
Fort Detrick in 1967-1969.
Project Whitecoat flourished during the heyday of the Cold War, it was
the legacy of another war that shaped the program's concern for the
rights of its volunteers. Detrick's researchers were "very conscious"
of the 1947 Nuremberg Code that called for the voluntary, competent
and informed consent of subjects in medical experiments, said Dr.
Abram S. Beneson, who served as director of experimental medicine at
Detrick in 1954-1955.
The consent forms included a clause warning a volunteer that an
outcome of a study, "though an unlikely outcome, could be their
death," said Dr. Beneson, 80, a professor emeritus of public health at
San Diego State University. Army lawyers told Beneson that he was
wasting his time because the form wouldn't hold up legally if
challenged.
"From the legal point of view (it may be a waste of time)," Beneson
said he replied. "But from a moral point of view, I'm not deluding
anyone."
Volunteers were briefed on the nature of the experiments, asked to
sign consent forms and given the chance to back out of a project. A
few volunteers never participated in a study. And those who did say
they received excellent care from the Detrick medical staff.
"If they were pulling the wool over anybody's eyes, I don't think it
was in the Whitecoat program, because there were too many civilians
involved who had no allegiance to the Army," said W. Jay Nixon, a
46-year-old Washington businessman and Whitecoat volunteer who served
from 1969 to 1971. |
