The Plutonium Files (71 page)

In the meantime, several of the families gave me permission to obtain the medical records of their relatives. From the San Francisco hospital, I received copies of Albert Stevens’s records and Elmer Allen’s records. Albert’s records did not say anything about the plutonium injection, but Elmer’s contained the so-called consent form written so many years earlier by Bertram V. A. Low-Beer. From Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester I obtained more than 300 pages of records describing Eda’s medical history dating back to 1945. The word “plutonium” was not mentioned anywhere.

Following other leads, I tracked down John Abbotts, a former staffer for congressman Edward Markey, who located a copy of the 1974 AEC report describing the internal investigation into the plutonium experiment and sent it to me. The report, which was stamped “Official Use Only,” was difficult to follow because the DOE had deleted the names of the scientists and the names of the patients. Nevertheless, it provided many important details about both the original injections and the follow-up study. I also interviewed Christine Waterhouse, Patricia Durbin, and Hymer Friedell on numerous occasions and talked with Argonne scientist Robert Rowland and others involved in the follow-up study. Although the DOE refused to confirm the names of any of the patients or even that the experiment had taken place, the documentation was solid, and we decided to publish what we had.

As the series was being edited, I went over again and again in my mind the documentary evidence proving that CAL-1 was Albert Stevens; CAL-3, Elmer Allen; HP-3, Eda Schultz Charlton; HP-6, John Mousso; and HP-9, Fred Sours. I was sure these people were five of the plutonium patients, but without official DOE confirmation, it was impossible to be 100 percent certain.

So it was with considerable apprehension that I watched that morning as Hazel O’Leary placed one transparency after another on the overhead screen. When she mentioned the plutonium experiment at the end of the press conference, my pen stopped moving. For one brief moment, I thought she was going to deny what the newspaper had printed and was grateful for the darkened room. Instead she said she was disturbed by the experiments and that the department was looking into them. Numb with relief, I resumed my note taking. With the help of Karen MacPherson, the newspaper’s Washington correspondent who had attended the press conference, we got a story on the front page two hours later.

O’Leary told me in an interview in 1997 just days before she stepped down as energy secretary that the question of whether the radiation experiments should be discussed at the press conference was a matter of “hot debate” within the department for a brief period. “I came pretty quickly to the decision that we had to go with it and it was just good common sense.”
²⁸

Although O’Leary had touched on many issues at the press conference, the national media focused on disclosures about the human radiation experiments. It was the first time any sustained attention had been given to the experiments. Within days of her admission, the Department of Energy was deluged with inquiries. A hot line was established as thousands of calls poured in. A staff of three telephone operators mushroomed to a staff of thirty-six. The hot line “overloaded” by 10,000 attempted calls in one day, according to one press release. Through January 4 of 1994, it was receiving 6,000 to 10,000 calls a day.
²⁹
Many callers never got past the busy signal.

O’Leary conceded on a CNN program that individuals who had been harmed by the radiation experiments might be entitled to compensation, an admission that led to even more frenzied news coverage and worried some officials at the White House. “There was this four-day period where the middle-level minions in the White House were tearing me apart because they weren’t sure whether the news would turn out to be positive or negative,” O’Leary remembered.
³⁰
“In the midst of all that, I got a call from the president of the United States saying, ‘I think you’re doing just the right thing. Keep on doing it.’ ”

On November 30, 1993, Eugene Saenger was awarded the Gold Medal, the highest honor given out by the Radiological Society of North America. He thought the TBI controversy, a musty scandal more than two decades old, had finally been put to rest. “It was the trial of my life,” he would later tell the
Cincinnati Enquirer.
¹

Just a week after he received the award, when Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary confirmed that Cold War scientists had used American citizens as guinea pigs, Saenger found himself back on trial. Martha Stephens, the young faculty member who nearly twenty-five years earlier had helped write the scathing indictment of Saenger’s experiment, was determined not to let the story fade away this time. She went down to her basement, retrieved the old reports, and gave them to reporters. In early 1994, the
Cincinnati Post
published a lengthy article about the experiment. More comprehensive than anything written in the 1970s, the story stirred up a frenzied wave of publicity.

Stephens and a graduate student identified nearly twenty patients by cross-referencing statistics in the Department of Defense documents with other publicly available records. The city’s two newspapers unraveled the identities of other test subjects, while still other relatives of deceased patients came forward on their own after reading or listening to news reports.

With names, the faceless, hopelessly ill cancer patients suddenly became flesh and blood: They were mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Day after day the sorrowing relatives appeared on television or in the newspaper recalling their loved ones’ last miserable
weeks. Family members alleged the doctors killed their relatives or, at the very least, shortened their lives and increased their suffering.

It was a public relations nightmare for the University of Cincinnati. A hot line set up by the medical center initially logged some 500 callers. There were rumblings of a criminal probe. The university’s Board of Trustees held a special meeting to address the issue in early 1994, and two weeks later, 5,000 pages of documents, some quite damaging, were released by UC president Joseph Steger.

With publicity at a fever pitch, a congressional field hearing was held in Cincinnati on April 11, 1994. The federal courtroom was packed with community leaders and public officials. Many of the relatives of the cancer patients couldn’t get in and were forced to listen to the testimony on a speaker that had been hurriedly placed in a hallway. After the Department of Defense, the doctors, and the families had testified, Eugene Saenger rose from the audience and took a seat alone at the witness table. He was then seventy-seven years old, erect and confident, and recovering from bladder cancer. A murmur went up from the crowd.

If the relatives had come to hear a plea for forgiveness, a few words of regret, they were to be sorely disappointed.
²
Saenger stuck to the same remarks he had made more than twenty years earlier; he said the patients were gravely ill and the purpose of the TBI treatment was to relieve pain, shrink the tumors, and improve their well-being. He also retracted his statement made in the 1973 paper that eight of the patients may have died from radiation. “We have looked at these charts recently and find the course of these patients—the downhill course of these patients to have been due to cancer.”
³

Sitting at the witness table, a manila folder opened in front of him, Saenger was still the military consultant who believed the world was on the brink of nuclear war. “Our work,” he told the congressmen, “has contributed significantly to the better treatment of patients with far advanced cancer and to our better understanding of the effect of radiation on humans in a time when nuclear warfare once again seems possible.”
⁴
But one of his most inadvertently revealing comments came later, in an interview with staffers from President Clinton’s Advisory Committee, when Saenger admitted he didn’t know whether he would have proceeded with the experiment if he had not secured the DOD funding.

“Would you have done it [the total body irradiation experiment] if you hadn’t gotten the DOD funding, or could you have?” asked staffer Gary Stern.
⁵

“I think we certainly could have. What we would have done, I don’t know,” Saenger responded.

The families eventually filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court. Although the obstacles were daunting, U.S. District Judge Sandra Beck-with, a Republican appointed to the federal bench in 1992 by President George Bush, issued an early ruling favorable to the plaintiffs. Beckwith said she found it “inconceivable” that the doctors “when allegedly planning to perform radiation experiments on unwitting subjects, were not moved to pause or rethink their procedures in light of the forceful dictates of the Nuremberg Tribunal.”
⁶
She added, “The Nuremberg Code is part of the law of humanity. It may be applied in both civil and criminal cases by the federal courts in the United States.”

In Massachusetts, Sandra Marlow’s ears perked up when she heard the Department of Energy was going to come clean on the human radiation experiments. After her father died in 1977 of a rare form of leukemia, she had begun delving into the atmospheric testing program in her spare time. Her father had been an Air Force colonel and had been exposed to radiation during a training course on one of the contaminated Operation Crossroads ships towed back to California and as a participant in the 1955 Operation Teapot.

When Secretary O’Leary made her announcement, Marlow just happened to be working as a librarian at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts—the institution where the boys had eaten the radioactive oatmeal decades’ earlier.
⁷
While organizing the library’s historical collection, she had come across numerous yellowing reprints describing the radioactive iron and calcium experiments. Some of the studies, she noticed, were funded by the Atomic Energy Commission. Why was the AEC, she wondered, sponsoring radiation research at a state institution for the mentally retarded? A few days after O’Leary’s announcement, Marlow and one of her friends, Dan Bernstein, a lawyer for the Center for Atomic Radiation Studies in Brookline, Massachusetts, tipped off the
Boston Globe
to the studies.
⁸

When the newspaper published an account of the experiment on December 26, 1993, the article touched off a furor. Some of the Science Club members, such as Gordon Shattuck, learned about the experiment when they were contacted by reporters. Others “self-identified” themselves after reading or listening to news reports about the experiments. The memories of the long-forgotten injustices—the mattress springs, the
rope rubbing, the back-breaking farm labor—came flooding back, along with the stinging knowledge that the state officials charged to protect them had used them as test subjects. The institution, Shattuck said bitterly, used the boys as “guinea pigs and farm rats.”

Less than three weeks after the article appeared, Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Edward Markey were conducting a field hearing at Fernald. Markey was outraged that the experiment had not been disclosed when he was conducting his investigation. “I fear that past human radiation experimentation may prove much wider than we found in 1986,” he said.
⁹

Austin LaRocque and Charles Dyer, two of the men who had been subjected to the experiments during their boyhood days at Fernald, testified at the hearing. A. Bertrand Brill, the scientist who had helped analyze the doses that the Vanderbilt children had received in the womb, represented the scientific point of view. As Markey tried to pin down Brill, Austin LaRocque turned to Senator Kennedy and said, “Can I ask one question please?”

“Sure,” responded Kennedy.
¹⁰

“To this gentlemen here,” LaRocque said, nodding at Brill. “If you had your son here, would you have allowed this to happen, knowing what you know about radiation?”

“Well, I have, you know, many of us in medicine, when we are investigating new phenomena will take radioactive tracers and study ourselves. I’ve done it so many times,” Brill responded.

LaRocque pressed on, going straight to the heart of the matter. “But you didn’t answer my question directly. I want to know, if it was your son, would you have accepted it?”

The audience suddenly erupted in applause, nearly drowning out Brill’s response. “Knowing what I know now, I would,” he said. “But at that time, I don’t know … ”

The Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation assembled the Task Force on Human Subject Research to investigate the experiments. Following a four-month inquiry, the task force found the studies violated the “fundamental human rights” of the patients.
¹¹
The parents were not adequately informed, and the Science Club constituted a “potentially coercive factor” in getting the children to cooperate.
¹²

The task force also concluded that the doses were too small to produce “significant health effects.” But many of the former Fernald residents don’t believe the experiments were harmless.
¹³
They have lost their teeth. They have lumps, cysts, deteriorating disks, and prostate problems,
and they don’t know if the ailments are related to aging, radiation, or both.

“They bribed us by offering us special privileges, knowing that we had so little that we would do practically anything for attention,” Fred Boyce, one of Fernald’s former residents, said at a hearing in Washington, D.C. “It was cruel and unusual punishment in the name of science.
¹⁴
Keep in mind, we didn’t commit any crimes. We were just seven-year-old orphans.”

While they were making dinner, driving their cars, or watching TV during the Christmas season of 1993, the women who attended Vanderbilt University’s prenatal clinic listened in astonishment to news reports about an experiment that had been conducted there after the war. As in Cincinnati, a media frenzy had erupted in Nashville when a reporter for the
Nashville Tennessean
wrote a story about the Vanderbilt study. So much time had elapsed. The mothers had lived through births, deaths, divorces. They were grandmothers with gray hair and long lives etched into their faces and bore little resemblance to the young women who obligingly drank the cocktails the doctors handed them.