BALTIMORE -- The Maryland Court of Appeals has ordered lawsuits to proceed against a leading research institution that allegedly exposed poor children to lead-based paint during a study.

The court also criticized the Institutional Review Board at Johns Hopkins University, which oversaw the study, saying it protected the interests of researchers at the expense of children. The primary researchers were Hopkins faculty members.

"The researchers and their Institutional Review Board apparently saw nothing wrong with the search protocols that anticipated the possible accumulation of lead in the blood of otherwise healthy children as a result of the experiment," Judge Dale R. Cathell wrote Thursday.

The issue stems from lawsuits that were filed on behalf of two children who allegedly suffered elevated blood-lead levels and irreversible brain damage in the Kennedy Krieger Institute study. The suits seek unspecified monetary damages.

Cathell ordered trials in Baltimore Circuit Court, which last year threw out the cases, saying the institute was not obligated to tell participants in the study that they risked lead poisoning.

The institute is a children's hospital and research center. Baltimore ranks among the worst U.S. cities for lead-paint poisoning because of its older housing stock.

The study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, examined inexpensive alternatives for removing lead paint. Children can develop learning disabilities and brain damage after eating lead paint chips.

Landlords were paid to recruit about 100 families with healthy children to live in their homes during the early 1990s. The children were to be tested periodically to see how well the abatement methods worked.

Dr. Gary Goldstein, chief executive of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, said the children already ran a high risk of lead paint exposure because they already lived in old row houses.

"If a child is lead-poisoned in one of those houses, is that our fault and are we doing something wrong by studying those children? I don't think we are."

A spokesman for the EPA did not return phone messages seeking comment. Hopkins and one researcher would not comment. The other researcher recently died.

Cathell, who likened the research project to typhus experiments conducted on prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp in World War II, said consent agreements signed by parents were incomplete and unclear about the risks their otherwise healthy children faced in the study.

"I think the court made it very clear that doing research on human subjects is not the same as doing research on animals," said attorney Suzanne C. Shapiro, who represented 11-year-old plaintiff Myron Higgins.

The judge said Hopkins' review board abdicated its responsibilities by helping researchers get around federal regulations designed to protect children participating in non-therapeutic research.

Last month, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services temporarily shut down nearly all of Hopkins' federally funded research on human subjects after the death of a healthy lab worker in an asthma study.

Federal regulators found that researchers had bypassed several safety checkpoints in the study approved by the Hopkins review board.



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