Harvard Will Hire Archivist to Review Files

The Countway Medical library will hire an independent archivist to catalog the files of a former Medical School faculty member who in the 1940s and '50s subjected retarded children to experiments involving radiation.

Judith Messerle, Countway's head librarian, said last week that she will hire a professional medical archivist to separate patient files from the 27 boxes of Dr. Clemens E. Benda's uncatalogued papers.

Following newspaper reports of Benda's involvement in radiation experiments, Harvard University lawyers two weeks ago ordered Countway's librarians to end all public access to the papers.

The order to seal the documents came in a two-page letter sent to Richard J. Wolf, who is in charge of the Benda papers at Countway, by an attorney in the University's Office of General Counsel.

The order stands in contrast to the U.S. Department of Energy's decision to make public many of its files about tests with radiation on human subjects.

But Harvard and the library have sealed the files because they include patient records, Messerle says.

"Usually the materials are organized and patients' records, a definable part of the records, are segregatable," Messerle says. "But these are co-mingled."

Once patient records are sorted out, researchers may once again be able to look at the files. "For appropriate people, I don't see that [as] a problem," she says.

Messerle says she has "no estimate" as to how long the process of archiving the files will take. The archivist will be hired "soon," she says, declining to give an estimate of the date.

"We're working to make sure they get done appropriately," Messerle says. "We are fairly close to bringing someone in and there are likely to be several people involved. We want it done....We're hiring a professional. We're working to find someone soon."

Benda, a Medical School professor, served as the director of clinical psychiatry at the Fernald State School for the retarded from 1946 to 1962. In 1954, he reported in the Journal of Nutrition on a study in which retarded children at the school were fed radioactive milk with their breakfast cereal to monitor their intake of calcium.

Former Fernald residents have said repeatedly in interviews and in testimony before a special U.S. Senate panel that they were not told of the radiation used in the experiments. Instead, the students participating in the tests say researchers, including Benda, referred to them as members of a "Science Club."

But questions about what exactly went on at Fernald will not be answered until Harvard and a state task force representing the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation complete their investigations.

In the meantime, Acting Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Jane Corlette, Harvard's point person on its investigation, says the files will stay closed.

The files contain materials "that absolutely should not have been available to anyone except under strict conditions," Corlette says.

Some papers from the Benda files will be turned over to the state task force, according to Harvard officials.

Who's in Charge Here?

Questions remain as to who is running the probe and who has ultimate responsibility over the files. University officials have been unable to describe who is turning the files over and what those files contain.

In an interview two weeks ago, Corlette said that she expected the first shipment to leave within "a day or two." Corlette and other University administrators, however, have been unable to confirm that such a shipment ever left Cambridge.

Gerald Ryan, the spokesperson for the Department of Mental Retardation and its task force, says only that "we are assembling files from several source."

Ryan says he could not comment on any documents involved in the investigation until all files have been collected and reviewed by the department's 10-member task force.

Ryan refuses to comment on any Harvard role in the state probe.

Although Benda died in 1975, many of his patients are still alive. Harvard is merely seeking to keep their private records out of public scrutiny, according to Corlette.

"I'm not sure they had developed any standards for sorting out what is and is not confidential," Corlette says of the librarians at Countway. "I suspect [Benda's papers] will be available" once the sorting process is finished, she says.

Messerle says that in the four years she has been working at Countway she cannot recall a time when Harvard lawyers have ordered files closed. She also says Harvard has "many" similarly uncatalogued collections.

Wolf, who is in charge of the uncatalogued papers at Countway, has repeatedly refused to comment.