The Plutonium Files (5 page)

Despite an occasional glitch, Lawrence’s showmanship paid off handsomely, and the money started flowing in from foundations and wealthy patrons. One of his earliest supporters was Lewis Strauss, a New York businessman who would go on to become a close friend of Lawrence’s and an important figure in the Atomic Energy Commission. “We thought or hoped there might be a specific isotope for every part of the body,” Strauss said.
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“I suppose I had the medieval notion of the fencing thrust, or of a magic bullet that would strike straight at the disease.”

John Lawrence injected his first leukemia patient with radio-phosphorous on Christmas Eve of 1937. Kenneth Scott, a pudgy, young scientist who worked in the laboratory at the time and whose recollections of many of the key personnel and events of the Rad Lab are tinged with bitterness, described the Christmas Eve treatment as a “big grandstand act” designed to attract money and fame for the Lawrence brothers.
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But Scott’s views were not shared by everyone. According to records and interviews with a number of doctors who were practicing medicine at the time, radiophosphorous was genuinely thought to have some therapeutic value for the treatment of certain kinds of leukemia and blood disorders.

Indeed, Ernest and John Lawrence believed enough in the curative power of the neutrons produced by the cyclotron to use it to treat their mother, Gunda. The sixty-five-year-old woman was put on a train for California as soon as the doctor informed her she had cancer of the pelvis. After first undergoing X-ray therapy at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco, located across the bay, she was transported to the Rad Lab, where her sons arranged for a neutron beam from the cyclotron to be turned upon her. Gradually her health improved and she lived for another eighteen years. “She was the very first to be given neutron treatment.
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It was kept completely confidential,” an unidentified physicist told author Davis.

Notwithstanding the apparently successful treatment of Gunda Lawrence, many medical doctors at the University of California Hospital in
San Francisco viewed the use of radioisotopes and neutrons by the Berkeley experimenters with skepticism. A few UCSF doctors, however, became intrigued by the research going on at the Berkeley Rad Lab. UCSF physicians Robert Stone and Joseph Hamilton were among those who would find the Lawrences’ work inspiring. In fact, even before John Lawrence had performed his much-ballyhooed phosphorous experiment, Stone and Hamilton had quietly injected two leukemia patients with radioactive sodium.
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According to a scientific paper written by the two men, the radioactive material did not seem to alter the course of the patients’ disease, but neither did it cause any severe side effects. There is no indication whether the patients knew what was being administered or gave their permission.

The sodium experiment, performed in 1936, would mark the beginning of a long relationship between the two men. Stone was nearly a decade older than Hamilton, but he said in a tape-recorded memoir that it was Hamilton who “stimulated me into working with him on radioisotopes.”
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Stone was a small, benign-looking radiologist who wore glasses and had a thick head of gray hair. Although he had a gentlemanly demeanor and was well liked by his colleagues, he grew extremely angry when anyone challenged his medical judgment.

Born in Canada in 1895, Stone went to Europe with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces during World War I, was wounded, and returned to Canada, where he resumed his education.
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By 1924 he had a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a medical degree from the University of Toronto. He joined the faculty at the University of California at San Francisco in 1928, becoming the hospital’s first full-time radiologist. Almost immediately, he was drawn into the research across the bay at the Rad Lab. “Ernest Lawrence was a great stimulus to our department from the very beginning,” Stone recalled in his tape-recorded memoir.
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Like the Lawrence brothers, Stone believed that neutrons had great potential for deep-seated cancers. More biologically effective than X rays by a factor of ten or more, neutrons interact readily with human tissue, causing a series of physical and chemical changes in the body.

With the help of a young scientist named Paul Aebersold, Stone began using the neutron beam from the Rad Lab’s cyclotron for his human experiments. Between December of 1939 and September of 1941, he bombarded some 128 patients with neutrons.
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They were irradiated in a small lead-lined chamber adjacent to the cyclotron. Some of the patients came from the UCSF’s outpatient clinic and were in good or fair condition. Others came from the “Visible Tumor Clinic” and were
deemed to be suffering from cancers that could not by cured by normal surgical or X-ray treatment. Still others were apparently well-to-do individuals who had been referred to Stone by other doctors.

At first, everything seemed to go well. As Kenneth Scott recalled of that period, “Dr. Stone’s wealthy patients used to roll up with chauffeurs and their iced champagne.
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In the laboratory they had a big field day that afternoon; we all got smacked on champagne and I thought it was wonderful.”

As the experiment progressed, however, it became clear that Stone had underestimated the biological effects of neutrons. Although they are effective at killing cancer cells, they are difficult to control and can cause a lot of collateral damage to healthy cells as well. Nearly half of the patients died within six months of the treatment period. Many of the subjects suffered horribly from the side effects. Some developed gruesome skin damage that one radiobiologist likened to armor plates. Others eventually died of malnutrition rather than their underlying disease because they had such painful ulcers in their mouths they couldn’t eat.
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Although Stone acknowledged the statistics were discouraging, he nevertheless recommended that neutron therapy be continued because the neutrons did shrink tumors and, in some cases, caused them to disappear altogether.

While Robert Stone was discovering the good and bad effects of neutrons, his young sidekick, Joseph Hamilton, continued to explore the medical possibilities of radioisotopes. According to Scott, Hamilton had become interested in radioisotopes almost by accident. Scott was analyzing mouse tissue at his laboratory bench one day when Hamilton, dark-haired and smooth-looking, slipped onto the stool behind him and asked him what he was doing. “He was just a young resident in neurology interested in doing something interesting,” Scott remembered.
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Scott later worked for Hamilton but the two men never became close friends: “He was the kind of guy who gets his zipper stuck in the men’s room, he won’t let anybody help him.
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I caught him in the men’s room one day and he couldn’t get his zipper up, and he wouldn’t let me help him with it. So I got him a pair of scissors. I guess he cut himself out of there one way or another.”

To the casual observer, Hamilton seemed like any other affluent, urbane doctor; he enjoyed fine wine, drove a convertible, played poker. But documents written by Hamilton himself as well as recollections of his colleagues reveal a suspicious and brooding side to his personality. As his hairline receded and pouches formed beneath his eyes, he developed
a scowling and remote appearance that seemed a more accurate reflection of the inner man.

Hamilton was trained as a medical doctor to heal the sick, yet he recoiled from human touch. He was taught to respect the sanctity of human life, yet he plotted ways to poison the food and water supply of enemies with radioactive materials. Anne de Gruchy Low-Beer, a contemporary and wife of one of his colleagues, said, “He didn’t have any warm friendships.
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He was not the kind of person to make them.” Patricia Durbin, a Berkeley scientist who as an undergraduate washed glassware in Hamilton’s lab and is to this day one of his most devoted fans, saw the same qualities but in a more positive light. Hamilton, she said, “would have been very much at home in mid-Victorian Sweden, hard bound, bound by rules of conduct, narrow, not to show in public that you had either emotions or affection.”
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Hamilton’s guarded nature may have been a defense mechanism developed in response to the probing eyes of his father, Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, an author, scientist, and avid experimenter. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, the elder Hamilton was a “psychopathologist” who specialized in the study of human sexuality. Hamilton Sr. moved to southern California sometime before 1914 and began treating many well-known personalities, including playwright Eugene O’Neill.
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In a live-oak woods in Santa Barbara, the elder Hamilton also maintained a spacious laboratory where he did observational experiments on monkeys and baboons. He would place various combinations of animals—even different species—in cages together and then record their behavior and sexual couplings in steamy, overwrought language. Joseph Hamilton was an only child and undoubtedly served as an experimental subject for his father—at least on an observational level. In a discussion about the suckling behavior of animals, the elder Hamilton once wrote that his son had sucked both his thumb and his Teddy bear until early adolescence.
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Hamilton attended schools in Santa Barbara and then enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley.
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He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and then crossed the bay, where he obtained his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco in 1936. During medical school, he married painter Leah Rinne, who had had rheumatic fever as a teenager and suffered from ill health for much of her life. The couple owned a log cabin in the Sierra Nevada where Hamilton liked to pan for gold.
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Although Hamilton’s colleagues thought he was a bright and imaginative scientist, he didn’t have the patience for painstaking research nor
did he possess the originality that produces great scientific discoveries. “We considered him a kind of explorer,” Stafford Warren remembered years later.
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“He didn’t want to do any of these long-term, big-scaled things. He was not that kind of an operator. He had a mind that was very quick and very imaginative.” Toward the end of his life, he told Patricia Durbin on several occasions, “what he liked to do was get in there early and skim off the cream and go on to something else.”
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Like Ernest Lawrence, Hamilton often gave public talks about the benefits of radioisotopes. Instead of sodium, he used radioactive iodine, which has a longer half-life and concentrates in the thyroid gland. As for the guinea pig, Hamilton used himself. He would pour the radioactive iodine into a water glass and then hold a Geiger counter up to the glass so the audience could hear the clicks. “Then he would walk across the room and put it up to himself and there were no clicks,” recalled Patricia Durbin.
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“He would drink the water, and in order to demonstrate how valuable this tool was with respect to the thyroid metabolism, at the end of his lecture he would put the Geiger counter up to his neck—lots of clicks.”

Hamilton was cold, sober, serious-minded. Yet, at the edges of his life, there was a giddy recklessness. He immersed himself in radiation, gulping down “radioactive cocktails” and flying through radioactive clouds in the postwar years.
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But where he really pushed his luck was around the cyclotron. He raced into the bombardment area to grab samples while the room was still radioactive and slouched against the hot, ticking parts of the machine with a nonchalance that radiologist Earl Miller still found staggering decades later. “I tried to talk to him about the danger,” Miller told interviewers from the Department of Energy in 1994. “This was massive doses of radiation that he exposed himself to.”
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Perhaps as he watched the delicate starlike shapes from plutonium emerge on film, or when he looked up from a microscope late at night in the stillness of the laboratory, the knowledge suddenly came to Hamilton that he was carrying the irradiated cells of his own death within him or, as colleague Kenneth Scott bluntly put it, that he “had already had it.”

Hamilton was one of the many Manhattan Project veterans who often boasted after the war about how safe the nuclear weapons industry was, but he was to become one of its first casualties.
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Sometime in the 1950s, he grew pale and wan, plagued by infections, bleeding gums, and bruises. He had contracted a fatal form of leukemia, a disease that can be induced by exposure to radiation. His sister-in-law, Christine Alan, said Hamilton diagnosed the illness himself. John Gofman, a Berkeley
scientist who has written extensively on the effects of small doses of radiation, said Hamilton “looked like a ghost” after he became ill.
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Patricia Durbin added, “I would be willing to bet that his [radiation exposure] would have been if not the highest, among the highest ever recorded in Berkeley.”
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Through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, the Rad Lab continued to attract eager new students interested in working with one of the great masters, Ernest Lawrence or J. Robert Oppenheimer, or with the lesser-known physicians who were using the side products of the cyclotron to forge a new discipline that came to be known as nuclear medicine. The students came not only from California but from other parts of the United States and even Europe.

One of the pilgrims was Hymer Friedell, an extremely bright and talented young doctor with a medical degree and a doctorate in radiology from the University of Minnesota. Friedell began hearing about Berkeley while he was working in New York at Memorial Hospital (today known as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Institute) and thought he had better get himself to California. “I wrote to Dr. Stone and asked him if he would accept me.
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And he did. So I came and became a member of the staff.”