| http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/07/pageone/pageone7.html
Baby bones shipped to US for studies as late as 1978 By Deborah Smith, Science Writer Autopsy samples from more than 50 Australian children under four were used in American nuclear studies in the late 1950s, scientific papers reveal. Bone samples were taken with the approval of the Federal government, reduced to ash and sent overseas for testing, as part of a project that continued until 1978. The consent of the families was unlikely to have been obtained. Papers from the period also reveal bones from at least 27 children and teenagers and 87 adults from Australia were tested in 1958 and 1959 as part of the United States Atomic Energy Commission research, code-named Project Sunshine. Most State governments, including NSW, have announced inquiries into the issue, after a British newspaper reported that Australian stillborn babies had been shipped overseas as part of the secret program. The chief executive officer of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, Dr John Loy, said yesterday the agency had no evidence that stillborn babies were shipped overseas but the government's Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee had begun a program of taking bone samples from dead babies and adults in 1957 to be tested overseas for radioactive strontium. He said pathologists in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney turned the human bone samples to ash before sending them to the US and United Kingdom for testing. The project continued until 1978 and in the later years Australia did its own strontium testing. Project Sunshine, headed by Nobel laureate Dr Willard Libby, began in 1953 to measure the radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions in soil, plants, animals and humans. At a meeting of the project's scientists in 1955, Dr Libby said its supply of stillborn babies had been "cut off". "If anyone knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country," he said. It would be difficult to do it legally. Dr Laurence Kulp told the 1955 meeting a senior member of the Columbia Medical School with "contacts all over the world" could assist them in obtaining international cadaver samples. "In particular, we could develop a program in Australia" and other countries, he said. Between 1953 and 1959 the project obtained 9,000 samples of human bone, Dr Kulp wrote in the journal Science in 1960. "These have included foetuses, single bone samples from individuals of all ages, and whole skeletons [most from New York]." A spokesman from the University of Chicago, where Dr Libby worked, has said it was unlikely family permission for the samples would have been obtained. |
