The Plutonium Files (37 page)

How could the AEC, on one hand, have established new rules to prevent experiments like the plutonium injections from reoccurring while simultaneously promoting a program that would encourage thousands of similar experiments? No documents have surfaced to adequately explain the contradiction. Some records suggest that AEC researchers didn’t really consider the tracer studies as bona fide experiments because they believed the doses were harmless.
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But if the experiments were
harmless, researchers should have had no qualms about informing patients or using themselves as the test subjects.

When the Manhattan Project began distributing its radioisotopes in 1946, scientists who wanted to use the materials in humans had to submit a request to what became known as the Subcommittee on Human Applications. At one time or another, committee members included Hymer Friedell, Andrew Dowdy, Joseph Hamilton, and Paul Aebersold, the scientist who had assisted Robert Stone on his prewar neutron experiment and was assigned to help Stafford Warren at Trinity. Dubbed “Mr. Isotope,” Aebersold was almost fanatical in his support of the program. Scientist Merril Eisenbud, one of the AEC’s fallout experts, many years later described Aebersold as a “nut.”
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Eisenbud added, “He committed suicide, which is probably the extreme of his nuttiness. But he was very fanatic about the importance of radioisotopes and what it was going to do for you.”

Scant records of the subcommittee exist. But documents that have been found show that the subcommittee developed its own rules governing tracer research. Larger doses of radionuclides could be used on terminally ill patients and on “mentally deficient” subjects, the panel decreed. But by 1949 researchers were discouraged from using radioactive materials in normal children and pregnant women. For more than 800 women in Nashville, Tennessee, who were given radioactive iron “cocktails” to drink at a clinic where they went for prenatal checkups, this advice came several years too late.

The waiting room at the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic was always crowded in the jubilant years after the war, row after row of young women dressed in their Sunday best sitting in straight-back wooden chairs waiting for their doctors.
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There were no magazines to read or music to listen to, but soon the room filled up with girlish chatter as the young women turned to each other and began talking in soft, southern accents about their husbands, the new homes they were hoping to buy, the children they would soon give birth to. Segregation was strictly enforced, and the clinic treated white women only. But these were not women from Nashville’s well-to-do neighborhoods. Many were poor and their fees were based on what they could pay. Shy and eager to please, they felt lucky to have Vanderbilt doctors taking care of them and followed their orders without question.

In late July of 1946, Helen Hutchison signed in at the reception desk and took a seat in the waiting room. A ceiling fan spun lazily overhead but did little to relieve the muggy Nashville heat. Helen’s husband had landed in Europe on D-Day and had helped liberate two concentration camps, including Buchenwald. Although they weren’t exactly poor, money was tight. Helen plucked at her damp clothes and fanned her face. Just twenty years old, she was a willowy woman with long curly hair who talked in a slow, unhurried voice. She had experienced so much nausea and vomiting during her pregnancy that she actually had lost fifteen pounds. The doctors prescribed liver shots, vitamins, thyroid medication, and plenty of bed rest, but the nausea continued unabated. When Helen’s name was called, she followed the nurse down the hallway
to an examining room. Soon a doctor came in, mixed something into a cup, and handed it to her to drink.

As Helen sat on the examining table holding the cup in her hand, she looked out the window at Gartland Avenue. Parked at the curb were De Sotos, Packards, and Studebakers. Beyond were the lovely brick homes and deep green lawns of Nashville. At the corner of Gartland Avenue and 21st Street was a pie wagon, a street car that had been converted to a soda fountain. After her checkup at the clinic, Helen sometimes slipped onto one of the stools and ordered a Coke, hoping the carbonated sweetness would staunch the nausea welling up inside her. It was such a beautiful day, she thought, as the physician urged her to swallow the drink.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a little cocktail. It’ll make you feel better,” she recalled the doctor saying.

“Well, I don’t know if I ought to be drinking a cocktail,” she responded, her voice light and bantering.

“Drink it all,” he told her. “Drink it on down.” The concoction was fizzy and sweet, like a cherry Coke. It wasn’t bad tasting.

Three months later Helen was rolled into the delivery room. The nausea had not let up during her pregnancy. She had gained only six pounds and never even had to wear maternity clothes. Six hours after her labor began, a “lusty cry” announced the entrance of her daughter, Barbara, into the world. The infant’s skin was so smooth and white she looked like a porcelain doll. The mother and her newborn were discharged five days later. Both seemed healthy.

The bizarre health problems that were to plague mother and daughter began several months later. Helen’s face swelled up and water blisters appeared on the right side. “You could draw a line right down through the middle of my face,” she remembered. Then her hair fell out and she began to tire easily. In the ensuing years she had two miscarriages. The internal hemorrhaging was so severe during the second one that she had to have sixteen blood transfusions. She now suffers from pernicious anemia and is extremely sensitive to sunlight.

Barbara also felt exhausted through most of her childhood and now suffers from an immune system disorder and skin cancer. When she was about eleven, the lymph nodes under her arms swelled inexplicably. “She was always really sleepy,” Helen remembered. “She’d come in from school in the afternoons and have to lay down and take a nap. The other
kids would say, ‘Why don’t you come out and play?’ and she’d say, ‘I will, after I take my nap.” ’

As it turns out, Helen was one of 829 women who passed through the prenatal clinic between roughly September 1945 and May of 1947 and were given the strange-tasting cocktails to drink. Like Helen, many of the women were led to believe that the drinks contained something nutritious that would benefit them and their babies. But nothing could have been farther from the truth. The drinks actually contained varying amounts of radioactive iron. Within an hour the material crossed the placenta and began circulating in the blood of their unborn infants.

Paul Hahn, an enthusiastic researcher in his thirties, may have looked down the hall and seen the rows of young female patients as he dashed back and forth between the clinic and his laboratory. He had arrived at Vanderbilt University in 1943 with a stack of published reports and five years’ experience using radioisotopes. He was five feet eleven inches tall, weighed 185 pounds, and was described by a colleague as “an energetic and competent investigator equipped with imagination and ingenuity and fired by an insatiable curiosity.”
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Hahn had been a protege of Stafford Warren’s at the University of Rochester, where he obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1936.
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There, he had collaborated on several experiments with William Bale, the dour-looking scientist who oversaw Strong Memorial Hospital’s metabolic ward, and Joseph Howland, the young Manhattan Project doctor who later said he injected Ebb Cade with plutonium. Hahn had also studied under Robley Evans at MIT. During the war he frequently attended Manhattan Project meetings in Oak Ridge, and after it ended he was recruited for Operation Crossroads. One of the first scientists to take advantage of the Atomic Energy Commission’s radioisotope distribution program, Hahn had received the largest number of radioisotope shipments in the country in 1947.

The radioactive iron experiment Hahn was doing at Vanderbilt was a subset of a large nutrition study.
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Partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the study focused on how a woman’s diet and nutrition would affect her pregnancy and delivery, and the condition of her infant. William Darby, a young nutritionist, was in charge of the overall study. Many decades later he said that one reason he undertook the study was because the poor living conditions, eating habits, and water supplies of
people living in the South at that time were equivalent to those found in underdeveloped countries. “There were signs on the roadside showing which towns had healthy water.”
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The radioactive iron experiment was simple and straightforward. During the first visit to the clinic, a baseline blood sample was drawn and physical exam conducted by William Darby or one of his colleagues.
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The radioactive iron was administered during the second visit, and on the third visit, blood samples were drawn from the women to measure how much iron had been absorbed. Hahn wrote in a scientific paper published several years later that anywhere from 200,000 to 1,000,000 “countable counts” per minute were administered.

Darby stated in a sworn deposition taken in 1994 that the radioactive mixture was prepared in Hahn’s office and brought to the clinic. He said researchers referred to the drinks as “cocktails” because that was the commonly used term.
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“We just used it. I mean, this is like—would you like to have a sweet?”

Darby told reporters that he was “certain” that the women were told the cocktails contained radioactive iron.
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But in his deposition taken several months later during a class-action lawsuit, he said, “We did not decide that we would not inform [the women]. We simply felt it was—felt it was unnecessary.…”
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“Is it your testimony, sir, that you and the planning committee didn’t decide to tell the women about the radioactive iron nor did you decide not to tell them?” Don Arbitblit, an attorney representing the women in the class-action lawsuit, asked.

“That’s right. Neither,” Darby responded.

Under questioning, Darby also stated that the radioactive iron had no therapeutic purpose and that he didn’t know much about radiobiology.
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“In fact, it was not my field,” he admitted.
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In the early stages of the experiment, Hahn conferred with Stafford Warren, who was still medical director of the Manhattan Project. It’s not known whether the two men specifically discussed the Vanderbilt experiment, but according to an entry in one of Warren’s notebooks, they discussed “isotopes.”
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Vanderbilt University was proud of the radioiron study and on December 13, 1946 issued a press release describing the experiment. Most of the radioactive iron came from the cyclotron at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the press release noted, “while a recent supply has been received at Vanderbilt from the Oak Ridge chain reacting uranium pile.”
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Officials in Oak Ridge had become increasingly concerned about the radioactive iron manufactured in their reactor. In mid-1947 they discovered the iron-59 being distributed for medical purposes contained more iron-55 than had been expected. Iron-55 was thought to be too hazardous to be administered to humans because it had a half-life of five years. That meant that it would take five years for half of the iron-55 molecules in any given amount to decay to a nonradioactive compound, five more years for half of the remaining iron-55 to decay, and so on. By contrast, iron-59 was believed to have a half-life of forty-seven days, which meant that it would return to a stable form more quickly and subject the body to less radiation.

Oak Ridge officials were aware that any iron-59 contaminated with the longer-lived isotope was dangerous because it subjected the body to “considerable radiation.” And Paul Hahn, even while the Vanderbilt experiment was ongoing, was advising a Florida doctor in 1947 not to treat his patients with radioactive iron.
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“Radioactive iron regardless of the amount of activity contained is, to my knowledge, of no value whatsoever in therapy,” he wrote.
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Hahn believed that the half-lives of both iron-55 and iron-59 were “far too long.” An isotope’s halflife, wrote Hahn:

If Hahn had any similar concerns about the radioactive iron administered to the pregnant women, no correspondence has yet been made public describing those concerns. He transferred to Nashville’s Meharry Medical College in 1948, about a year after the Vanderbilt study ended, and the women were largely forgotten. Many of the mothers and children exposed to the radioiron developed strange afflictions that were similar to those described by Helen Hutchison and her daughter. They lost their teeth and their hair. They developed bizarre rashes, bruises, strange blood disorders, anemia—and cancer.

Around Christmas of 1955, a young Nashville child named Carolyn Bucy developed a lump about the size of an orange on her upper thigh.
Her mother, Emma Craft, a pretty woman with small, delicate features, had gone to the Vanderbilt prenatal clinic in early March of 1946 to find out if she was pregnant. Vanderbilt doctors had delivered her other three daughters, and she thought Vanderbilt was the best hospital in the world. At that time, she was married to Floyd Bucy, a carpenter and musician who made five dollars on Saturday nights playing at the Grand Ole Opry.

After examining her, the doctors at the prenatal clinic told her she was indeed pregnant with her fourth child and instructed her to return seven days later. On her second visit, she testified in a videotaped deposition taken in 1994, doctors gave her the cocktail to drink. Her daughter, Carolyn, was then a thirteen-week-old fetus.