J. David Litster, vice president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dean for research and professor of physics, said in a statement issued by the MIT News Office:
"Chairman Fred Misilo, Rev. Doe West and the entire Task Force on Human Subject Research are to be congratulated for the hard work and thought they have put into completing a difficult mission over the past four months.
"As MIT President Charles M. Vest said in January, MIT has expressed its sorrow that the young people who participated decades ago in the nutritional tracer studies--and their parents--apparently were not informed that the study involved radioactive tracers in very small amounts.
"I am pleased that the Task Force has confirmed MIT's initial impression that no harm was done to the participants in the cereal nutrition studies that were the initial focus of publicity," Professor Litster said.
The Task Force's five principal findings included: "IV. In the best judgment of the experts whose opinions were sought by the Task Force, no significant health effects were incurred by the research subjects as a direct result of the nutritional research studies in which radioactive calcium and iron tracers were used."
MIT spokesman Kenneth Campbell said the MIT nutrition research used minute amounts (less than one billionth of an ounce) of radioactive iron and calcium to chart the absorption of calcium and iron in the body from eating cereal. The exposures to radiation were between 30% and 99% below the much more stringent standards that are in effect today, he said.
The Task Force has been meeting since January at the request of Philip Campbell, Commissioner of the Department of Mental Health. It submitted to the commissioner its 46-page report and about 250 pages of documentation and appendices in a paper-bound book, "A Report on the Use of Radioactive Materials in Human Subject Research that Involved Residents of State-Operated Facilities within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 1943 through 1973."