The Plutonium Files (15 page)

A month after Cade’s injection, Langham gave a classified talk in Chicago to other Manhattan Project doctors about the experiment: “The subject was an elderly male whose age and general health was such that there is little or no possibility that the injection can have any effect on the normal course of his life,” he began.
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Langham said the plutonium solution that he prepared was designed to produce the “maximum deposition” in human bone. “This presumably would produce an excretion rate comparable to that of a worker having absorbed the material at a slow rate thereby depositing a maximum amount in the bone where it is probably the most damaging.”
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In charts accompanying the talk, Langham noted that 332 counts per minute were detected in Ebb’s urine in the first twenty-four-hour period after injection, declining to 119 counts three months later.
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By contrast, exposed laboratory workers—individuals with nose counts in excess of 50 counts per minute—showed only an average of 2.2 counts per minute in their urine samples.
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The excretion rate of human beings was surprisingly low, Langham said, and the leveling off was much slower “than with rats.”

Despite the elaborate planning, the experiment was flawed.
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Samples of Ebb’s urine from before and after the injection were accidentally pooled together, providing no control sample.
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Scientists also worried that Ebb’s kidney damage could have affected the excretion rate.

Five days after the injection—and nearly three weeks after the accident
—Ebb’s bones were set. The timing of the surgery enabled the scientists to complete one critical component of the experiment: obtain bone samples from Ebb after the plutonium had circulated in his body. The samples showed the plutonium had indeed gone to the bone. In one fragment, scientists detected 82 counts per minute. Fifteen of Ebb’s teeth also were pulled, purportedly because Ebb was suffering from gum inflammation and tooth decay.
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The teeth, as well as portions of his gum tissue and jawbone, were analyzed for plutonium content. Plutonium also goes to the jawbone where the teeth are embedded.

Lawrence Suchow, a young enlisted man, spent about a week in June emptying Ebb’s bedpan. He had been cautioned to be very careful taking the urine away and never saw any family members or doctors stopping in to see Ebb. Two months or so had elapsed since the accident and Ebb still appeared to be in great pain. “He was just moaning,” Suchow remembered.
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“He seemed in terrible shape. He looked to me like he was not going to make it for a few days.”

One of the still-unexplained aspects of the case is what happened to Jesse Smith, the driver. He was hospitalized for approximately nine months with a fractured hip. In a letter written two years after the accident, a Major William Clarkson in Oak Ridge asked Hymer Friedell about Smith’s case. X rays taken in January 1946 and March 1947 showed that Smith’s bones still had failed to heal. And a colleague, he added, “is at a loss to explain the failure of the bone to unite and because of the large amount of laboratory work done while he was hospitalized, was wondering if, perhaps he had received ‘some stuff’ given by a member of this office.”
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In a response to Clarkson written three days later, Friedell said he couldn’t remember the man’s name who had received the material and suggested that Clarkson contact Joe Howland or Wright Langham. “Joe Howland actually gave the material and he might remember the man’s name,” Friedell added.
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“As I remember it, the individual who received the material was an older Negro and had multiple fractures.”

Although Clarkson had asked for information on Jesse Smith, the driver, Friedell’s response seems to refer to Ebb Cade. Friedell does not mention the patient’s name or the word “plutonium,” so it is not absolutely certain to which of the men he was referring. No written evidence whatsoever has been found suggesting that Smith received plutonium. And if Friedell was referring to Cade, it would be further confirmation of Howland’s version of the story.

It’s not clear why the Manhattan Project doctors abandoned their plan to use a hospital patient in Rochester or Chicago and chose Ebb Cade instead. But sixteen days after Cade was injected, Arthur Hubbard, a bespectacled and distinguished-looking white businessman from Austin, Texas, was injected with plutonium in Chicago by Robert Stone’s group.

As a young man, Arthur had been recruited to play baseball for St. Edward’s University, a small college in Austin.
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During one game, he glanced up and saw a determined-looking girl named Selma watching him from the stands. The couple fell in love and got married. Eventually they had seven children, one of whom died as a toddler after eating mistletoe at Christmas.

When Arthur’s baseball days were over, he purchased land in the hill country outside Austin where he cut down cedar trees, split them into posts, and sold them for fences and firewood. When gas heaters replaced woodstoves, he moved to town and opened Hubbard’s Baseball Inn, which sold beer and barbecue sandwiches and became a watering hole for the police chief and the county commissioners.

Arthur had enjoyed excellent health until the latter part of June 1944, when he noticed a swelling under the front part of his chin. The swelling increased to the size of a “hen’s egg” and was excised four months later.
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Doctors diagnosed Arthur with squamous cell carcinoma and subsequently exposed the affected area to two thousand roentgens of localized radiation. Within two weeks the cancer was back, and Arthur underwent another surgical procedure and another round of radiation.

A friend who was a surgeon urged Arthur to get treatment at University
of Chicago’s Billings Hospital. The hospital was just a few minutes’ walk from the Met Lab, and many of the doctors who worked at the lab also had privileges at the hospital. “We knew they were experimenting with some new treatment,” Arthur’s daughter, Ripple Guess, said.
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But neither Ripple nor any of Arthur’s other children suspected the so-called treatment consisted of an injection of top-secret material that would be used in a weapon soon to be dropped on Japan.

In his late sixties when he contracted cancer, Arthur underwent “seven different plastic operative procedures,” including the removal of his lower jaw.
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Eventually he was fed by tube because his throat and mouth had become so painful that he could no longer swallow. At 9:17
A.M.
on April 26, 1945, several weeks after he entered the hospital, he was injected with 6.5 micrograms of plutonium in a citrate solution, a dose equal to 120 times the radiation an average person receives in a year. Afterward, his urine was collected in gallon bottles filled with hydrochloric acid and samples of his stool were placed in “seal-fast” cardboard containers.
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He was assigned the code name CHI-1, a number that signified that he was the first Chicago patient injected with plutonium. A year later Met Lab scientists explained the logic behind the injection in a secret report:

Soon after Arthur Hubbard was injected, Joseph Hamilton and his colleagues in Berkeley began scouting the corridors of the University of California Hospital in San Francisco for a suitable human candidate for their own plutonium experiment. For more than a year, Hamilton and his associates had been injecting plutonium into rats. Now Hamilton, a compulsive and impatient experimenter, was eager to ratchet the studies up to the next level. In January of 1945, the very month that Los Alamos’s Wright Langham perfected the chemical technique for detecting plutonium in human urine and feces, Hamilton notified the Met Lab’s Arthur
Compton that he was ready “to undertake, on a limited scale, a series of metabolic studies with product [plutonium] using human subjects.”
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Although Compton was a religious man, his moral scruples apparently were overridden by his fear of plutonium and his conviction that the human experiments were necessary.

Joseph Hamilton held dual academic appointments: He was a professor of medical physics at UC-Berkeley and a professor of experimental medicine and radiology at UCSF. This arrangement, he said, allowed him access to “clinical material.” The “clinical material” that caught his eye in May of 1945 was house painter Albert Stevens, a shrunken, pale man on Ward B of the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.
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Albert had long been a familiar figure in the small town of Healdsburg, California, his bladelike body rattling up and down ladders with cans of paint or slouching in a block of shade with an unfiltered cigarette between his fingers. In the 1920s Albert had set off for California in a skinny-wheeled Model T with a bird’s nest of furniture piled on top after a doctor told him his asthmatic wife would not survive another year in Ohio. The West was still an uncharted wilderness then, and the rutted roads often bloomed into lakes or vanished in the prairie grasses. The journey took a year and it was one of the happiest times of his life. In the old photographs, he is tall and slim and always grinning.

The years had taken their toll on Albert, and by the spring of 1945 he bore little resemblance to the smiling young man in the photographs. For several months he had been experiencing extremely sharp pains in his stomach.
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The pain was so fierce, so consuming, it was as if the finches and canaries he kept were free and he, Albert Stevens, were in the cage. He talked to the birds often, coaxing them to sing for his young grandson. Now the musical notes spilled over his shoulders, sweet and clear. But Albert was listening to the drab complaint within him. The pain weakened him, draining the color from his face and hair, until finally he was a prematurely old man.

One doctor said he had lost fifteen pounds; another put it at forty. A local physician suspected Albert had a malignant ulcer that had spread to the liver and advised him to consult specialists at the University of California Hospital.
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Albert reluctantly agreed. It meant he would miss part of the spring. In his backyard, lumps of hard fruit hung from the orange tree and in the tangled blackberry bushes along the wall. The seventy-five-mile trip south to San Francisco was beautiful. The hills were still a vivid green, and splotches of yellow mustard spilled across the slopes.

Albert arrived at the hospital in San Francisco the first week of May 1945, the week Germany announced its surrender. Just three weeks earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had guided the nation during the war and had approved the atomic bomb project, died. President Harry Truman was briefed on the new weapon on April 25 by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army General Leslie Groves.

Albert was slated to undergo a battery of tests in the hospital. The cost was $5.25 a day plus a $30 deposit.
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The medical expenses were reasonable, but Albert was unemployed and it was a lot of money to scrape together. The hospital also insisted that Albert’s family replace any blood used for transfusions, so his son and daughter-in-law flew down from Michigan to donate. Afterward they paced the corridors and waited for the results of the diagnostic tests.

In the first few days of his hospital stay, Albert underwent a routine workup. A urinalysis and chest X ray were normal. His abdomen was concave and tender to the touch. Small curds of milk and coffee grounds were found in his stomach. He was placed on a standard hospital diet and after a few days felt “substantially improved.” An upper gastrointestinal series was conducted. Both a radiologist and a surgical consultant concluded that Albert probably had cancer but suggested a gastroscopy be done to confirm the diagnosis.
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For some reason, however, the procedure, which involves inserting a scope through the mouth to visually inspect the stomach, was not done. When the other diagnostic tests were completed, the doctors relayed the bad news to the family: Albert had stomach cancer and would probably not live more than another six months. He was fifty-eight years old.

Through some invisible network, perhaps nothing more than a hallway conversation, scientists working on top-secret research for the Manhattan Project learned of Albert. While doctors in San Francisco were doing their diagnostic tests, Joseph Hamilton’s group in Berkeley began preparations for their first human plutonium experiment. Hamilton’s team prepared a solution that consisted of mostly plutonium-238 and a small amount of plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 is 276 times more radioactive than plutonium-239 and therefore has the potential to cause much more biological damage. Plutonium-238 probably was used because it was easier to measure with the crude instruments of the time.

Kenneth Scott, the chubby scientist who had been working at the Rad Lab since John Lawrence had injected his first human patient with radiophosphorous, transported the plutonium from Berkeley to the hospital.
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The son of an aspiring beautician and a locomotive engineer, Scott
had worked his way through high school and the University of California at Berkeley and later claimed to have successfully cured animal tumors with LSD
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. Like Hamilton, Scott’s interest in radioisotopes was accidental, having begun after he went to a “beer party with a bunch of physicists.”
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