The Plutonium Files (35 page)

Warren used friendly persuasion to get what he wanted and raw power when necessary. He maintained cordial relationships with many Manhattan Project scientists, including doctors like Robert Stone with whom he had strong professional disagreements. But in early 1952 Warren allegedly attempted to ruin the career of one scientist outside the inner circle who raised serious questions about radiation hazards in the uranium mines.

Wilhelm Hueper, an outspoken scientist at the National Cancer Institute, had been invited by the Colorado State Medical Society to present a paper at its annual meeting in Denver on the cancer hazards that workers in the unventilated mines on the Colorado Plateau faced. Drawing on a seventy-five-year history of lung cancer incidents among miners at Schneeberg, Germany, and at Joachimsthal, Czechoslovakia, Hueper described the similar hazards that U.S. miners, many of whom were Native Americans, were exposed to from the radioactive gas and dust. In his unpublished autobiography, Hueper said that the director of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine then ordered him to eliminate all references to hazards in the mines, and subsequently suggested that he be dismissed for using bad judgment. Shocked, Hueper told his supervisor at the National Cancer Institute that he had not joined the organization “to be made into a scientific liar.”

Hueper did not lose his job, and went on to warn against other radioactive materials that were potentially hazardous.
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One was nasopharyngeal irradiation, a practice in which radium applicators were inserted in the nostrils.
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Thousands of Navy submariners and Army Air Force pilots underwent the procedure in order to alleviate obstructions of the eustachian tube; and hundreds of thousands of children with chronic colds and sore throats or inflammatory changes in the tonsils and adenoids were also subjected to the procedure.

The treatment of the uranium miners remains one of the scandals of the Cold War. Hundreds of miners have died, and many are still dying, from lung cancer caused by radioactive dust and gases trapped in the unventilated mines. Stewart Udall, a former Interior Secretary who waged a decade-long battle to obtain compensation for the miners, questioned Shields Warren about Hueper’s allegations a year before Warren died. Warren did not dispute the accuracy of Hueper’s story, Udall later wrote.
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Under Shields Warren’s steady hand, a vast new empire devoted to radiation research sprang up in the United States. The research, Warren informed Congress, was necessary not only for the advancement of science but to ensure “our very survival.” With the terrible visions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh in their memories, the Manhattan Project doctors and scientists already had staked out their own large piece of the action in this burgeoning new world.
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But the money was flowing freely and there was plenty of room for newcomers. In fact, the AEC actively encouraged them. Recruitment and training of young scientists was one of the five major components of the commission’s biomedical program. The others were: continuation and expansion of wartime research into the effects of ionizing radiation; follow-up studies of the Japanese bombing victims; the development of a nationwide cancer research program; and the distribution and sale of radioisotopes for medical and industrial research. (Plutonium and uranium, which could be used in weapons, were not for sale.)

In mid-1946, the Manhattan Project began aggressively hawking radioisotopes produced in its Oak Ridge reactor to qualified researchers. These isotopes, which included such materials as radioactive iron, iodine, phosphorous, calcium, and sodium, were used as diagnostic tools to help locate a malignancy or malfunctioning organ and, in basic research, aimed at better understanding the body’s metabolic processes. By tagging red blood cells with radioactive iron, for instance, researchers could learn more about how long those blood cells lived. Or, since radioactive iodine has an affinity for the thyroid gland—a small butterfly-shaped
gland at the base of the throat—by measuring the rate at which the iodine was absorbed they can learn a lot about how well the thyroid was operating. As MIT scientist Robley Evans explained in a 1946
Atlantic Monthly
article, “The radioactive isotopes are actually spies which go around unrecognized in the company of normal atoms of the same chemical type and at a later time reveal in detail the movements of the normal atoms which they accompany.”
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When scientists first began investigating the medical uses of radioisotopes in the 1930s, they hoped they might find the proverbial magic bullet that would destroy cancer cells, but by the end of the 1940s they realized that most isotopes would function primarily as diagnostic tools.

Researchers throughout the United States used the radioisotopes in thousands of human experiments. As these experiments involved minute amounts of radioactive materials, they are often called “tracer studies.” A few of the radioisotope experiments did involve large amounts of radioactive materials, which caused severe injury and death.

The Manhattan Project’s first shipment of radioisotopes went to the Barnard Free Skin & Cancer Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. Within twelve months, 1,092 shipments of more than “100 varieties” of radioisotopes had been sent from Oak Ridge to research facilities around the country.
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The radioisotope distribution program was one of the commission’s most widely touted success stories. Radioisotopes were seen as an antidote—an inoculation of sorts—against the public’s fear and apprehension of the atomic bomb. Recalled Oak Ridge scientist Marshall Brucer: “The liberal establishment was in the depths of shame for having ended the war by killing people.
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Radioisotopes didn’t kill people; they cured cancer.” The AEC’s Medical Board of Review said the program “would aid in showing the scientific world that the Atomic Energy Commission is effectively contributing to the advancement of knowledge despite the impression often left by security regulations.”
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Congress allocated $175 million to the AEC in 1947, with up to $5 million to be reserved for cancer research that did not duplicate the work of other public or private agencies.
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At that time the $5 million was a huge sum, and more money than some AEC officials believed could be spent on legitimate projects. Under Shields Warren’s direction, three AEC cancer hospitals were eventually set up: the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital, a fifty-eight-bed facility located in an AEC-owned building in Chicago next to Billings Hospital; a thirty-bed hospital at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies in Tennessee; and a forty-bed facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory near Upton, New York. During the
next three to four decades, scores of human experiments using radioisotopes and external radioactive sources were conducted at these facilities.

Armed with $1.1 million annually in AEC fellowship funds, Warren and his colleagues sought to encourage young science and medical students to pursue a career in some aspect of radiation research.
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From the moment of its inception, the AEC had recognized the obstacles to recruitment of scientists. “The emphasis on the responsibilities of the Atomic Energy Commission for atomic warfare and the consequent fear and distaste which is engendered in the public mind brings added difficulties to the work of the Commission,” intoned the Medical Board of Review, the blue-ribbon panel.
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Rochester’s Andrew Dowdy believed scientists weren’t interested in radiation research because there was “no romance” to it.
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He said: “There are no Nobel prizes. There are no great discoveries to be made. Few people want to take that sort of thing.… You merely sit for months without seeing anything happening. You have nothing to report. You go to meetings and everybody else has something to report, and you just sit there. It takes you months or years to accumulate information.”

Stafford Warren, Shields Warren’s predecessor, knew long-term experiments were needed to properly assess the dangers of low-level radiation but warned in an April 1, 1947, speech at Yale University that such studies were going to be “time-consuming and rather unspectacular.”
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Returning again to one of his favorite subjects, Warren said the research had to be done in order to protect the government from lawsuits by scam artists and freeloaders: “Particularly if we have a depression, we will have a lot of people who will want to coast along on the government charities, and who will come up with the story that they worked for the Manhattan District somewhere, or they passed down the street to windward of the plant, and therefore they deserve compensation. It is going to be a very serious problem.”

Unbelievably, the AEC in early 1948 found itself in the position of having too much money. What is even more unbelievable is that it considered returning some of the cash to the federal treasury. “Several members [of the Advisory Committee for Biology and Medicine] told me that the cancer money might prove to be very embarrassing to AEC since there is already more money for cancer research than there are original and legitimate research projects upon which to spend it,” AEC official Bob Tumbleson wrote.
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“In fact [A. Baird] Hastings went so far as to suggest that it might be well if the Commission would refuse to accept cancer money for the coming year.”

Soon enough, scientists hungry for grant money and job advancement managed to overcome their distaste for atomic warfare and the tedium associated with radiation research. Proposals poured into the AEC and the money flowed out. “One had the feeling that almost anything could get supported if it had any smattering of sense behind it,” recalled William Bale, the Manhattan Project scientist who opened the metabolic unit at Strong Memorial Hospital.
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Stanton Cohn, another Manhattan Project veteran, said, “It was fantastic—we could buy any piece of machinery or equipment, and you never had to justify it.”
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A deliriously happy Los Alamos scientist returning from Washington after the launching of Sputnik once remarked, “I am black and blue from being pelted with money.”
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By the 1950s the commission’s budget for biomedical research was around $25 million per year.
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About 37 percent of that went to studies of radiation effects; 34 percent to studies of the benefits of radiation; 21 percent to research related to industrial health and safety; and 8 percent to studies aimed at combating radiation’s harms.

The Atomic Energy Commission wasn’t the only federal agency with deep pockets. The Army, Navy, and Air Force established their own research laboratories and entered into generous contracts with universities following the war. With preparations for the atomic battlefield in full swing, a lot of the money went to the development of nuclear weapons and radiation research. “Never before in history have the interests of the weaponeers and those who practice the healing arts been so closely related,” crowed a medical doctor in the 1949 volume
Atomic Medicine.
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The symbiotic arrangement was fraught with danger, however. What was good for the armed forces wasn’t necessarily good for the patient, and vice versa. Some experiments went on too long. Others wouldn’t have been done at all without military or AEC funding. The melding of medical know-how and military dollars produced “dual-purpose” experiments—studies with both a medical and a military component. Many of the Manhattan Project’s human experiments had dual purposes, as did other experiments conducted in the postwar years.

Much of the atomic research was initially classified, creating cliques on college campuses of people who spoke mostly to each other. Sometimes even college presidents didn’t know what kind of research their professors were doing. Secrecy prevented adequate oversight and enabled sloppy, incompetent, or unethical experiments to go unquestioned or to be swept under the rug. Oak Ridge scientist Karl Morgan, often called the father of health physics, said in an interview many years ago
that weapons scientists worked in a closed society where the same ideas were passed from researcher to researcher. “Pretty soon it makes the circle, and you’re literally talking to yourself.”
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In addition, he said: “I realize now that we were rather conceited as a group. We grew up during the war years and in an environment which only we were interested in or knew anything about these problems, problems of nuclear energy. The outside world, at least during the early security days even in physics departments, they hardly knew what was going on in this field.”

After the war the physicists needed big machines like cyclotrons and accelerators to do their work and were growing ever more dependent on military largesse. Philip Morrison was one of the first Manhattan Project physicists to warn of the dangers of military-supported science. At a forum on public affairs sponsored by the New York
Herald Tribune
in October 1946, he said, “The backers—Army and Navy—will go along for a while.
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Results, in the shape of new and fearful weapons, will not justify the expenses and their own funds will begin to dwindle. The now amicable contracts will tighten up and the fine print will start to contain talk about results and specific weapon problems. And science itself will have been bought by war on the installment plan.”

The infusion of money, combined with the advances in medicine and science during World War II, spawned an orgy of human experimentation in almost every medical field in the postwar years. “This was, to borrow a phrase from American political history, the Gilded Age of research, the triumph of laissez-faire in the laboratory,” writes Columbia University’s David Rothman.
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The vastness of the human experimentation became clear only in 1994, when the General Accounting Office reported that hundreds of thousands of Americans were used in military-related experiments involving radiation, blister and nerve agents, biological agents, and LSD between 1940 and 1974. “In some cases, basic safeguards to protect people were either not in place or not followed.
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For example, some tests and experiments were conducted in secret; others involved the use of people without their knowledge or consent or their full knowledge of the risks involved.”