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More than four years after a petition seeking compensation was filed before the Kerala Human Rights Commission (HRC) by one of the 27 patients involved in the controversial Hopkins-RCC drug trials, a Division Bench of the Kerala High Court quashed it on November 17, accepting technical objections raised by the Regional Cancer Centre (RCC) and its former Director, Dr. M. Krishnan Nair. They pleaded that as per the Protection of Human Rights Act, the complaint ought to have been filed within one year of occurrence of the event for it to be considered by the Commission. The patient M. Gopalan, therefore, lost his case purely on legal technicalities, with the commission never looking into his complaint of serious ethical violations by the doctors who experimented on him without his voluntary or informed consent.
The HRC had initially rejected the RCC's and Dr. Krishnan Nair's objections. So had a single-Judge Bench of the High Court subsequently. (Another petition filed by Dr. V. N. Bhattathiri is pending before the Commission.)
Gopalan, then a patient awaiting surgery at the RCC, received the last in a series of controversial injections in mid-January 2000. The Division Bench accepted the argument that Gopalan should have filed the complaint within a year of the date of that injection. Perhaps it does not matter any more. Gopalan died a year after filing the complaint.
The following report is based on an interview Frontline had with Gopalan in Thiruvananthapuram in July 2001, a few days before he filed the petition:
Gopalan seemed to know death was nearing. In a stream of thought that broke each time he stressed a syllable in his native tongue, the 65-year-old man talked about life in his native Tirupur in Tamil Nadu where he used to make Rs.1,200 a month mending gunny-bags for local rice merchants. He talked about how his wife Saraswati had been under treatment at the RCC earlier for "uterine cancer", and about his three children, who were married and lived separately. He talked about the surgery at the RCC in January 2000 and the painful ordeal that he underwent before it. He recalled the trauma of being diagnosed with another cancerous growth on his tongue very near the spot where an earlier one had been removed surgically. And how he realised, more than a year later when he went back for treatment for a second time, that a potentially dangerous experiment was carried out on him by some doctors without his consent, while he thought it was part of his treatment.
In November 1999 he was admitted as an inpatient at the RCC. Nearly a fortnight before the scheduled surgery in January, he was asked to "go to another room" in the hospital and "sign on a piece of paper". He said he did not understand a word of what was written on the paper as it was in Malayalam, the local language.
"Any way, I signed it, thinking that it was routine procedure before surgery." Then, two doctors, "not the ones who were treating him regularly", examined the burning lump on his tongue. They "squeezed it" and then they gave him a painful injection. More injections followed "almost at the same place, the same unbearable way". Then the injected lump was removed. The doctors said he was cured and then they sent him home.
"But I was not cured. When I came back with another lump on my tongue, my own doctor asked me one day why I allowed them to give me those injections and why I had failed to inform him about it. I asked him, `Didn't I give you my trust?' I thought it was part of my treatment'."
Would he have volunteered had they told him that it was an experiment? Did he know that it involved risks unknown even to the researchers? Was he aware it was the first time the chemicals were being injected on human beings to try and find a cure for his type of cancer? Did he know he could refuse to be part of the experiment?
He replied: "Do you think anybody would take such a risk? Who would have thought they would do such a thing to me?"
Gopalan had a vacant stare as he sat uncomfortably on his bed in that nondescript lodge near the RCC after yet another session of radiotherapy - a bland stare that would stay in your memory for long.
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