The Plutonium Files (32 page)

Records that were not declassified until the mid-1990s show that Kline was being used as a guinea pig in other ways. Louis Hempelmann carefully collected the data from Kline’s exposure and the other healthy men injured in the criticality accidents and used it in later years when military and civilian officials in Washington were trying to predict what would happen to soldiers on an atomic battlefield.
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Kline, who is still alive and living in California, spoke in general terms about the accident, but did not answer specific questions about his health or legal issues related to his case. He is a classic example of what President Clinton’s Advisory Committee came to refer to as an “experiment of opportunity.” That is, he was not the subject of an experiment per se, but his exposure provided scientists with a unique opportunity to collect data.

Louis Hempelmann remained at Los Alamos until 1948, when he joined the University of Rochester medical school, where he was to remain for the rest of his career. Like the other Manhattan Project doctors, Hempelmann maintained his close ties with the AEC. He was always one of the first experts called upon whenever someone was injured by radiation.

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1947, the wartime empire belonging to the Army’s Manhattan Engineer District was officially transferred to the new, civilian-run Atomic Energy Commission, which was headquartered in Washington, D.C. The complex was scattered over thirteen states and included more than 2,000 military personnel, 4,000 government employees, and 38,000 employees of contractors.
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On December 24, six days before the transfer, U.S. Army Col. Kenneth Nichols, who directed the daily operations of the Manhattan Project from a rambling administration building in Oak Ridge known as the castle, sent the following memo to the Manhattan District’s representative in Berkeley:

The stop-order apparently was triggered by a progress report written by Joseph Hamilton and sent to Oak Ridge a month earlier. In his usual
dry language, Hamilton had advised his superiors that “suitable solutions” of uranium, americium, and plutonium were being prepared for “intravenous administration to human subjects.”
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He had sent many similar reports to the Manhattan Project, and there was nothing remarkable about his statements. But suddenly, the bomb builders found that the research was unacceptable. The abrupt policy change is one of the most inexplicable events surrounding the plutonium injections. Were Colonel Nichols and General Groves, who were about to lose control of their empire, trying to clean up the paper trail so it would appear as if they hadn’t known about or supported the human experiments? Was Nichols objecting to the ethical implications? Did he feel that the injections did not fall within the wartime contract between the Rad Lab and the Manhattan District? Or could there have been other reasons for the stop order?

Records that have surfaced so far don’t fully explain what was going on, but at least one document suggests that Nichols, who had been appointed by Groves to serve as a liaison to the AEC, may have felt that the decision to continue such studies should be made by the Manhattan Project’s civilian successor. In fact, a memo sent to Berkeley on January 8, 1947, indicates that AEC officials did want to review the human studies: “Until the Atomic Energy Commission is able to consider sponsoring this type of experimentation, authorization cannot be given for the use of radioactive materials in human subjects under this contract.”
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Other events going on in the world might have been making General Groves and Colonel Nichols jittery. Throughout the summer and fall of 1946, American prosecutors were preparing for a historic trial in Nuremberg, Germany. In December of that year, twenty-three medical doctors, including Hitler’s personal physician, went on trial for assorted crimes involving murder and torture performed in the name of medical science. Even before the trial began, the American Medical Association (AMA) went on record with guidelines for ethical human experiments. The three rules published by the AMA required the voluntary and understanding consent of the subject, prior animal experimentation, and appropriate medical supervision.

An editorial writer for the
Journal of the American Medical Association
pointed out that the guiding principle behind ethical human experiments was the voluntary consent of the subject. “In the American army,” he wrote, “the tradition is well established that human beings, even under military conditions, are not ordered to submit to procedures that violate the sanctity of their own persons.”
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Alluding to the medical experiments
conducted in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, the editorial writer pointed out that the medical profession in the United States would rally behind any enlisted officer who refused to conduct an unethical human experiment, even if ordered to do so by the “highest political leaders.”

It’s likely that some Manhattan Project officials saw the editorial. One AEC official, writing years later, noted that as early as 1946, “doubts were expressed concerning the ethics of the [plutonium] study.
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At one time, consideration was given to referring the matter to the A.M.A. ethics committee but this was not done.”

But Stafford Warren, who was just getting settled in at his new job at UCLA, had no ethical qualms, at least initially, about the radioisotope injections and wanted to continue them. Warren chaired an interim committee that provided advice to the AEC on the future course of its research. Not surprisingly, much of the proposed research was slated for the doctors who had done the wartime work, including Stafford Warren himself. “It is the opinion of this Committee,” Warren wrote on January 30, 1947, “that in the further study of health hazards and of the utilization of fissionable and radioactive, and other materials, final investigations by clinical testing of these materials will be necessary under the proper and usual safeguards.”
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Always conscious of litigation, Warren suggested that the AEC’s legal department determine what the commission’s “financial and legal” obligations were when “clinical testing” was done. Warren didn’t explain what he meant by “clinical testing,” but presumably he was referring to the kind of studies being done by Joseph Hamilton, Robert Stone, and scientists at Rochester’s Manhattan Annex.

Warren’s request landed on the desk of Carrol Wilson, the AEC’s boyish-looking general manager. An engineer and an MIT graduate, Wilson had been appointed by President Truman just days before the transfer occurred. His uncle, Frank J. Wilson, one of the AEC’s security consultants, had headed up the income tax investigation of Al Capone and also was responsible for the recording of the serial numbers of the bills that led to the capture of the Lindbergh baby kidnapper.
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Under Carroll Wilson’s direction, the AEC developed new rules for human experiments, which were summarized in a letter sent to Stafford Warren at UCLA on April 30, 1947. The commission would allow human experiments with radioactive materials to continue provided several conditions were met. First, no experiment could be undertaken unless the procedure was expected to benefit the patient. Second, the medical
file should contain documentation showing the patient understood the procedure and agreed to it. The experiment, Wilson cautioned:

Wilson’s guidelines were strong and unambiguous, but when Joseph Hamilton and his Berkeley colleagues injected Hanford Jang and Elmer Allen a few months later, they flatly ignored this first rule. Wilson had made it clear that radiation experiments could proceed only if the patients might benefit. Neither the americium nor the plutonium was expected to benefit the two California patients.

The Berkeley experimenters could not plead ignorance, because Wilson had ordered the letter outlining the new guidelines to be circulated to all of the AEC’s area managers.
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And it is obvious that the letter had been disseminated to the Berkeley scientists because the so-called consent form in Elmer Allen’s file repeats almost verbatim parts of Wilson’s directive. The records made public so far do not explain why the Berkeley group ignored AEC policies. But it was not the first time, nor would it be the last time, such a violation occurred.

About the time that Hanford Jang and Elmer Allen were injected, a new blue-ribbon panel of experts was brought together to help the AEC further define its research goals. This panel, called the Medical Board of Review, urged that even more restrictive guidelines governing human radiation experiments be implemented. The review board recommended that doctors obtain not only the patient’s informed consent in writing but also the written informed consent of the most responsible nearest of kin. It is not known if the review board recommended the tighter restrictions in response to Hamilton’s continuing experiments, or if the board even knew about those studies. But it is clear that this recommendation became part of the official AEC policy. In a November 5, 1947, letter to Robert Stone, who was also at Berkeley, Carroll Wilson summarized the
review board’s guidelines and explained why and under what conditions it was allowing human radiation experiments to proceed:

Thousands of human radiation experiments, many of them unethical and without therapeutic benefit, were funded by the AEC over the next three decades of the Cold War. But Wilson’s two letters show unequivocally that within the first year of its creation, the commission had clear, strongly worded rules governing such experiments. Although President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments pointed out that Wilson’s second letter contained the earliest known use of the term “informed consent,” the historic significance in this document seems to have been lost on them.
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They mentioned the letter then all but dismissed it, saying the standards it enunciated may not have received wide circulation. “Maybe it means Wilson was just a good writer,” speculated Ruth Faden, who chaired the panel.
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But Joseph Volpe, who worked as an attorney at AEC headquarters at that time and
knew Carroll Wilson personally, said that it was “inconceivable that [Wilson] didn’t see that this policy reached everyone in the organization.”
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At the same time Carroll Wilson and his lawyers were drawing up new rules for ethical human experiments in the future, the commission began to cover up any evidence of the plutonium injections from the past. The cover-up is well documented in memos, many of which remained classified for fifty years. What’s not clear is who specifically decided that the experiments should be kept secret and who ordered the cover-up.

The Atomic Energy Commission had squeaked into existence following a year of congressional battles and behind-the-scenes struggles. Not surprisingly, the general manager and the appointed commissioners were eager to prevent news of a possible scandal from reaching a public already apprehensive about atomic bombs. The AEC was intent upon making atomic energy as unthreatening as electricity; public disclosure of the injections would have damaged the commission’s bomb-building program and its efforts to build a civilian nuclear power industry.

With the ruthlessness of a political ward boss, the AEC suppressed all evidence of the plutonium injections and other human experiments and embarked on a deliberate campaign to squelch information that could tarnish its prestige, promote lawsuits, or cause embarrassment. Scientific reports were regularly scrutinized by the commission’s classification officials as well as by employees who worked in its medical and insurance departments. Wrote the medical advisor in Oak Ridge: