The Plutonium Files (39 page)

Seven times Gordon had wriggled under the barbed-wire fence and run toward home, a place that in his child’s mind still represented warmth and security despite its total chaos. His escapes usually lasted until dark. He was afraid of the dark, and when night came on, he turned himself in to the local police. A state car was dispatched from Fernald to bring him back to the institution. “You’re a state boy, Gordon,” Malcolm J. Farrell, the school superintendent and physician, would tell him. “Nobody wants you. You’re gonna die here.” Still haunted by the murky dark rooms, the smells, the human suffering he witnessed, Gordon began to believe it. “It was like a Hitler camp, I tell you,” he said.

Into this dreary march of days came the Science Club. The name
alone conveyed the kind of belonging unwanted boys such as Gordon yearned for. The brainchild of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Science Club offered Gordon and his young friends a legal way to escape from the hated institution for a few hours. The youngsters were taken to the beach, to ball games at Fenway Park and Christmas parties at the MIT faculty club. They got Mickey Mouse watches and armbands that showed they were wanted. But these weren’t the kind of boys who got something for nothing. In return for the trips and the trinkets, the boys had to eat the specially prepared oatmeal scooped into their bowls each morning. They also had to submit to X rays and blood tests and collect their urine and stool samples in special containers for the scientists. The Science Club, they would learn many years later, was never designed to assuage their loneliness. It was part of a scheme concocted by MIT scientists to get the boys to participate in their radiation experiments.

Like Paul Hahn and his colleagues in Tennessee, researchers in Massachusetts had readily embraced the use of radioisotopes. Robley Evans, the founder of MIT’s Radioactivity Center, and one of the world’s experts on radium poisoning, was closely involved in overseeing the preparations for experiments at the school.

Between 1946 and 1953, seventy-four Fernald boys were used in experiments in which trace amounts of radioactive iron or calcium were mixed into their oatmeal.
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The function of the initial experiments was to find out whether phytates—chemicals found in cereals that can combine with iron and calcium to form insoluble compounds—were robbing the children of important minerals. The oatmeal was scooped out of square metal pans into the boys’ bowls. Then the milk, foamy and cold, was poured over the cereal. Sometimes the radioactive isotopes were mixed into the cereal and sometimes they were mixed into the milk. The scientists had impressed upon the attendants how important it was that the boys clean their bowls. “You had to drink the milk. That was the thing,” Gordon remembered. There was nothing unique about the MIT study at Fernald. Indeed, the school had been a veritable laboratory for medical researchers from nearby Boston for many years.

Founded in 1848 by Samuel Gridley Howe, Fernald was the first permanent school for the “feeble-minded” in North America.
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Howe was a social reformer who named one of his children after his good friend Florence Nightingale, and was guided through the prisons and institutions
of England by none other than Charles Dickens.
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His wife was Julia Gridley Howe, a famous suffragette and outspoken opponent of slavery.
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Edward W. Emerson, the physician son of Ralph Waldo Emerson, at one time was a member of the school’s board of trustees.
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Howe believed that retarded children could be rehabilitated through education, fresh air, and work. But as the decades passed and the political climate changed, the institution evolved into a very different kind of school from the gentle learning environment Howe had envisioned. Civil servants replaced the high-minded reformers. The long periods of prayer and classroom lessons shrank to a few desultory hours per day. The goal was no longer to help the mentally retarded but to protect society from them. Walter E. Fernald, a respected figure in psychiatry and superintendent for whom the school eventually was renamed, illustrated the harsh sentiments of the era in a speech:

In addition to the mentally handicapped, Fernald also became a dumping ground for troublesome children and adults deemed unacceptable by society or the Massachusetts courts. Prostitutes and alcoholics, “deviants and defects,” children from large immigrant families, and even youngsters found by the judiciary to be too stubborn were shipped to Fernald.
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In the early twentieth century, as scientific research into the causes and treatment of “mental diseases” began to expand, doctors and scientists from the ivy-covered schools in Boston began to take an interest in the disabled residents living in the institution twenty to twenty-five miles
away. Here was an ideal population—a captive population—that could be studied in detail. Here were humans suffering from such rare physical deformities and diseases that they were regularly paraded before photographers who snapped their pictures for medical textbooks. The diversity and range of ailments was so great that researchers began referring to the brick institution as the “zoo.”

A laboratory was set up in one of the buildings.
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Downstairs was the morgue where autopsies were performed and human organs stored in jars of formaldehyde. Two air-conditioning repairmen inadvertently discovered several “artifacts” from that era on a summer day in June 1986 in a storage room at what is now called the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center on the grounds of the Fernald campus.
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In the unused storage room, the repairmen found two enamel cooking pots eleven inches wide and nine inches high. On the lid of one of the crocks, which was caked with dust and “old brown spatters,” the word “Pedro” was written in orange grease paint. Inside was a decapitated human head in formalin solution. The head was covered with gray and brown scalp hair about one inch long. All the upper teeth were missing and a stubbly beard covered the face. The other crock, labeled “Sexto,” also contained a human head.

According to documents and news reports, the heads were from prisoners decapitated by General Francisco Franco in Spain and had been brought into the United States in the 1950s by Harvard neurosurgeon Hannibal Hamlin, who was researching a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Hamlin subsequently turned the heads over to Paul Yakovlev, one of Fernald’s former researchers. Yakovlev had acquired a collection of 1,000 brains, which eventually was given to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. He and his successors had tried on numerous occasions to give the heads away to a medical institution but were unsuccessful. Eventually the heads were put in storage and forgotten.

Many human experiments were conducted at Fernald, including lobotomies and vaccine studies for diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles.
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New drugs were used in nasal discharge studies on children with Down syndrome. Prepubescent girls and boys were subjected to hormone studies and biopsies. Scientists also used the institutionalized population for a “synthetic food” study.

The radioactive iron used in the initial cereal studies was produced by MIT’s cyclotron, but scientists had to go through the AEC’s radioisotope distribution program in Oak Ridge to obtain the radioactive calcium. While the AEC Subcomittee on Human Applications discouraged
the use of radioactive material in normal children, it allowed larger doses to be used on patients institutionalized for “mental inadequacy” and on “moribund” patients.

At Fernald, for example, the AEC subcommittee not only approved the use of trace amounts of radioactive calcium for the boys in the Science Club, but also gave MIT scientists the go-ahead to administer a vastly larger amount of radioactive calcium to a young boy described as a “moribund gargoyle patient.” Gargoylism is an archaic term used at that time to describe patients suffering from Hurler-Hunter syndrome, a metabolic disorder that causes severe skeletal abnormalities, dwarfism, and mental retardation.
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The child was two months shy of his tenth birthday and weighed thirty-three pounds. He was completely unaware of his surroundings and could communicate only with a “birdlike whine.” Clemens Benda, Fernald’s medical director and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, asked the AEC subcommittee for permission to inject the child with 50 microcuries of radioactive calcium, but a published scientific paper later stated the child was actually injected with 80 microcuries. Urine, stool, and blood samples were obtained from the boy at set intervals. Cerebrospinal fluid also was collected periodically through spinal punctures. The boy died sixteen days following the injection, apparently from his disease. Bone samples, teeth, and other body parts were removed during an autopsy and studied for calcium deposition.

At Robley Evans’s insistence, researchers had spent a year conducting radioactive calcium studies on rats, guinea pigs, and dogs before the tracer doses were administered to the Fernald youths. While doing the animal experiments, the MIT group discovered that radioactive calcium concentrated in certain parts of the skeleton, creating “hot spots” that were six to ten times higher than surrounding bone.
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Nevertheless, Evans believed the calcium doses targeted for the boys would cause no damage. Each youth was to be given the equivalent of one-hundredth of a microcurie of radium. Since “deleterious effects” from radium did not appear until one microcurie was retained in the body, the proposed radioactive calcium doses were “perfectly safe,” he assured the AEC’s Paul Abersold. (During a classified meeting on fallout years later, Evans reported that boys at the Fernald school had been used in the radioactive calcium studies and noted that “additional studies might be possible there.”)
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The Fernald boys were thrilled to have been among those selected to eat the specially prepared breakfasts. Gordon Shattuck believed the
studies were for the 4-H club. Others thought they were participating in a vitamin study. Although they didn’t like the X rays, the blood tests, or the collection of their urine and stool specimens, they endured the inconveniences because the payoff was admittance to the Science Club. The scientists viewed the Science Club as an innocent way to repay the boys for the minor inconveniences suffered during the experiments. But the outings and gifts were not available to other children confined to the institution and were viewed as a “potentially coercive factor” by a Massachusetts task force that investigated the experiments in 1994.

The task force also uncovered documents showing that the school provided misleading information to the parents about the experiment.
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In one 1953 letter, radioactivity is not mentioned and the researcher implied the studies would benefit the boys. “Dear Parent,” the letter begins:

With the possible exception of the experiment on the “moribund” patient, most contemporary scientists maintain the radioactive iron and radioactive calcium used in the experiments delivered extremely small doses of radiation to the youths. When considered against the grim backdrop of the school itself and the other more invasive studies, the radiation experiments seemed almost harmless. Still, there was something opportunistic about scientists from a prestigious university using institutionalized boys into whose lives so much misfortune had fallen.

For Gordon and the other boys who participated in the experiments, the years passed slowly. They worked in the buildings, labored on the farm, and occasionally scraped together enough players for a baseball
game. The thin, frightened children became young men. Sometimes the parents came and took their sons and daughters back home. More often the youths were “paroled” into the community at the age of eighteen, nineteen, or twenty. They had learned how to reweave chairs, cut meat, make key chains, wallets, brooms, coat hangers, and mattresses. But the institution had not taught them to read or write, a deficiency that practically guaranteed a lifetime of low-paying jobs. Some former residents “rehabilitated” themselves by attending night school after they were discharged. Eventually the memories of Fernald faded or were deliberately banished as the boys married and started families. Many never spoke of their boyhood at Fernald because of the stigma of mental retardation that it carried. None of them ever gave a second thought to the special breakfasts they had consumed so long ago.