The Plutonium Files (63 page)

By the late 1960s, nearly all of the major human radiation experiments of the Cold War were under way. Scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, had just completed collecting the data for a follow-up study of the pregnant women who drank the radioactive iron cocktails; Eugene Saenger and his team in Cincinnati were struggling to work out the kinks in their bone marrow transplant program; the Holiday Inn—styled chamber in Oak Ridge that subjected patients to the low, chronic doses of radiation similar to what astronauts would experience in space had just begun operating; Carl Heller was discovering the incredible sensitivity of human testes to radiation; and C. Alvin Paulsen was about to submit to reviewers his proposal to irradiate prisoners’ testicles with neutrons.

Countless radioactive tracer experiments also were ongoing at civilian and military hospitals and research institutions throughout the country. Many of these experiments were aimed at better understanding how fallout moved through the food chain. At the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, for example, radioactive iodine was intentionally released into pastures. Cows were led onto the contaminated pastures, where they grazed for several days, then they were milked, and humans drank the milk.
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The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory conducted an experiment between 1961 and 1963 in which real and simulated fallout and solutions of strontium and cesium were fed to 102 subjects.
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At Hanford, humans were fed radioactive fish. Fifty-seven workers at Los Alamos ingested small spheres containing radioactive uranium-235 and manganese-54 so scientists could assess the potential
hazards from the atmospheric reentry and burnup of rockets propelled by nuclear reactors or radioactive power supplies.
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The studies weren’t limited to humans; insects, birds, honeybees, wild animals, even forests and grasslands were subjected to experimentation. Many of the most bizarre of these experiments were carried out at the Savannah River Site’s Ecology Laboratory. Located near Augusta, Georgia, Savannah River is a 300-acre site established in 1950 to produce plutonium and tritium, which is used in thermonuclear bombs. Five production reactors and two chemical separation plants are located there.

In one experiment, two persimmon trees were injected early in the growing season with calcium-45. Web worms were placed on the trees to feed, then their larvae were transferred to uncontaminated leaves in a laboratory to establish calcium-45’s half-life. Sixteen loblolly pines were “inoculated” with strontium-89. Field mice were fed peanut butter laced with iron-59, zinc-65, and iodine-131. Red-winged blackbirds and sagebrush lizards were injected with tritium. Yellow-bellied slider turtles were fed calcium-47. Tantalum wires were inserted in the tails of salamanders. The larvae of houseflies contaminated with radioactive zinc were fed to spiders. An “old field” was subjected to short-term gamma radiation and a stand of hardwood trees was irradiated.
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In the frenzy of ongoing experimentation aimed at better understanding atmospheric fallout, criticality injuries, nuclear battlefield casualties, and space radiation, the plutonium injections had been more or less forgotten. But in 1967 the old experiment was revived when an AEC official from headquarters placed a call to Berkeley’s Patricia Durbin, the student who had once washed beakers in Joseph Hamilton’s laboratory.
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The AEC official wanted to know more about the comparative toxicity of plutonium and americium following an accident at Rocky Flats, a plant outside Denver, Colorado, which made triggers for thermonuclear bombs. Durbin, by then a respected biophysicist, began looking up scientific reports and eventually found herself reviewing her mentor’s old work. Exactly two decades had elapsed since Elmer Allen, the last of the eighteen patients, had been injected.

Durbin was astounded to discover that Allen, code-named CAL-3, was still alive. Then she drove up to Santa Rosa, California and poured through death certificates at the county courthouse. To her amazement she discovered that Albert Stevens, CAL-1, the housepainter from Healdsburg, California, had died in 1966, only one year before her search began. He had lived for more than two decades after being given a
so-called lethal dose of plutonium. Durbin wondered what had become of the other patients. “Like a drunk or a gambler, a little bit whets your appetite,” she recalled in an oral history interview.
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Slowly she began pulling the data together. She persuaded officials at the Atomic Energy Commission headquarters to declassify he 1950 Los Alamos report written by Wright Langham and Samuel Bassett and retrieved the records of Joseph Hamilton from storage. (Durbin ruefully acknowledged in 1994, after the injections had become the subject of intense publicity and legal action had been taken against the scientists and institutions who were responsible, that it might have been better if the Berkeley lab had thrown away Hamilton’s data. It was stupid. It was like Richard Nixon taping in the White House.“)
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In a letter to a hospital administrator dated April 23, 1969, she explained that there had been a furor within the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission when officials learned that some of the plutonium patients had been misdiag-nosed:

As she went about her data gathering. Durbin also contacted Wright Langham, who was still working at Los Alamos. Langham was pleased to learn that Durbin was interested in the fate of the plutonium injectees but did not want any active role in a follow-up study. Durbin confided in a letter to her supervisor that Langham was tired of being identified with the experiment and had grown weary of discussing the project at meetings and conferences. “He is, I believe, distressed by this and other aspects of the study itself—particularly the fact the injected people in the HP series [the Rochester patients] were unaware that they were the subjects of an experiment,” she wrote.
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“I believe that in retrospect he
wishes there had been some other way to obtain the needed relationships between Pu excretion and body burden.” Despite his regrets, Langham couldn’t pass up the opportunity to obtain some fraction of the excretion samples from the test subjects. “He said that if such material were available, the Los Alamos group would be interested in participating, but that they did not want to be directly responsible nor in direct contact with whomever was actually obtaining samples,” Durbin wrote. “He summed up his feelings as follows: ‘I’ll be delighted to hold your coats while you other fellows fight.” ’ (Langham did not live long enough to see the results of the study: He died in 1972 in a plane crash in Albuquerque, New Mexico.)

Durbin soon learned that besides Elmer Allen, three patients injected with plutonium at the University of Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital were also still living—homemaker Eda Schultz Charlton, handyman John Mousso, and Janet Stadt, the pain-wracked scleroderma patient. Durbin proposed that a complete follow-up study be undertaken. This meant obtaining additional urine and stool samples from the four survivors and exhuming the bodies of the deceased subjects. In a letter to an official at AEC headquarters, she acknowledged the proposed study was “messy,” but suggested that perhaps the families of the deceased could be offered “something” in order to get them to cooperate.
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Durbin wanted to headquarter the project at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, but her boss quickly rejected the idea, fearing “the introduction of exhumed bodies into the politically charged Berkeley atmosphere might even result in picketing of the laboratory by students.”
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Without laboratory support, Durbin could proceed no further, and in December of 1972, she reluctantly turned over copies of the data she had so painstakingly collected to Robert Rowland, the first director of the Center for Human Radiobiology at Argonne National Laboratory, a sprawling complex that had evolved out of the Met Lab and was located some twenty-seven miles southwest of downtown Chicago. The center, which is now defunct, had been set up to do just the type of follow-up studies that Durbin envisioned for the plutonium patients. Formally established by the AEC in 1969, largely through the urging of Robley Evans, the center was devoted to studying individuals who had ingested or been injected with large amounts of radium. Deep within the bowels of the building was a whole-body counter that measured the radium content of both the living and the dead. “We had cadavers laid out and being deskeletonized one door away from the waiting room to the whole-body counter,” Rowland recalled in a 1995 oral history interview.
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“If
somebody [opened] that door by mistake, we [would be] in deep trouble.”

When Robley Evans retired from MIT and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, he and his assistant, Mary Margaret Shanahan, were put on the payroll of the Center for Human Radiobiology. Evans and Shanahan then operated a “CHR satellite” from Shanahan’s home in Phoenix called the Southwest Field Station of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radioactivity Center. The purpose of the CHR satellite was to track down radium patients and get permission from relatives for exhumations. Evans was very powerful, Rowland recalled, and “very, very intimately involved in ways I don’t understand with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Atomic Energy commissioners and the headquarters people at Germantown.”
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Durbin had identified most of the plutonium patients by name when she gave her information to Rowland’s group. She also had secured the cooperation of Christine Waterhouse, the Rochester doctor who had taken care of Eda Schultz Charlton and John Mousso for many years. With Waterhouse’s help, Rowland and his staff began making arrangements for follow-up studies of the surviving plutonium patients, to be conducted the following spring at Strong Memorial Hospital, the very hospital where eleven of the eighteen patients had been injected nearly 30 years earlier. Waterhouse later told investigators that she didn’t want to tell Charlton and Mousso, both in their seventies by then, of the injections because she thought disclosure might be harmful in terms of their “advanced age and ill health.”

The Chicago scientists wanted a complete collection of the patients’ urine and stool samples; vials of blood for clinical analysis and chromosome research; and complete or partial X rays.
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Soon after receiving Durbin’s files, Rowland dashed off a memo to his staff that included the following instructions: “Please note that outside of CHR we will
never
use the word
plutonium
in regard to these cases.
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‘These individuals are of interest to us because they may have received a radioactive material at some time’ is the kind of statement to be made, if we need to say anything at all.”

Rowland told Department of Energy interviewers in 1995 that he issued those instructions at the behest of James Liverman, who held essentially the same job Shields Warren had once held in what had been renamed the Division of Biomedical and Environmental Research of the AEC. Rowland said he was able to get AEC approval for the follow-up studies only on the conditions that he took the funding from his own
budget and that he not tell the patients they had plutonium in their bodies. “That was Jim Liverman (who) requested that in no uncertain terms,” Rowland told DOE interviewers. “So I agreed. I mean, he’s the boss; he funds us, you know. You do what he tells you. And he said, ‘Do it, but don’t tell them they have plutonium in them.” ’ (Liverman did not respond to inquiries about the matter. His wife said he had been instructed by his attorneys not to speak to the media.)

Andrew Stehney, who worked closely with Robert Rowland, said scientists at the Center for Human Radiobiology didn’t tell the patients the truth because everybody was “leery of getting these people all excited.”
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He added, “We were told these people were pretty elderly and might get very upset if we started talking about radioactivity in their bodies.”

Robley Evans and Mary Margaret Shanahan were given the job of locating the relatives of the ten deceased plutonium patients and obtaining permissions to exhume the bodies. They worked with a scientist in Philadelphia named Jan Lieben. “I was what you’d call a ‘procurer.’
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I would get the names of these people, and if they were dead, we wanted to see where the plutonium was and what the excretion pattern was,” Lieben said. “We were trying to establish if the bomb were dropped and people were exposed to radioactive material such as plutonium and other products, what their prognosis would be.”

Officials at the Center for Human Radiobiology instructed Lieben not to tell the families that their loved ones had been injected with plutonium. “An appropriate approach would be to say that the Center was investigating the composition of radioactive materials that had been injected at an earlier date in an experimental type of treatment; and that since the composition of the mixture was not well known, there would be considerable scientific interest in investigating the nature of the isotope and the effects that it might have had.”
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With the decision not to disclose the nature of the long-ago injections to either the living patients or the families of those who had died, the stage was set for the second phase of the experiment and the second phase of the cover-up.