Ethical aerobics: ACHRE's flight from responsibility

The President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) was charged to perform a comprehensive ethical evaluation of US government‐funded radiation experiments. In these experiments, several hundred thousand people were used as experimental subjects in several thousand experiments. This paper reviews ACHRE's Final Report, issued in October 1995. ACHRE recommended no apology or compensation to the vast majority of victims. Their rationale for this decision was plagued with inconsistencies. Whenever facts could not be recontextualized to reduce the apparent misconduct of the government‐funded researchers, ACHRE constructed ethical loopholes to avoid judgment of the perpetrators. We critique ACHRE's recommendations by a careful analysis of their own records and transcripts. We. provide an accurate history of informed consent standards in human subject research, in contrast to ACHRE's inconsistent history. We also give a detailed review of ACHRE's erroneous risk analysis in two representative groups of experiments.