[Stephen Klaidman recently completed an assignment as Director of Communications and Counselor to President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Earlier, he had been a reporter for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and editor of the editorial page of The International Herald Tribune. More recently, he has studied journalism ethics and reporting on risks to human health, resulting in two books, The Virtuous Journalist (written with Tom L. Beauchamp) and Health in the Headlines, both published by Oxford University Press. According to Klaidman, the committee was an ethics committee, one of whose responsibilities was to make retrospective moral judgments distinguishing between acts that were clearly improper from acts that were blameworthy by today's standards but not by the standards of the time in which they were committed, and determining if specific individuals could be held at fault for some of the wrongs and some of the harms that were done to people. The report found frequent failure to show adequate respect for the rights of a subject or a patient according to current standards, but relatively few cases of physical injury and few instances where a specific individual could be found to be blameworthy.
As a former public information officer for the National Academy of Sciences, an organization with a firm belief in the sanctity of committee discussions, I was interested in his account of a committee compelled by law to work on a highly controversial issue completely in the open. The following account is an edited transcript of our conversation. Klaidman noted that he was speaking only for himself, and that the full committee report is available now from the Government Printing Office and next February from Oxford University Press-- H. J. Lewis]
HJL: I understand that the committee was not permitted to impose a press embargo on draft chapters of its own report.
SK: That's correct. We operated under the Federal Advisory Committee Act which mandates that all committee activities be open to the public, including the drafts of chapters of the final report. They were all available to the news media--and to members of the general public--on request.
HJL: Were the media on your doorstep, or did they learn about it in the course of time?
SK: It appeared to me that virtually no reporters were familiar with the provisions of the Act, and they were as surprised as we were to discover that they had access to the drafts. Some of them took a very long time to learn. But even we didn't appreciate that the chapter drafts would be public documents until we began producing them. As far as I know, we all assumed that we would not be required to share anything in the draft stage with the public. It turns out that the Act is quite specific about that.
HJL: Was there some fear that the level of openness would inhibit the discussion?
SK: Absolutely. There was considerable concern about that. It turned out that the concern was misplaced, because at the meetings themselves-- which typically were attended by news media (frequently including the electronic media) the discussion was quite free-wheeling and as far as I could tell, totally uninhibited. There was very little discussion of the issue and I interpreted that to mean that people simply grew comfortable with it, despite the fact that most of the members were not accustomed to those conditions. I think that anyone who read the meeting transcripts would agree.
HJL: As a former journalist and now a staff person, did you feel that the circumstances affected the work of the committee in a constructive or negative fashion?
SK: My personal view was that the effect was overwhelmingly constructive. There were certainly times when all of us felt that raw data were written about in the media in a way that inaccurately reflected what ultimately turned out to be the case. That was an adverse effect of the openness process, but I think that on the whole it was overwhelmingly beneficial to operate in the open. And the single most important reason was that we benefited from far more comments on our chapter drafts than we would have had otherwise, from a far more diverse body of critics. I think that resulted in the avoidance of considerable amount of error.
HJL: Was there a concern that the interests of some of the investigators whose work was being questioned could have been harmed by the fact that the information came out in segments rather than as a whole?
SK: I think they were as likely as anyone to benefit from the process, because those who are still alive and possibly subject to damage claims had access to the same documents and committee drafts as everyone else. We also paid as much attention to their comments as we did to anyone else's. Most of them had already had a great deal of news coverage--at least in the local media.
HJL: Did the subjects of those early experiments--or their survivors--turn up at the meetings?
SK: Oh yes. We tried to go into their communities as much as possible, to make it easier for them--Cincinnati, Knoxville, Santa Fe, and Spokane. There are a number of advocacy groups associated with the subjects of the experiments, and notices they put in their newsletters generated large turnouts for these meetings.
"The law calls for the drafts to be circulated at the time they are given to the full committee."
HJL: Didn't the White House and the Department of Energy see drafts any earlier than anyone else?
SK: No, they had roughly the same access as anyone else. The law calls for the drafts to be circulated at the time they are given to the full committee. Our procedure typically allowed that to happen about a week in advance of each meeting, essentially monthly. That allowed interested parties to prepare a presentation at the meeting, or, at least, more easily follow the discussion. Government agencies would receive copies on that same basis.
HJL: Were there any leaks before the drafts were given to the committee and distributed?
SK: Not that I can recall. Of course, we were being covered by a relatively small number of reporters interested in specific stories, but even among those who were covering a specific local story, I can't recall any notable leaks.
HJL: In my own experience, there seems to be a prevailing belief in at least the science and engineering communities that a certain amount of privacy is required for free expression among committee members. Is it your experience that such concerns are overstated?
SK: I think so, Going into this exercise, I expected a process that allowed for considerably more confidentially, up to the point of publication. Once I learned that it was going to be a totally open process, in part I was heartened by it, but I was also assuming that candor would be compromised. The experience of this committee was that if this happens, it happens rarely.
HJL: And the effect on pending civil suits?
"I was also assuming that candor would be compromised. . . . The opposite is true."
SK: It provided an opportunity for both sides to use the news media. My guess is that if there were an advantage it went to those who were more adept in doing that.
HJL: It sounds like a great recommendation for the sunshine laws.
SK: At this point, I would have to be convinced that any closed process would have benefits that would outweigh the benefits I observed in this open process. For me, the burden of proof has shifted.
HJL: What was your overall impression of the press coverage?
SK: Overall, about as I would have expected. There was a lot of very superficial coverage that resulted from people simply not having been present at the debates. There was a narrowness to some of the coverage, a focus on compensation issues, for example, simply because it's sexier and an easier story to write. I would have liked more coverage of questions such as: What are the flaws in contemporary Federal oversight of biomedical research? How do you make retrospective moral judgments about what people did fifty years ago. The issues that we found most interesting were not the ones that tended to be written about most, but, arguably, they were more difficult to write about. Some people did very good jobs--David Brown of The Washington Post, for example, but he's a physician. A lot of regional reporters did fine jobs--Karen Dorn Steele of the Spokane Spokesman-Review did a consistently first-rate job; Paul Barton on the Cincinnati Enquirer; and Phil Hilts, of The New York Times. Of the electronic reporters, where we got the least coverage, the one who covered us most carefully was Barry Serafin of ABC News