The Plutonium Files (78 page)

The class-action lawsuit initiated by Harold Bibeau, a former convict who had his testicles irradiated in Oregon, was dismissed by a federal judge because of statute-of-limitations considerations.
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Attorneys representing Bibeau have appealed the ruling and also have filed a lawsuit in state court to compel authorities to establish a fund for the medical monitoring of the prisoners. About half of the men who participated in Heller’s experiment are dead.

In Washington State, a lawsuit filed by prisoners irradiated by C. Alvin Paulsen was faring better. A federal judge ruled in early 1999 that the case could go forward, but dismissed two contractors and the federal government from the lawsuit. In a sworn deposition taken in September of 1998, Hazel O’Leary said that Paulsen’s subjects could not have obtained information from the Department of Energy about the
experiment before December 1993, when she held her press conference. She continued, “If information was deemed to be embarrassing, it was simply not made available.
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I might add that the department had a culture of punishing people … when they delivered bad information.”

In comparison to the mild criticism levied by the Advisory Committee, several federal judges presiding over the cases had harsh words for the experimenters. “This was an atrocity,” snapped U.S. District Judge Michael A. Telesca of Rochester during a preliminary proceeding in one of the plutonium cases.
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In Cincinnati, U.S. District Judge Sandra Beck-with wrote, “The allegations in this case indicate that the government of the United States, aided by the officials of the City of Cincinnati, treated at least eighty-seven of its citizens as though they were laboratory animals.
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If the Constitution has not clearly established a right under which these plaintiffs may attempt to prove their case, then a gaping hole in that document has been exposed. The subject of experimentation who has not volunteered is merely an object.”

Almost without exception, the universities and hospitals named in the lawsuits were bellicose and defensive about their role in the experiments, downplaying their involvement and the harm to the patients, or even going so far as to rewrite history. The institutions hired top-flight lawyers to represent them. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s worth noting that the American taxpayers wound up picking up the tab because of policies dating back to the Manhattan Project, which indemnify contractors if they are sued in the course of carrying out their duties.

The University of California at San Francisco assembled a “fact-finding” committee in early 1994 to probe the three plutonium injections performed at the University of California Hospital. In its final report, the committee occasionally referred to the experiment as an “intervention” and to the subjects as “plutonium recipients.”
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With no direct evidence to support the claim, the panel put forth the speculative hypothesis that Simeon Shaw, CAL-2, and Elmer Allen, CAL-3, were not part of the Manhattan Project’s plutonium experiment but participants in a legitimate university research effort to discover a treatment for bone cancer. Similarly, the panel hypothesized that the injection of americium into Hanford Jang, the sixteen-year-old from China, was also part of the researchers’ efforts to find a cure for bone cancer. The panel reluctantly conceded that Albert Stevens and Simeon Shaw’s guardian didn’t give their informed consent for the injections, but it noted, “The committee found no evidence that the experiment was designed with malevolent intentions.”
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The report revealed more about the bunker mentality of UCSF in the 1990s than the plutonium experiment in the 1940s. All but one of the committee members were employed by UCSF, which in essence meant the university was investigating itself. In addition, several multimillion-dollar lawsuits were filed against the university by relatives of the plutonium patients while the group was meeting, making it even more doubtful that an unbiased report would emerge. Ruth Macklin, a member of the president’s Advisory Committee, dismissed the UCSF findings at a public meeting as a “whitewash.”

The report may have been a whitewash and its contents a classic case of counterspin, but the findings actually were used by lawyers representing UCSF to pressure the family of Simeon Shaw into settling for $262,500. Simmy was an Australian citizen and the youngest patient used in the plutonium experiment.
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Yet his family received one of the smallest awards.

Joshua Shaw, Simmy’s brother, said that with the public attention waning, attorneys representing UCSF felt free to play hardball. The immorality of the experiment meant nothing to them, he said. “Morality has to be accounted for.
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The Nazis tattooed numbers on their victims’ arms. The American government gave Simeon Shaw the number ‘CAL-2.” ’

In face-to-face negotiations with Joshua Shaw in the spring of 1997, attorneys for UCSF argued that the injections didn’t kill Simmy, that the child was going to die anyway, and that physicians at the University of California Hospital were trying to find a cure for one of mankind’s most dreaded diseases. “They said UCSF doctors were looking for a cancer cure and that’s why he was given the extra injections,” Joshua said.
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“But there is nothing in the documents that indicate they were looking for a cure for cancer. It was just another red herring.”

In Rochester, Strong Memorial Hospital officials initially expressed regret about the experiment. But the repentant attitude hardened into a defensive posture as debate over the experiment raged. Hospital spokesman Robert Loeb described the plutonium injections as a “covert extracurricular activity” of which the university was not aware and did not approve.
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When advocates for the experimental subjects called for a criminal investigation, Loeb labeled it “a suggestion full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
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He added, “As far as they concern UR Medical Center, these cries for a criminal investigation are utterly ridiculous. There is no basis for criminal charges whatsoever.”

With scores of foreign journalists knocking at their doors and helicopter-borne camera crews buzzing the air space above them, officials at
Los Alamos National Laboratory decided to take a proactive stance toward the radiation experiments. A task force called the Human Studies Project Team was assembled, and beginning in January of 1994, the group released documents on a regular basis to public reading rooms. The weekly disclosures contained a few juicy items, but many of the documents consisted of previously published reports or memos already in the public domain. Los Alamos also sought to put a favorable spin on the documents in press statements accompanying the releases. The manipulation notwithstanding, the fact that the lab was making public anything at all was a historic event. Los Alamos was the heart and soul of the weapons complex. From the remote mesa in northern New Mexico, it had operated in virtual secrecy for fifty years. But the lab could not escape the public scrutiny of the radiation experiments and was under intense pressure from the Department of Energy to cooperate with the national search effort ordered by President Clinton.

During a “close-out” news conference, lab officials concluded no Los Alamos scientist had acted improperly. But Joan McIver Gibson, a medical ethicist from the University of New Mexico and a paid consultant on the document-release project, afterward told a reporter that she didn’t know if the public should believe the lab had told all it knew. “There is an insularity at the lab, a lack of practice and experience in talking to the community,” she said.
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“We don’t have a clue to a lot of things that have gone on here.”

Even though President Clinton, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, and the Advisory Committee had publicly acknowledged that many of the experiments were unethical, many scientists couldn’t accept the idea that they or their peers had committed any wrongs. They maintained their belief that the ends they had pursued justified the means they used, expressed little or no remorse for the experimental subjects, and continued to bash O’Leary and the media for blowing the controversy out of proportion.

Don Petersen, one of the old hands who was brought back to the lab to help with the search effort and who had testified at one of the outreach meetings about giving his own children trace amounts of radioiodine, told a reporter he would be willing to drink a solution of radioactive plutonium if it would help researchers. “The abject terror of plutonium is unfounded,” he said.
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Patricia Durbin, the Berkeley scientist who worked for Joseph Hamilton and initiated the follow-up study of the plutonium patients, was still irritated when I contacted her by telephone at her home in Berkeley
three years after the story broke. The controversy over the plutonium injections, she said, took a year out of her life. “When you’re approaching seventy, you can’t afford years out of your life.
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I spent the better part of a year in interviews, hearings, depositions, consultations with lawyers, writing reports and so on. I got tired of it.”

Durbin said she and her colleagues hoped to publish a comprehensive scientific report on the plutonium experiment “when the dust settled.” She said she would also like to see the rest of the plutonium patients exhumed. The data are so important, Durbin continued, that she and several colleagues considered having themselves injected with plutonium before their deaths and then donating their bodies to science.

Officials in the Department of Energy were quick to reject the offer. Lori Azim, an aide to Tara O’Toole, the DOE’s assistant secretary for environment, safety, and health, told a Rochester newspaper she couldn’t imagine anyone endorsing that idea. “Frankly, we’re not interested in that anymore.”
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When Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary acknowledged that the federal government had conducted radiation experiments on its own people, thousands of callers flooded a hot line set up by the DOE: What was going on? Had we become a nation of paranoiacs? A country of guinea pigs? Or had O’Leary touched on something that resonated deeply with the American public?

Certainly the radiation experiments raised complex questions that go to the core of our society: the trust between a government and its people, the subjugation of individuals to the interest of the state, and the ethical dilemma associated with the development of weapons of mass destruction.

But what O’Leary did in a dramatic and unexpected way was confirm the hunch that all was not well beneath the soothing no-harm, no-danger statements that accompanied the reports of nuclear blasts, spills, and accidents of the Cold War. Her admission produced an electrifying response, something akin to the emotions a person might feel after being subjected to a lifetime of vague allusions and abrupt silences and suddenly learning a dark family secret he or she had always suspected.

When the Nevada Test Site opened in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission warned its public relations men to approach the tests “matter-of-factly” and not go overboard in emphasizing how safe the explosions were going to be. Such a campaign might be interpreted as one of the “lady doth protest too much,” an AEC official cautioned.
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The bomb project’s public relations machine succeeded in keeping a lid on the experiments for fifty years. Its spokesmen were able to blame
the fallout controversy, the illnesses of the atomic veterans, and the diseases of the downwinders on sudden wind shifts, misinformed scientists, the overactive imaginations of aging soldiers, and even Communist propagandists. But the radiation experiments revealed a deliberate intent, a willingness to inflict harm or the risk of harm, which could not be explained away so easily. Somebody inserted the needle into the human vein, mixed the radioisotopes in the paper cup, or flipped the switch that delivered a potentially lethal dose of whole-body radiation. There is no denying that:

   • Thousands of Americans were used as laboratory animals in radiation experiments funded by the federal government. Many of the subjects were not asked for their consent or given accurate information about the nature of these experiments. Some didn’t learn they or their loved ones had been used as guinea pigs until 1994 or 1995. Some still don’t know, and never will.

• Many of the doctors and scientists who performed these experiments routinely violated their patients’ trust and engaged in deception. They ignored the Hippocratic Oath, the 1946 American Medical Association guidelines, the Nuremberg Code, as well as policies adopted by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 and by the Defense Department in 1953. Civil and criminal laws also may have been broken. Beyond everything else, the experimenters violated a fundamental right that belongs to all competent adults: the right to control one’s own body.

• Although the majority of the experiments were the so-called tracer studies, which involved administering radioactive materials in quantities so small that they probably caused no harm, most scientists agree that no dose can absolutely be called safe.

• Some studies are known to have had very serious consequences. The total-body irradiation experiments caused intense suffering and premature death in some patients. The radium rod treatments and some of the radioactive iodine experiments increased the risk of head, neck, and thyroid cancers and other secondary disorders.

   What can be said about the scientists and doctors involved in these experiments? Like professionals in every field, some were extremely accomplished and others were hacks. A few of the experiments increased scientific understanding and led to new diagnostic tools, while others were of questionable scientific value. The plutonium experiment is a prime example of bad science. It was a poorly designed experiment for
several reasons, including the fact that the sample size was too small and the patients varied greatly in age and type of disease. Beyond those obvious flaws, the experimental results led the Manhattan Project doctors to erroneous assumptions. From the excretion data, they concluded that urine could be used to determine the body burden of any compound of plutonium that is inhaled or ingested. But William Jay Brady, the scientist who spent four decades at the Nevada Test Site and is now helping the atomic vets, said that just isn’t true.