1997 Senator John Glenn / Human Research Subject Protections Act of 1997

Introduction

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John Glenn was one of the most widely admired men in the United States Senate. He saw combat with the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II and the Korean War, and rose to rank of Colonel before retiring in 1965. In 1962 he became the first American to orbit the Earth in a space craft. He was a member of numerous U.S. and international aviation, aeronautic and scientific organizations. He was elected to the U.S. Senate on November 5, 1974 by the people of Ohio - his home state - and served as Senator until his retirement from public life on January 3, 1999. On his retirement he was the ranking minority member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and a member of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a member of the Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces (which has oversight of the Pentagon's military intelligence activities) and the senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In other words, there was no one more knowledgeable on the subject of classified medical and scientific research on unconsenting human subjects in the entire American Congress than Senator John Glenn of Ohio.

At the beginning of the 105th Congress, Senator Glenn introduced a bill "to provide protections to individuals who are the human subject of research". It was assigned the identifier S.193, by which we will henceforth refer to this bill. S.193 was specifically designed to deal with all human research including even that which is classified, and requires that the human subject of classified research be given the identity of the Federal Agency providing the funding, a statement that the research contains classified information, and an unclassified description of the purpose of the research. With that, Senator Glenn left for Houston, Texas to resume his career as an astronaut at age 76 while continuing to collect his salary as a Senator.

What we know for certain is this: Glenn abandoned the Senate and his legislation a few months after introducing it, that the bill was never reported out of the subcommittee to which it was referred, that the bill was opposed by the pharmaceutical industry, and that without Glenn's muscle behind it we lost our best chance ever to stop Nazi-style human experiments in the United States of America and by its proxies around the world.

Never tiring, we called Senator Glenn's office at Ohio State University after his return from space to inquire whether he would see us to discuss a strategy for having his bill reintroduced in the Congress. After consulting with the decrepit astronaut himself, his executive assistant told us to get lost.

We are presenting here S.193 itself.

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