The Plutonium Files (14 page)

Now here he was taking part in a discussion about a human experiment. In the preceding months, at laboratories in Rochester, Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Alamos, dogs, rats, mice, and even rabbits had been injected with plutonium or forced to breathe in large amounts of plutonium-contaminated air. Then their bodies or organs were reduced to ashes in ovens and dissolved in acid, and the plutonium was extracted and measured. As expected, the animals who received the largest amounts suffered severe damage and death. Hemorrhages appeared on internal organs. Spleens, thymus glands, and adrenals shrunk dramatically. Livers turned yellow and necrotic. Lymphomas and bone sarcomas were induced. Precancerous conditions appeared at injection sites, and rats that breathed in the vapors developed acute pneumonia.

Although the scientists initially believed that plutonium was fifty times less hazardous than radium, by the spring of 1945 they had begun to realize that plutonium in larger amounts could actually be thirty times
more
hazardous than radium.
²¹
From their animal studies, they had discovered that plutonium gravitated to more vulnerable parts of the body than radium. Radium deposited itself in mineralized bone, which is generally considered resistant to radiation. But plutonium in a soluble chemical form settled in the liver and the parts of bone associated with the production of blood cells. That phenomenon was particularly serious, Joseph Hamilton later wrote, because it meant that the alpha particles would be bombarding the “radio-sensitive bone marrow.”

The Los Alamos scientists asked Friedell to take back a request to Manhattan Project headquarters.
²²
They wanted help in arranging an experiment: “It is suggested that a hospital patient at either Rochester or Chicago be chosen for injection of from one to ten micrograms of material and that the excreta be sent to this laboratory for analysis.”
²³
Oppenheimer
gave his approval to the human experiment in a memo forwarded to Stafford Warren:

Usually Stafford Warren was the medical officer who made the jarring trip up the canyon to Los Alamos. But according to Hymer Friedell, Warren was having prostate surgery on the day the scientists decided to go ahead with the plutonium injection experiment.
²⁵
His role in the decision is hard to pin down. In a 1950 Los Alamos report, Warren is credited as the official who was “primarily responsible” for the initiation of the program.
²⁶
Yet few records have surfaced that were written by Warren, or to him, about the experiment. One document that has been found is a December 2, 1944, memo to his files entitled “Medical Experimental Program on Radium and Product.” Writing about five months after the Mastick accident, Warren summarized efforts by scientists in Rochester, Chicago, Los Alamos, and Berkeley to obtain data that would clarify the relative toxicity of radium and plutonium and help establish “tolerance” standards for workers. Task “a” involved using intravenous injections to determine the lethal dose for radium and “product” in rats. Task “b” was to establish the ratios of blood level to urine and fecal excretion following injections of radium and “product” into rats. And the final task was “Tracer experiments on humans like b. above so that the comparison (factor) can be made between the rat data and human data.”
²⁷

The role of Warren’s boss, General Leslie Groves, is even more obscure. Groves kept tabs on all aspects of the atomic bomb project and probably knew about the experiment being planned. But so far his name has not surfaced on any documents related to the injections. John Lans-dale, a lawyer who had been in charge of Groves’s intelligence operations and once interrogated Oppenheimer about his Communist connections, said in 1995 that the experiment was “not the kind of thing that should have been initiated without the approval of Gen. Groves, yet I find it hard to believe he did—moreover it is the kind of thing he would have discussed with me but I knew nothing of it.”
²⁸

Hymer Friedell told DOE interviewers that he believed Groves was aware of the plan. “I think he was. I think he would be.
²⁹
But I don’t know [it] from the record. If I recall correctly, I never communicated with him. But Stafford Warren almost certainly did.”

In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the day after the Los Alamos meeting, Ebb Cade and his two brothers got ready for work. It was a Saturday and they were tired and stiff from a long week of hard labor. But soon the three men slipped out of the house and piled into a car driven by Jesse Smith, a friend who lived and worked with the Cade brothers.

Ebb was a soft-spoken man with powerful shoulders and callused hands who worked as a cement mixer for the J. A. Jones Construction Co., a contractor based in Charlotte, North Carolina, which had built the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a gigantic U-shape building where uranium was enriched.
¹
Ebb was only fifty-five, but his left eye was completely blind, a daub of cloudy blue.
²
A cataract was starting to creep over the right eye too.

On the way to the job site, they picked up another man and woman. About 6:30
A.M.
they pulled up to the guard shack leading to the classified project.
³
The occupants showed their badges to the guard and were waved on through. At 6:40
A.M.,
one to two miles from the plant, Smith spotted a stalled government truck blocking his lane. One of its rear wheels was jacked up, and Smith started to edge around the vehicle. That’s when he saw the dump truck barreling straight toward him. It was too late to turn, too late to brake.

Ebb may have been napping in the backseat, squeezed between the warm bodies of his two brothers, dreaming of Sunday, when the head-on accident occurred. The injuries suggested it was a violent collision, full of the shriek of brakes and squealing metal. Then a shuddering stillness filled the blue Tennessee dawn.

Everyone in Ebb Cade’s vehicle was taken to the Oak Ridge Army Hospital, a bustling facility built two years earlier and staffed with 20 civilian dentists, 141 nurses, 54 nurses’ attendants, 8 dietitians, and 41 medical officers.
⁴
Ebb’s nose and lip were cut.
⁵
His right kneecap, forearm, and his left femur, the long, heavy bone that extends from the hip to knee, were fractured. The injuries suffered by the other occupants are unknown. But one record indicates the driver, Jesse Smith, was hospitalized for nine months.
⁶

Ebb was coherent enough to give the doctors some of his family history. He told them he had always been in good health except for a chronic urethral discharge. Upon examination, physicians noted that the lens of his left eye had been “completely obliterated” by a cataract.
⁷
He had marked tooth decay, gum disease, and a touch of arthritis in his left knee. Ebb said he didn’t have any problems with his kidneys or liver, but a urine test indicated that he had a “somewhat diminished” kidney function. A doctor wrote: “He was a well developed, well nourished colored male.”
⁸

A couple of days after the accident, Los Alamos chemist Wright Langham sent Hymer Friedell a detailed set of instructions on the “49” [plutonium] experiment. On April 6, twelve days after the sit-down meeting in Los Alamos, he sent a second set of instructions, according to a memo declassified in 1994. Langham was particularly concerned that the plutonium injected into the human subject be accurately measured.
⁹
The syringe containing the plutonium, he advised Hymer Friedell, should be allowed to sit for five to ten minutes so that the plutonium would saturate its inner walls. “My experience has been that a syringe always delivers 5–10% less than indicated by the graduations,” he wrote.
¹⁰
“There is also the problem of 49 [plutonium] absorption by ground glass surfaces.”

The subject’s urine and stool samples should be bottled separately for the first thirty-six hours after injection. Mason fruit jars would make good containers, but “you may have a better idea on this,” Langham wrote.
¹¹
“The samples should be packed about twice as securely as normally necessary because the packages coming into this place are hardly recognizable after the truckers get through with them.”

Four days later, on April 10, a small amount of plutonium was removed from an ampoule that Langham had sent to Oak Ridge and mixed into a solution containing distilled water. Approximately 0.25 cc of the plutonium mixture was drawn up into a syringe, then the solution was injected into Ebb’s left arm. During the injection, a document later noted, “care was taken to avoid leakage.”

Denser than lead and with a 24,000-year half-life, the plutonium immediately began circulating through Ebb’s bloodstream.
¹²
Eventually the radioactive molecules would settle in his liver and bones. Ebb Cade, later assigned the code name HP-12, had been injected with 4.7 micro-grams of plutonium—nearly five times the amount scientists at the time felt could be retained without harm in the human body and a dose equal to eighty times what the average person receives in a year from natural and man-made radiation sources.
^13
14

The day after Ebb’s injection, Hymer Friedell sent Louis Hempelmann a copy of the protocol and a brief note: “Everything went smoothly, and I think that we will have some very valuable information for you,” he wrote.
¹⁵
“I think that we will have access to considerable clinical material here, and we hope to do a number of subjects.”

No one is sure now who actually administered the injection. Joseph Howland, the young doctor who was in charge of the Manhattan Project’s “special problems,” told AEC officials many years later that he did it under protest, and only after he received written orders from Hymer Friedell.
¹⁶
No consent was obtained from Cade, Howland said.

Friedell has denied Howland’s allegation for more than two decades. He contends a physician named Dwight Clark from the University of Chicago performed the injection. In August of 1994 Friedell was asked again about the injection by staffers from President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments:

After the war, Howland returned to the University of Rochester where he had worked before and took over the medical division of Rochester’s Atomic Energy Project. Some years later he suffered a nervous breakdown. He eventually returned to the laboratory, but on the advice of his physician did not resume his practice.
¹⁸

In an undated autobiographical sketch, Howland described the injection of Ebb Cade as “a command performance”: “I injected a five-microcurie dose of plutonium into a human and studied his clinical experience.
¹⁹
(I objected, but in the Army, an order is an order.)”

Howland also stated that Dwight Clark carried out parallel experiments on animals at the University of Chicago. Both Howland and Clark are dead now, but a declassified transcript of a telephone conversation appears to support Howland’s version of the injection.

Three years after Ebb Cade’s injection, Albert Holland, a medical doctor in Oak Ridge, contacted Joseph Howland at the University of Rochester and asked him about the case.
²⁰
Although the conversation appears casual, the telephone call was transcribed and may have been part of a surreptitious investigation into the experiment by Shields Warren, the Harvard pathologist who assumed control of the Atomic Energy Commission’s biological and medical programs after the war. (Shields Warren was not related to Stafford Warren.) The following is an excerpt of the January 9, 1948, telephone call: