Nightmare all too real for 1940s moms

By Mike McKee Copyright 1998 The Recorder August 3, 1998

    A roomful of elderly women wept in a Nashville, Tenn., courtroom last Monday as Vanderbilt University apologized for conducting experiments a half-century ago that might have given their children cancer.

U.S. District Judge John Nixon asked Alfred Wilcox, a partner in Philadelphia's Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz, to face the women as he read the note of repentance penned by Vanderbilt vice chancellor and general counsel Jeffrey Carr.

"It is right and timely for Vanderbilt to apologize," the note said, for giving as many as 800 women radioactive iron cocktails from 1945 to 1947 to study iron metabolism during pregnancy.

"It was a dramatic moment," co-plaintiffs' lawyer Donald Arbitblit of San Francisco said late last week about the courtroom scene.

It also was a profitable moment for the Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein partner. Along with the apology, the women are being paid a settlement of $10. 3 million, of which $2.35 million goes to Arbitblit's nationally recognized class action firm.

Another $650,000 will be divvied up by Arbitblit's co-counsel, George Barrett, a partner in Nashville's Barrett, Johnston & Parsley, and Jacqueline Kittrell of the American Environmental Health Studies Project. And all three lawyers will split up an award of nearly $860,000 in expenses.

Vanderbilt is contributing $9.1 million of the settlement and the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the experiments, tossed in $900,000. Another $325, 000 was previously contributed by other funders, including St. Louis-based Monsanto Co.

Arbitblit filed the suit -- _Craft v. Vanderbilt University_, 3-94-0090 -- as a class action in 1994. Nashville resident Emma Craft, one of four class representatives, blamed the unauthorized tests for the 1958 death of Carolyn Bucy, her 11-year-old daughter.

According to a story Tuesday in _The Tennessean_, Craft immediately forgave Vanderbilt -- which likes to call itself the "Harvard of the South" -- after the school apologized.

"I wanted Vanderbilt to apologize and now they have apologized," she said. "I am sure they will never do another experiment like that again."

Arbitblit said the apology is something you don't see often.

"It's a first in my experience," he said. "Usually when cases are settled, no one admits any wrongdoing."

Wilcox, Vanderbilt's lead defense counsel, confirmed all the essentials of the settlement agreement Friday and expressed satisfaction at the outcome. He was assisted in the case by William Ozier, a partner in Nashville's Bass, Berry & Sims.

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