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THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release January 18, 1994

                    PRESIDENT SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER
                                FORMING 
           ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS

The Clinton Administration today continued efforts to uncover the nature and extent of government-sponsored experiments on individuals involving intentional exposure to ionizing radiation. The President today released an Executive Order that will establish an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The Advisory Committee, to be made up of outside-government experts in medicine, science and ethics, will provide to the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group advice and recommendations on human radiation experiments conducted by the government since the 1940's. This Advisory Committee shall comply with the terms of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

In other actions:

On January 3, 1994, the White House called for the formation of a Human Radiation Interagency Working Group to coordinate the government-wide effort to uncover the nature and extent of any government sponsored experiments on individuals involving intentional exposure to ionizing radiation. The members of the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group include the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, the Attorney General, the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Christine Varney, Secretary to the Cabinet, will issue a memorandum tomorrow to federal departments and agencies with formal instructions concerning the retrieval and inventory of records on human radiation experiments consistent with discussions by staff of the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group. The memo calls for each agency to establish procedures for document handling and review.
The Human Radiation Hotline service will soon be upgraded to handle 500 calls an hour.

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