Interim Committee and

CH14 INTERIM ANALYSIS AND DATA MONITORING COMMITTEES... 

Before a trial starts, a charter needs to be written and agreed upon by the trial sponsor and the committee. This charter describes the structure and operation of the committee and specifies its activities and responsibilities. The DMC should have access to fully unblinded data, with actual treatments and not just codes available for its review. Except in certain limited circumstances, trial integrity is best protected when interim data comparing treatment groups are seen only by the DMC members and statisticians preparing the interim report (Ellenberg et al., 2003, see also O Neill, 2006). 

The Presidential Advisory Committee issued interim, special, and final reports on the GWS (Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses 1996a, 1996b, 1997). Table 1-9 summarizes the major recommendations and conclusions of this and other committees and panels. 

In response to the Navy s request, the NRC assigned this project to the Committee on Toxicology (COT). The COT convened the Subcommittee on Permissible Exposure Levels for Military Fuels,1 which prepared this report. The subcommittee based its evaluation of the Navy s interim PELs and STELs on a detailed examination of current data on the toxicity of fuel vapors from JP-5, JP-8, JP-4, and DFM in animals and humans. JP-4 is included in this analysis because more information is available on the toxicity of JP-4 vapors than on the other three fuels and because the composition of JP-4 vapors is sufficiently similar to those of JP-5 and JP-8 vapors. The toxicity of the vapors from all these fuels is expected to be similar. 

The next morning the Interim Committee met for the first time in Stimson s office. The gathering was preliminary, to fill in Byrnes, State s Clayton and the Navy s Bard on the basic facts, but Stimson made a point of introducing the former assistant President as Truman s personal representative. The membership was thus put on notice that Byrnes enjoyed special status and that his words carried extra weight. 

Bohr s proposal to enlist the Soviet Union in discussions before the atomic bomb became a reality here slips to the question of whether or not to tell the Soviets the bare facts after the first bomb had been tested but before the second was dropped on Japan. Byrnes thought the answer to that question might depend on how quickly the USSR could duplicate the American accomplishment. The Interim Committee s recording secretary, 2nd Lieutenant R. Gordon Ameson, remembered after the war of this confrontation that Mr. Byrnes felt that this point was a very important one. The veteran of House and Senate cloakrooms was at least as concerned as Henry Stimson to extract a quid pro quo for any exchange of information, as Conant s next comment to Bush demonstrates ... 

If Byrnes had begun his service on the Interim Committee respecting the men who had carried the Manhattan Project forward, he must have conceived less respect for them now. Both Stimson and Bush, Conant told Byrnes, had talked to Churchill in Quebec. If, as it seemed, they could be conned by the British into giving away the secrets of the bomb—whatever... 

The Interim Committee was to meet in full dress with its Scientific Panel on Thursday, May 31, and on Friday, June 1, with its industrial advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared the ground for those meetings on May 25 when they issued a formal directive to the Pacific commanders and to Hap Arnold defining U.S. military policy toward Japan in the months to come ... 

I told the President of the final decision of his Interim Committee. Mr. Truman told me he had been giving serious thought to the subject for many days, having been informed as to the investigation of the committee and the consideration of alternative plans, and that with reluctance he had to agree that he could think of no alternative and found himself in accord with what I told him the Committee was going to recommend... 

Truman saw his Secretary of War five days later. The President, Stim-son noted in his diary, said that Byrnes had reported to him already about [the Interim Committee s decision] and that Byrnes seemed to be highly pleased with what had been done. ... 

After the Interim Committee meeting on May 31 Robert Oppen-heimer had sought out Niels Bohr. I was very deeply impressed with General Marshall s wisdom, he remembered in 1963, and also that of Secretary Stimson and I went over to the British mission and met Bohr and tried to comfort him but he was too wise and too worldly to be comforted, and he left for England very soon after that, quite uncertain about what, if anything, would happen. ... 

From secret participants in a top-secret project the two men and their colleagues had emerged as public heroes, the artificers of a military revolution. With the discovery of fission, C. P. Snow comments, ... physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resource a nationstate could call upon. The letter on postwar planning that the Berkeley and Los Alamos directors polished that last weekend of the war tried out their new authority in it the members of the Interim Committee Scientific Panel—Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Compton, Fermi—set aside merely technical advice to propose a radical rethinking of national policy. In doing so they began to outline the nuclear dilemma as they understood it. 

---