Scientists did not choose terminally ill patients for the experiments at Rochester, as some of them said later, but selected relatively healthy hospital patients, including an 18-year-old boy, to be injected with plutonium, uranium and other radioactive substances, the documents show. The experiments were intended to show what type or amount of exposure would cause damage to normal people in a nuclear war.

"It is of primary importance that the subjects have relatively normal kidney and liver function, as it is desirable to obtain a metabolic picture comparable to that of an active worker," according to the plan for plutonium injections at Rochester written in September 1945 by Dr. Wright Langham of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico.

"The individuals chosen as subjects were a miscellaneous group of male and female hospital patients for the most part with well-established diagnoses," said one document written in 1950 by Dr. Samuel Bassett, who carried out some injection experiments. "Patients with malignant disease were also omitted from the group on the grounds that their metabolism might be affected in an unknown manner."

At least 3 of the original 11 patients given plutonium at Rochester were still alive and 2 were being treated by doctors at Rochester in 1971, the documents showed.

But Dr. Langham, who helped write the experimental plans and oversaw them, suggested in public papers after the experiments that the patients had been terminally ill.

The patients in the experiments, carried out from 1945 to 1947, were never told they were being experimented on, according to reports Dr. Patricia Durbin wrote for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971 after interviewing Dr. Langham and others who conducted the experiment.

Mr. Loeb, the Strong Memorial Hospital spokesman, said: "We have not seen the documents, but these experiments did happen here. They were not a part of the hospital culture; they were highly secret extracurricular activities carried out by only three or four people."

In addition to all the patients and researchers being dead, the documents on the experiment had been in storage at the Department of Energy and the National Archives.