The Plutonium Files (54 page)

Significantly, many of the patients used in the TBI experiments suffered from “radioresistant” tumors, or solid cancers of the liver, pancreas, bladder, breast, and other parts of the body, which were usually treated with thousands of rads of local radiation. Total-body irradiation was normally not used on such cases because the doses necessary to destroy the tumors were so high that they could also kill the patients. Other types of cancers that have spread through the body, such as leukemia and lymphoma, are “radiosensitive,” and TBI was considered an appropriate treatment at that time and is still used today. But scientists preferred to use patients with radioresistant tumors because often their blood counts were nearly normal and the radiation effects were not obscured by the products released by the widespread destruction of tumor cells.

Blood cells, chromosomes, amino acids, enzymes, plasma proteins, and lipids of the irradiated patients were intensively studied. But the
military doctors never found a reliable marker and ultimately had to rely on the same symptoms of radiation sickness they had first chronicled in the criticality victims and the Japanese bombing victims—onset, severity, and duration of nausea, vomiting, anorexia, and hair loss. These are to this day the best indicators of the degree of radiation to which a person has been exposed.

Air Force leaders had seen the handwriting on the wall long before Shields Warren gave the official AEC thumbs-down to total-body irradiation experiments on healthy volunteers. So they simply did an end run around him. While the TBI proposal was still winding its way through the Pentagon’s chain of command and being debated at meetings like the one in which Warren took his firm stand, officials from the School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, began looking for a research hospital where they could piggyback simple coordination and psychological tests onto medical treatments in which patients were irradiated for their diseases. Air Force officials began discussing the studies in March 1950 with Randolph Lee Clark, the director of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Clark, a handsome, athletic man who had been the National Amateur Middleweight Wrestling Champion, was no stranger to the School of Aviation Medicine, having been its director of surgical research prior to his hospital appointment.

The contractual details with M.D. Anderson were finalized in October, a month before General James Cooney and Shields Warren locked horns. Explaining the M.D. Anderson contract to his superiors at the Air Material Command, a young lieutenant said the experimental data was “urgently required” by the U.S. Air Force in connection with the NEPA Project:

(Although Shields Warren was adamantly opposed to TBI experiments on healthy volunteers, he apparently saw nothing wrong with the School of Aviation Medicine’s planned research on sick cancer patients. In 1953, a year after Warren resigned his position at the AEC, he became a medical consultant to the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program, the successor to the nuclear-propelled aircraft project, and was present at an organizational meeting in May of 1953 when M.D. Anderson’s TBI experiment was discussed.
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There is no record of his posing any objection to the study. Other consultants included Manhattan Project veterans Andrew Dowdy and Simeon Cantril and MIT’s Robley Evans.)

The School of Aviation Medicine assigned one of its newest Paperclip arrivals, Herbert Gerstner, to the TBI project. A stocky physiologist with a saberlike scar on his left cheek, Gerstner had been smuggled out of Germany’s Russian Zone in 1949 and brought to San Antonio, Texas, where a number of his German colleagues were already working.
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By the time he arrived, most of his countrymen had already adapted to their new homeland. The fiery food, the jalapenos, salsa, and chorizo-and-egg breakfast tacos took some getting used to, and when temperatures soared toward the 100-degree mark, many of the scientists undoubtedly yearned for the cool cities of northern Europe. But through the efforts of the school’s commandant, Harry G. Armstrong, a disarming medical doctor with an infectious enthusiasm, much of the hostility and resentment aimed at the foreigners following World War II had faded away. Intelligent,
circumspect, and hardworking, the Germans had quietly resumed their research in the nondescript laboratories at Randolph Air Force Base.

There were at least twenty German Paperclip specialists at the School when Gerstner and his wife, Helga, a lovely green-eyed blonde sixteen years his junior, arrived in San Antonio in January of 1950. Hubertus Strughold, the intellectual leader of the small band of German specialists and the man whose own retinal burn had inspired the early flashblindness studies at the Nevada Test Site, was probably among those who greeted the couple. Strughold had helped Armstrong select the German scientists recruited for the school and no doubt was also aware of some of the circumstances behind the couple’s escape.

Gerstner’s personnel records, which are on file at the National Archives, show that he was a member of the Hitler Youth from 1935 to 1938, but say nothing about whether he was a member of the Nazi Party. His wife, Helga, said in an interview in 1995 that her husband was not a party member. But
The Texas Observer
reported in 1997 that Gerstner became a party member in May 1937 and was assigned the membership number 5815500 “when the party re-opened its ranks to Nazis who had proven themselves active and devoted.”
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Drafted into the German Medical Corps in 1939, Gerstner was first dispatched to France as a soldier and then worked as a doctor on military hospital trains in Russia.
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He was assigned to the Academy for Military Medicine in Berlin in 1940, where he began investigating the effects of loud sound on guinea pigs. The research was stimulated by the constant shelling that German soldiers were receiving in their bunkers. As a result of his work, Gerstner had developed a list of sound intensities and knew how long humans could be exposed to those sounds without suffering permanent hearing damage.

Two years later, Gerstner was transferred to the University of Leipzig, where he focused on the effects of electricity on animal and human skin. At Leipzig, he studied the victims of “electrical accidents” and concluded that they died from an extraordinary increase in blood pressure when blood was squeezed out of peripheral vessels and into their hearts and abdominal cavity. In subsequent studies he noted that “electrical skin resistance” was higher in cancer patients. “It has not been investigated, however, whether a diagnostic method for cancer can be developed from this. (Resumption of work on this problem is difficult since all statistical data have been lost due to war events),” Gerstner wrote.

Gerstner had just begun working at the University of Griefswald in northern Germany’s Russian Zone in 1949 when an intermediary for the Central Intelligence Agency contacted him, his wife said.
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The couple made inquiries about the visitor through a trusted friend. Then Gerstner camouflaged himself and went to the CIA’s offices in West Berlin. “As a citizen of Russian-occupied Germany, you can’t go to the CIA in West Berlin and think that you’re going to be safe coming back or not disappear or whatever,” Helga Gerstner said. “So they indeed camouflaged him and made him look like an American GI. They insisted he had to come there in person because none of this information would be given out other than one on one.”

A CIA official explained Operation Paperclip to Gerstner, but the scientist was worried that the Americans were more interested in denying him to the Soviets and were planning to “dump” him in the United States. So he again camouflaged himself as an American GI and went to Heidelberg where he was able to confirm that there was, in fact, a job waiting for him in the United States.

The Gerstners were flown from Berlin to Frankfurt by a military aircraft in a snowstorm around Christmas of 1949. From there they took a train to Landshut, Bavaria, the collection point for Paperclip scientists. A telegram dated December 27 stated that Gerstner was “available for shipment to U.S. in Jan. 50.”

Gerstner was one of thirty-four Paperclip specialists employed by the School of Aviation Medicine.
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The Army and the Navy, even some private companies, also recruited the scientists. At least 1,600 German specialists and their dependents were imported to the United States by Paperclip and its successor projects through the early 1970s.
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Many of the nation’s most brilliant scientists, among them Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe, opposed the importation of German researchers.
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The Manhattan Project’s Leslie Groves also had warned against letting Germans worm their way into America’s atomic energy programs. But the American military could not be dissuaded. Not only did the Army, Navy, and Air Force crave the Germans’ ingenious inventions and scientific data, but, just as Gerstner suspected, they also wanted to keep the information and the scientists from falling into Soviet hands. By 1950, less than a year after the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb, security concerns about Nazis had been subsumed by massive preparations for nuclear war. Communism, not Nazism, had become the greatest threat to the free world. “To continue to treat Nazi affiliations as significant considerations has been aptly phrased as ‘beating a dead Nazi
horse,’ ” Bosquet Wev, a Navy captain who directed Project Paperclip, wrote in a 1948 letter to the State Department.
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Ostensibly Gerstner was recruited for the School of Aviation Medicine because of his expertise in acoustics. Instead he was assigned to the new radiation project at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Gerstner had no expertise to speak of when it came to ionizing radiation. “He really got into the radiation effects area once he came to the School of Aviation Medicine,” Helga Gerstner said. “It was a field of interest to him but it was not his first and foremost one.”

The M.D. Anderson was Houston’s pride and joy. Named after a wealthy cotton broker who left his fortune to “good works” and administered by the University of Texas, by the early 1950s the hospital was rapidly becoming one of the most respected research institutions in the country. Gone were the large noisy wards and drab corridors of yesteryear. Pictures were changed often in the private and semiprivate rooms, but if a patient couldn’t stand a painting any longer, he could turn it around to a “contrasting but harmonious” color.
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The exterior of the hospital was covered by an inch of pink Georgia marble.

Most of the patients used in the TBI study were outpatients capable of “light tasks” and many apparently were African Americans, according to the minutes of a 1954 Air Force Research Council meeting. The purpose of the TBI treatment, wrote Gerstner and two coexperimenters, was to find out whether TBI would provide some “palliative” relief from cancer symptoms.

During the first phase of the study, 233 patients were exposed to doses ranging from 15 to 200 roentgens. During the second phase, an additional 30 patients were exposed to a single dose of 200 roentgens. School of Aviation Medicine scientists had found the first part of the experiment in which the patients were given small doses “unproductive.”
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But when cancer specialists at M.D. Anderson began increasing their doses, the military researchers felt they, too, were beginning to make headway.

The patients who were given 200 roentgens purportedly had diseases that were so far advanced that conventional treatments offered no benefit. Yet, they were still ambulatory and clear-headed enough to take the battery of pre- and postirradiation tests prepared by the school’s doctors. Three psychomotor tests were administered before the patients were irradiated: The Air Force SAM Complex Coordination Test required participants
to coordinate movement of a stick and rudder bar to match the position of three red lights and three green lights.
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The Two-Hand Coordination Test required patients to operate two crank handles to keep a cursor positioned on a moving target. And the Rotary Pursuit Test required participants to follow a rotating target with the tip of a stylus. The tests were repeated the day after the TBI treatment and again nine days later. “These tests were chosen because of their proven relationship to the skills required in basic pilotry,” School of Aviation Medicine scientists stated.

Just as Shields Warren had predicted, the patients’ response to the radiation varied greatly. A thirty-three-year-old minister who was irradiated with 200 roentgens went home and had a meal and his customary one-hour nap. Then he worked at his ministerial duties till 9:00
P.M.
and ten hours a day on the succeeding days. At the other end of the spectrum was a young man suffering from testicular cancer. After he was irradiated with 200 roentgens, he developed such severe nausea and vomiting that he had to be transported by stretcher and required a liter of intravenous saline solution.