The Plutonium Files (73 page)

The day before the accident, she had flown to Los Alamos, where she had undergone tests aimed at measuring the plutonium in her body. She had been placed in the lab’s whole-body counter, and she provided scientists with urine and stools samples, which were then analyzed with an improved version of the chemical process worked out by Wright Langham decades earlier. George Voelz, a close friend of Louis Hempelmann’s, and Don Petersen, Wright Langham’s old friend, helped decipher the data.

Following the car crash, George Voelz flew to Oklahoma for the autopsy and took back to Los Alamos some of Silkwood’s organs, including her brain. The organs were reduced to 113 small flasks containing solvent and a small amount of dissolved tissue.
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The flasks remained at Los Alamos until 1992 and were then shipped to the DOE’s National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository in Spokane, Washington (the same place where some of Albert Stevens’s ashes wound up).

Bill Silkwood, Karen’s father, was shocked when he learned that Los Alamos had kept his daughter’s body parts. He said the lab did not have the family’s permission to take the organs in the first place. “They stole those organs. How else can you put it?” But the lab said its authority to take the organs came from the Oklahoma medical examiner.
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Alan McMillan, head of the lab’s Human Studies Project Team, offered in 1994 to return the bone chips to Karen’s father. “Since the amount of plutonium present is so small and would present no hazard, the lab could send them to you in their current state.
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Or they could be cremated and sent to you in a proper container. Please let me know what you would like us to do with regards to these remains,” he wrote.

Silkwood wanted the bone chips back so that he could bury them in Texas. But in an interview two years later, he said he never heard another word from Los Alamos. “They were supposed to apologize and everything but I never heard nothing.
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You know how the government is. They tell you one thing and do another.”

As the public pressure mounted, the Department of Energy finally released the medical records on all eighteen plutonium patients. Although their names and other identifying factors were deleted, or “redacted,” the files nevertheless provided enough information for me and several other reporters to unravel the identities of all the remaining patients except for
CHI-3, the young man from Chicago who was injected with a massive amount of plutonium.

When stories about the patients began appearing in the Rochester newspapers, Mary Jeanne Connell, an elderly woman living in the Rochester area, read them closely. There were so many aspects of the experiment that seemed familiar to her.
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She, too, had been hospitalized on Samuel Bassett’s metabolic ward at Strong Memorial Hospital in the mid-1940s. Her urine and stool specimens had been collected in special containers. And, like Eda Schultz Charlton, she also had been sent on shopping trips where she was accompanied by hospital personnel.

With a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, Connell realized that she must have been used in a similar experiment. But as it turns out, she had been injected with uranium—not plutonium. She was the youngest of the six patients injected with uranium and is the only known living survivor from that experiment. “All these things have been in my mind all these years,” she said a year or so after her participation had been confirmed.

A shy young woman raised on a sheep farm in upstate New York, Connell was twenty-four years old when her doctor referred her to the metabolic ward in September 1946. She was five feet two inches tall and weighed eighty-four pounds. Although she was perfectly healthy, the physician wanted to find out why she couldn’t gain weight. (Slenderness, she said, runs in the family.)

Soon after she was admitted to the ward, she was taken to an animal laboratory on two occasions. The experience, she said, upset her “something terrible.” During one of the visits, her white-coated chaperon made several oblique remarks about how slowly their animal experiments were going, how they needed human subjects to continue their work. “I think that’s when they decided they were going to have me,” she said.

Connell found herself lying on a gurney with straps across her chest and ankles when she woke up one morning. A large group of doctors had gathered at her bedside and one of them was trying to open a small vial of orange-colored liquid. Everyone in the room appeared to be afraid of the mixture. There was no cork, no cap, no way to open the sealed bottle. Finally someone smashed the vial against of the edge of a table and a small amount of the orangey stuff trickled onto the floor. Connell looked over the edge of the table and couldn’t believe her eyes: The material had burned a hole in the floor. “I never forgot that,” she said.

One of the doctors then injected the mixture into her veins. As the radioactive material flooded through her body, she said, “I felt like I was
laying on hot coals. I almost passed out.” Later she was woozy and sick to her stomach. Numerous doctors came in and looked at her. “They didn’t say anything. They just stood around looking at me.”

The date was October 1, 1946. Connell had just been injected with 584 micrograms of enriched uranium, twice the amount researchers at the time believed would cause kidney damage. Her urine and stool samples were collected and a woman stood guard over her day and night. Occasionally two or three attendants took her out for a shopping spree. One of the nurses joked that she was the most famous person in the hospital, but five decades would elapse before Connell finally understood what she meant.

Connell was discharged about three weeks later. The injection forced her to urinate frequently. Over the years, she has suffered from persistent urinary tract infections, kidney pain, and high blood pressure. She doesn’t know if she is still excreting uranium but said she often caused electronic equipment at her job to malfunction.

Bassett and his colleagues did not inform Connell of what was in the vial nor did she give consent for the uranium injection. “I feel hurt and humiliated, everything all at once,” she said. “The doctors were probably saying to themselves, ‘Well, she isn’t much good for anything. If she dies, so what?’ ”

Less than a month after Hazel O’Leary’s disclosures, President Clinton ordered all federal agencies to comb their records for any documents related to human radiation experiments and make them public. He also established the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to investigate the studies. With that action, the attention shifted from the Department of Energy and Hazel O’Leary to Ruth Faden and the Advisory Committee.

Faden chaired the committee. She was a bioethicist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and a scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Forty-four years old and coauthor of an authoritative book on informed consent, Faden told a reporter she viewed the appointment as a chance to “rewrite the history of ethics and research on human subjects in this country.”
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Both of Faden’s parents were survivors of the Holocaust.
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Her father spent two years in Auschwitz, and her mother was in Birkenau for two years. But Faden said she had a “deep aversion” to drawing any analogies to the Holocaust or trading in any way on that experience. “I don’t think I have any special claim to anything because of who I am, or more importantly, who my parents are and what they experienced. Nor do I want to draw any straight line analogies between what we’re studying and the Nazi experience. At the same time, obviously I am the product of that horrible event.”

Because of what her own family had gone through, Faden said she recognized how important it was for the committee to leave behind an accurate historical record of the radiation experiments. “There’s nothing
more terrifying for survivors of a horrible event than to hear other people trivialize it, or even worse, raise skepticism about whether the event ever occurred.
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Maybe my sensitivity to the importance of leaving the historical record irrefutably straight comes out of that experience.”

The White House appointed thirteen other people to the panel. They included two more ethicists, five medical doctors, two lawyers, two scientists, a historian, and a bank vice president. The group met roughly once a month in Washington, D.C., for two to three days from April of 1994 to October of 1995. In general, the first hour or two was set aside for witness testimony; the remaining time was reserved for debate and discussion among the committee members themselves.

The committee’s headquarters, located at 1726 M Street in downtown Washington, had the chaotic feel of a law firm on the eve of a big trial. The hallways were stacked with boxes of documents from various federal agencies. Desks and floors were piled high with records and paper coffee cups. In one room, two industrial-size copying machines ran twelve to fifteen hours a day, spitting out thousands of pages.

The creation of the committee changed the way the media covered the controversy. Instead of digging up their own stories, reporters began relying on what the panel had found. The committee had two press spokesmen, and its executive director, Dan Guttman, was an affable Washington lawyer who enjoyed schmoozing with the media. Before each monthly meeting, the panel would gather up a package of the most sensational documents and release them to the press. This process guaranteed that at least once a month the group would be portrayed in countless news reports as “uncovering,” “revealing,” or “disclosing” some new Cold War horror. Although staffers did find many important documents, much of the work was done by the legions of anonymous Energy and Defense Department employees working in the bowels of various federal archives. The monthly releases also enabled the Clinton administration, whether intended or not, to regain control of the controversy and, as one of O’Leary’s aides explained, “slow things down.”

None of this was apparent at first. The committee’s formation was viewed with great optimism by activists and the experimental subjects. Finally, they thought, here was an independent panel of experts not connected to the nuclear weapons establishment who would conduct a complete and unbiased investigation of this chapter in Cold War history.

A staff of about seventy people was hired to review documents, provide historical context, and help organize the monthly meetings. The staffers for the most part were young and liberal, but the fourteen people
the White House appointed to the commission itself were members of the nation’s scientific and academic elite. In fact, they bore a remarkable resemblance to the experimenters they were investigating: They came from the same socioeconomic class, attended the same colleges, and worked at the same universities that sponsored the experiments. Ruth Faden’s employer, for example, Johns Hopkins University, developed and refined the radium nasal treatments, which were administered by doctors throughout the country and significantly increased the subjects’ risks of cancer and other diseases. None of the victims of the experiments or their relatives were appointed to the panel, even though many presidential committees are required to include a representative from the affected community.

Counting the staffers and the appointed members, the committee had about eighty-five people working on the radiation experiments, but it quickly became apparent that not even that large a group would be able to keep up with the tidal wave of documents. Almost immediately, the panel was deluged with tens of thousands of records that the federal agencies had uncovered in response to Clinton’s search directive.

In all, an estimated 6 million pages related to the government’s little-known radiation studies were gathered up by the federal agencies and the military branches between late 1993 and 1997 and made available.
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A small percentage of the documents had been declassified, but the majority were records technically open to the public but not readily accessible. They came from federal repositories, university archives, storage rooms, filing cabinets, personal files, and even family garages.

Faden acknowledged in December of 1994 that the committee was overwhelmed by the documents. Despite this admission, she actually broadened the scope of the panel’s work to look at how well the rights of patients in
contemporary
experiments were being protected. At her direction, two large projects examining contemporary experiments were undertaken by outside contractors at a cost to taxpayers of several hundred thousand dollars. One involved interviewing 1,900 patients in waiting rooms throughout the country; the other was a detailed analysis of 125 contemporary research projects.

The General Accounting Office in December of 1994 noted that the committee “had done little of the ethical and scientific analysis called for in its charter.
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” Yet, the GAO added, “Despite these difficulties, the Committee has chosen to expand the overall scope of its work.” Faden staunchly defended the expansion, saying the panel couldn’t make any meaningful statements about the past without investigating whether similar
problems were occurring in contemporary experiments. “We have to look at the contemporary situation and say, ‘OK, what is the likelihood that this could happen now?’ And if there’s any plausibility to the view it could happen today, what do we need to do to change it?”

The committee attacked its assignment on several fronts simultaneously.
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Some staff members reviewed, analyzed, and searched for documents while others crisscrossed the country interviewing the scientists who had conducted the experiments. At the monthly meetings, the appointed members listened to personal testimony from witnesses who had firsthand experience with the horrors being investigated or whose family members had been victimized. They then tried to develop an ethical framework that they could use to judge the experiments and make recommendations for medical monitoring or financial compensation.