The Plutonium Files (64 page)

Eda Schultz Charlton was the first of the plutonium survivors brought into the University of Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital. Elmer Allen was second and John Mousso was third. Janet Stadt, the fourth patient, refused to participate.

Eda was hospitalized on the metabolic ward from January 28 to
February 28, 1973. According to an admission note written by Christine Waterhouse, the hospitalization was prompted by a four-day bout of abdominal pain. During Eda’s stay, doctors removed two lesions from her abdomen and biopsied them. They took X rays of her abdomen, pelvis, and spine and conducted a complete blood test. Waterhouse instructed staffers to begin collecting Eda’s urine and stool samples, but she mentioned nothing in Eda’s medical records about the long-ago plutonium injection or that the samples were to be sent to Chicago’s Center for Human Radiobiology. John Rundo, the scientist who oversaw the chemical analyses, said the plutonium was “easily” measurable in Eda. “I was surprised at how much plutonium was in the feces, how much in the blood,” he recalled.
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Elmer Allen was 2,000 miles from Rochester and didn’t like to fly, so getting him into Strong Medical Hospital required more planning. The first official contact with Elmer’s doctor was made by Austin Brues, who at the time was serving as the medical director of Argonne’s Center for Human Radiobiology. Brues, then in his mid-sixties, was another veteran of the bomb program. He had worked under Robert Stone at the Met Lab and accompanied Paul Henshaw to Japan in 1946. He also stumped the country with James Cooney, trying to defuse the public’s fear of atomic weapons, and served as a consultant on panels that dealt with rad warfare and the nuclear-propelled aircraft. He was bright, articulate—and deceitful.

Brues wrote a letter to Elmer’s doctor in Italy, Texas, in March of 1973 stating the Center for Human Radiobiology was interested in doing a follow-up study of his patient. Brues did not disclose the fact that Elmer had been injected with plutonium in 1947, and he lied about the purpose of the follow-up study:

Brues also told Elmer’s doctor that the center would pick up the tab for hospital and transportation costs and pay Elmer for participating in the study.

Brues was part of the clique of Met Lab doctors who had been doing the quick and dirty animal experiments during the war. In a formerly secret report written in 1945, he described an experiment in which dogs were injected with varying amounts of plutonium. “From what we know at the present time,” he wrote, “it seems reasonable to expect malignancy to occur following the administration of plutonium, as is seen after prolonged radiation in general, and to expect that bone may be a favorable site for plutonium carcinogenesis.”
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Brues also contributed some of the information used in the definitive 1950 Los Alamos report and reviewed the manuscript.
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Despite the evidence, Brues told AEC investigators in 1974 he was not familiar with the injections.
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Elmer agreed to participate in the follow-up study, and on a muggy evening in early June of 1973, he and Fredna took their seats in Car 1635, Drawing Room D, of the
Texas Chief,
an overnight train bound for Chicago. The Allens were on the trip of their life, a nineteen-day whirlwind that would take them to Chicago and then hundreds of miles northeast to Rochester. Limousines, fresh flowers, private train compartments, and immaculate hotel rooms awaited them. The government underwrote the trip and also paid Elmer $140 for participating in the study and $13 a day in expenses. “My mother thought this was big stuff coming from Italy, Texas,” recalled Elmer’s daughter, Elmerine.
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“She thought she was the queen of England. It wasn’t like they said, ‘We’re testing you guys because we injected you with plutonium.” ’

At Union Station in Chicago, a driver from Travelers Limousine Service picked up the Allens and whisked them off to the Hinsdale Ramada Inn, where a bouquet of flowers awaited them. The next day Fredna went sightseeing and Elmer was taken to Argonne National Laboratory. There he was placed in a whole-body counter and samples of his urine collected and studied for traces of plutonium from the long-ago injection. Scientists at the lab took numerous X rays of his entire body and detected changes in the bones of his shoulders that were “consistent [with] early radium deposition.”
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His jawbone also showed abnormal changes “suggestive of damage due to radiation.”

The limo driver picked the couple up the following evening and drove them to the Greyhound Station in Chicago, where they boarded a bus bound for Rochester.
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When the Allens arrived in Rochester, they took a cab to Strong Memorial Hospital. Elmer was checked into the
metabolic ward, where he was scheduled to stay from June 13 to June 25.

In a detailed hospital admission note recounting Allen’s medical history, Waterhouse wrote that his left leg had been amputated after he was told he had a tumor in the knee. The admission note disclosed nothing about the plutonium injection. Fredna said she had no idea what the doctors were doing. “Every time I went to see him, he was in bed.
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They would study the food he would eat,” she said. For two weeks, Elmer’s urine and stool samples were collected. John Rundo, the scientist overseeing the analyses, said the plutonium in Elmer was barely detectable. “His excretion rate was very low.”
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On the day Elmer was to be discharged, he had a seizure and the couple stayed an extra day.

John Mousso, the man from East Rochester, was the third patient hospitalized for the follow-up studies. He was at Strong Memorial Hospital from June 21 to July 1, 1973. As with Eda, the plutonium injected into Mousso twenty-seven years earlier was easily detectable in his urine, stools, and blood.
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Robert Rowland and Patricia Durbin, in a scientific paper published in 1976, said John was one of the six plutonium patients who received radiation doses to the bone “high enough to be considered carcinogenic.”
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The others were Albert Stevens, Eda Schultz Charlton, Janet Stadt, Amedio Lovecchio, and Daniel Nelson. The two scientists estimated that John’s endosteal membranes, the sensitive tissue lining the bone cavities and surfaces, had by 1975 received 973 rads of radiation—far more than the 600 rads that Durbin thought might produce bone tumors.
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Three months after the last living patient was hospitalized, the exhumations began. On September 24, 1973, scientists exhumed the body of Jean Daigneault, HP-4, the young Rochester patient who suffered from Cushing’s syndrome. Several months earlier Robley Evans and Mary Margaret Shanahan had driven from Phoenix to Tucson, where Jean’s older sister, Ruth Brown, lived, in order to get permission to exhume the body.

Brown said that she was under the impression that Evans wanted to exhume her sister because he was doing research on pituitary disorders. She said Evans did not disclose that her sister had been injected with plutonium.
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Once the exhumation papers were signed, Brown said she never heard from him again. Evans and Shanahan later told AEC investigators there was “no need to introduce the reasons for the injection of the isotopes since no questions by the persons contacted were raised with respect to that point.”
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Jean’s organs and brain had been removed during an autopsy at the time of her death. When scientists opened the casket, they saw that the body was still well preserved. The diaphragm, thigh muscle, several nerves, both eyes, the trachea with larynx, and skin from the thigh were removed.
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“The subject’s hair was removed from the remains with the scalp intact.”
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The hair was dried at 100 degrees Centigrade for forty-eight hours, then cut away from the scalp as closely as possible. Then it was washed, rinsed with water and “air-dried.” Scientists found traces of plutonium in Jean’s hair, leading them to theorize that hair possibly could be used to determine how much plutonium the body had absorbed.

The follow-up studies were rolling along nicely when serious questions about the ethics of the project were raised within the AEC. It’s not clear who, or what, triggered the concern, but the studies were not brought to the attention of the Argonne human use committee until November of 1973—after the three hospitalizations and one exhumation had already occurred. This committee, which was supposed to review all human research projects, had been formed in 1970, after the AEC had adopted the revised guidelines issued by the National Institutes of Health governing research with human subjects. The NIH guidelines required the establishment of committees to oversee human research and laid out the basic elements of informed consent. Those elements included:

All of the national laboratories, such as Argonne, agreed to abide by those guidelines and each year were required in budget documents to state their intent to uphold the rules. In an agreement dated June 19, 1970, the Argonne laboratory duly noted:

Despite the lab’s promises, there was a delay of nearly a year before the Argonne human use committee found out about the follow-up studies of the plutonium patients. The committee met on March 14, 1974, to discuss the study and several weeks later issued a report urging the involved scientists to inform the patients of the true purpose of the examination: “It is our opinion that the CHR should not be involved in examination of patients believed to have a body burden of plutonium, or excreta from such subjects, unless the patients have been informed that the examination is to establish the presence or absence of residual radioactivity stemming from the plutonium they received many years ago.”
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Lab officials later said that one reason they didn’t submit the follow-up studies to the committee was because “the nature of the studies was to be suppressed to avoid embarrassing publicity for the AEC.”

John Erlewine, general manager of the AEC, officially ordered an internal probe into the experiment on April 17, 1974. But James Liverman and an associate, Sidney Marks, had already begun an investigation and had met with National Institutes of Health officials to discuss the problem a month earlier.
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One of the NIH representatives present at the meeting was Donald Chalkley, the same official who had praised Eugene Saenger’s total-body irradiation project. Not surprisingly, the AEC was concerned about minimizing any adverse publicity and considered having the National Academy of Sciences issue a committee report. “A NAS committee report, which could be appropriately published, would be likely to have wide acceptance, and the existence of the report might limit the duration of any controversy that may arise,” an AEC official speculated.
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The official inquiry essentially had three parts: Investigators wanted to find out, first, if the patients injected with plutonium gave their informed consent at the time the injections were administered; second,
whether the plutonium survivors studied in 1973 gave their informed consent for the follow-ups; and third, whether the relatives of deceased patients were informed about the true purpose of the exhumations. Two divisions of the AEC, the Division of Biomedical and Environmental Research and the Division of Inspection, jointly conducted the inquiry. Liverman, who headed the biomedical division, had asked the Division of Inspection to examine the contemporary period because of “conflict of interest considerations.”
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The two principal investigators were Sidney Marks, from the AEC’s biomedical division, and Leo Miazga, from the inspection division. Liverman told Marks that the inquiry had top priority and all of his other duties should be set aside.

As the “official” investigation was getting under way, Dixy Lee Ray, chairman of the AEC, ordered one of her top aides, Dave Bruner, to quietly snoop into the issue. As one of the scientists who had encouraged C. Alvin Paulsen to pursue the testicular irradiation experiment, Bruner may not have been the most objective person Ray could have asked. He then contacted Hymer Friedell and several other scientists. “If Bruner is making phone calls, he should be called off! It will only ‘muddy’ the water,” a scientist warned Liverman.
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AEC investigators fanned out across fourteen cities, examining records and talking to researchers involved in both phases of the experiment. More than 250 documents were copied and brought back to AEC headquarters. Many of those documents were declassified and publicly released in 1994 and 1995. They were the same ones that DOE officials had said on numerous occasions didn’t exist.