The Plutonium Files (21 page)

Albert Stevens began painting houses again but was soon forced to give it up. “It got to the point where he wasn’t strong enough anymore,” his daughter said.
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Periodically he returned to UCSF for follow-up visits. Robert Stone ordered that a GI series be done without charge whenever Albert returned to the clinic. He had no specific complaints except for his inability to gain weight. Ten years after he was injected, a radiologist noted “rather marked” degeneration in the lumbar region of his spine and several degenerating discs.

Albert was to live nearly twenty-one years after he was diagnosed as terminal and injected with a so-called lethal dose of plutonium. His long survival rate is astonishing considering the amount of radiation he received. In 1995 two Los Alamos scientists calculated that Albert received a dose equal to 6,400 rem during his lifetime.
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That translates to 309 rem per year, or 858 times what the average person receives during the same period.

Just how the plutonium affected Albert’s day-to-day health is unknown. The radiation probably caused his bones to thin and become brittle. But it was his heart that gave out first. On January 9, 1966, he died of cardiorespiratory failure in Santa Rosa, California, twelve miles from the town of Healdsburg where he had brought his ailing wife and children so many decades before. He was seventy-nine years old. His body was cremated, and his ashes were placed in a bronze urn and stored in a niche in Santa Rosa’s Chapel of the Chimes.

The Manhattan Project medical doctors were not satisfied with the data they had acquired from the three injections. Ebb Cade’s impaired kidney function may have skewed his excretion results, and for some unknown reason, Albert Stevens was excreting plutonium much more slowly than the other two patients. The physicians and scientists soon developed a list of things they needed to find out: What was the minimum amount of plutonium necessary to produce damage in the body? How could it be quantified and detected in wounds or lungs? Did diet affect plutonium’s distribution? How was the liver damaged after intravenous injection? Did existing kidney damage diminish the elimination rate? And as a corollary, should people with kidney damage be excluded from working with plutonium?

The human experiments and ongoing animal studies had only confirmed fears that plutonium was indeed more carcinogenic than radium.
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On May 21, 1945, less than two weeks after Albert had been injected, Wright Langham wrote a letter to Hymer Friedell recommending that the so-called tolerance dose for plutonium be lowered to one microgram. Although Langham agreed with Friedell that the limit was probably much too conservative, he nevertheless supported it because “the medico-legal aspect will have been taken care of, and of still greater importance, we will have taken a relatively small chance of poisoning someone in case the material proves to be more toxic than one would normally expect.”
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Toward the end of June 1945, after the Manhattan Project’s Medical Section had received data on Albert, it officially lowered the tolerance dose to one microgram.
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(In 1949 a group of researchers recommended that the tolerance dose be lowered again, to one-tenth that amount, or 0.1 microgram, after former Met Lab scientist Austin Brues presented results of a rat study suggesting plutonium was fifteen times more damaging than radium. Wright Langham and other scientists vigorously opposed the adoption of such a conservative standard, arguing, among other things, that it would produce “serious delays” in the lab’s plutonium operations. The AEC’s Shields Warren struck a compromise and lowered the maximum permissible dose to 0.5 micrograms.)

Sometime in the summer of 1945, the Manhattan Project Medical Section decided to inject more humans with plutonium. In making the decision, the doctors probably were thinking about overexposures that had already occurred as well as exposures that might occur in the future. Stafford Warren knew as early as April of 1945, even before the successful detonation of the Trinity bomb, that the Manhattan District would continue in some shape or form. “It has been indicated by properly qualified individuals that the operations of the Manhattan Engineer District should and will continue on for peacetime purposes,” he wrote in a letter declassified in 1995. In short, plutonium and its hazards were not going to go away.
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Over the next two years, an additional fifteen patients would be injected with plutonium: two in Chicago by Robert Stone’s group; another two in San Francisco by Joseph Hamilton’s group; and eleven patients in Rochester. Before the program ended in the summer of 1947, a total of eighteen people would be injected with plutonium without their informed consent.

On September 5, 1945, just three days after Japan formally surrendered, Los Alamos chemist Wright Langham sat down with scientists working at the Manhattan Annex, the secret research facility at the University of Rochester to plan the most comprehensive set of plutonium injections yet undertaken. This new round of injections would be a collaborative effort. Langham would supply the plutonium; the Rochester doctors, the patients. According to documents made public in 1994–1995, the Rochester segment of the plutonium experiment was part of a larger, planned study in which fifty patients were to be injected with radioisotopes of plutonium, polonium, uranium, lead, and radium.
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Rochester’s Manhattan Annex was originally located across the street from the medical school and connected by a tunnel. There, as at all Manhattan Project sites, secrecy was closely guarded. Constructed in five months, the Annex employed 350 people by the end of the war. Its activities were shielded from intruders by Army guards, and the occupants’ backgrounds were thoroughly investigated to make sure “they were loyal American citizens, that they were discreet, and that they could be depended upon to keep secret work which contributed toward the development and production of the atomic [bomb].”

Rochester was far from the noisy industrial plants and hectic laboratories of the Manhattan Project.
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Oddly enough, though, the cold, industrial city had numerous links to the bomb project. Rochester was the home of George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak Co. A subsidiary of his company, the Tennessee Eastman Corp., was the first operating contractor of the gigantic Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge where enriched uranium was produced.

Stafford Warren, who had gotten to know Eastman when he was in Rochester, said Eastman had been a man so painstakingly meticulous he painted the shapes of tools on the walls of his workshop so he could tell immediately whether things were in their proper position. At home, diagrams of cutlery were outlined on the kitchen walls. In his hunting lodge, the shadows of his guns were painted behind the gun rack. On March 14, 1932, Eastman asked his personal physician to draw the image of his own heart on his skin. Then, at the age of seventy-eight, according to Warren, he shot himself in the middle of that drawing. “He, of course, was very meticulous about his own hygiene and was always dressed very nicely and properly, shaved and barbered, and so on,” recalled Warren.
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“But then he began to get feeble and developed some incontinence and had to hire a nurse to take care of him. After a while, he began to wear the equivalent of diapers so that he wouldn’t have a mess on his hands. He decided he wasn’t going to tolerate this.” William McCann, the physician who drew the heart on Eastman’s chest, was one of the men present at the September 5 planning meeting.

At the time of the meeting, less than six months had elapsed since Wright Langham had sent that first ampoule of plutonium to Oak Ridge to be injected into Ebb Cade. But the world had changed radically in those months, and Langham, the young chemist who once seemed destined for a mundane career on the Oklahoma Panhandle, now found himself in the vanguard of that change. He had bucked across the desert at the Trinity site in an Army jeep, bulky radiation detector in hand, as the purples and golds of the first atomic bomb ascended into the New Mexico sky. He had worked alongside the scientists responsible for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the bomb that exploded three days later over Nagasaki.

The meeting that Langham attended in Rochester had been ordered by Stafford Warren (who was to land in Hiroshima in three days). Most of the men present were Warren’s colleagues or students from his prewar days. Among them were Robert Fink, William Bale, Andrew Dowdy, and Harold Hodge. At the request of the Manhattan Engineer District, Bale had “activated” a metabolic ward at Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital to carry out “certain tracer studies” with long-lived radioisotopes.
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The ward, at least in the early years, appears to have been used exclusively for the radioisotope studies.

The protocol for the plutonium injections, which was written by Wright Langham and not made public until 1995, disclosed that the experiment was a result of the Rochester meeting as well as “numerous
conversations with Col. Warren, Col. Friedell, and Dr. L.H. Hempelmann.”
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According to that protocol, only two subjects were to be admitted to the metabolic ward during the first six weeks of the program.
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Once the technicalities were worked out, however, scientists hoped to handle four patients simultaneously.

The patients were generally transferred to the ward from other parts of the hospital. The small ward where the injections were administered and the excretion samples collected was supervised by Samuel Bassett, a pleasant-looking doctor educated at Cornell University who had also attended the September 5 planning meeting.

Each patient was assigned the initials “HP” followed by a number. According to one document, the “HP” stood for “human product.” The doctors were on the lookout for patients who had relatively normal metabolisms.
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Langham wrote:

Under the tentative plan, the group decided that each patient was to be injected with an average of five micrograms, or five millionths of a gram of plutonium. That was
five
times the amount of plutonium the Manhattan Project scientists had just declared could be retained without harm in the human body and was also more than what Wright Langham and other scientists were willing to risk putting into their own bodies. “We considered doing such experiments at one time,” Langham wrote in 1952, “but plutonium is considered to be sufficiently potentially dangerous to discourage our doing absorption experiments on ourselves.”
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Though five micrograms was the planned dosage, the actual amount of plutonium injected into the patients varied from 4.6 to 6.5 micro-grams. The cumulative radiation dose received by each patient was dependent on two factors: the amount of radioactive material injected into the body and how long the subjects lived. The longer the patients lived, the larger their cumulative dose.

Six weeks following the Rochester meeting, the program became operational when the first patient was injected with plutonium. In all,
eleven patients would be injected there between October 16, 1945, and July 16, 1946. But before that first injection could take place, many housekeeping details had to be worked out.

The patients’ initial two weeks on the metabolic ward were slated as a control period in which they were to be trained to collect their own urine and stool specimens. “The period of indoctrination,” Bassett later wrote, “usually required about ten days.”
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After collection, the urine samples were heated in a steam bath for two hours and then cooled. An adhesive mortar was then placed around the top of the jars so that “any leakage which might have occurred would be revealed to the person receiving the urine for analysis.”
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A preservative was added to the stool samples, and the mixture was boiled for ten minutes before it was transferred to half-gallon fruit jars. The excretion samples, as well as periodic blood samples, were to be collected on a strict schedule and shipped in wooden crates to Los Alamos.

According to the protocol prepared by Langham, Stafford Warren had suggested a Lieutenant Valentine perform the injections.
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But Hannah Silberstein, a woman who apparently worked on the metabolic ward, wrote that Bassett made the first injection.
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It’s not clear from the documents, however, whether Bassett injected all the patients. When Louis Hempelmann was asked about the experiment by AEC investigators in 1974, he said Bassett prepared the syringes and handed them to a physician who injected the patients. Hempelmann said he was “quite positive” that the physician making the injections did not know the contents of the syringe.
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There is no evidence that any of the Rochester patients gave their consent for the experiment or knew what was being injected into them. In fact, Hempelmann told investigators that a “deliberate decision was made not to inform the patient of the nature of the product that was injected.”
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Amedio Lovecchio, a sixty-seven-year-old Sicilian immigrant whom Bassett described as “well preserved for his years,” became the first of the Rochester plutonium injectees.
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A proud-looking patriarch, Lovecchio had two fig trees in his backyard. Each fall he bent the trees to the ground and buried them deep in the soil to protect them from the harsh winter. Each spring he gave the first fig to a pregnant daughter-in-law. Lovecchio was admitted to the hospital after an ulcer hemorrhaged so severely that he required a transfusion. Code-named HP-1, Lovecchio was injected at 3:30
P.M.
October 16 by Dr. Bassett “with no ill effects,” Hannah Silberstein reported.
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Lovecchio lived for another fourteen years after the plutonium was administered. He was working as a maintenance man when he contracted pneumonia and died on January 12, 1960.