Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
The Plutonium Files (61 page)
Dale Hetland said in a deposition that he underwent a vasectomy without any local anesthetic because an inmate with whom he had had a fist fight filled a syringe with sterile water instead of Novocain. “It hurt bad and I complained to the doctor at the time that it hurt, and he said it shouldn’t hurt, and I said it did hurt.”
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Hetland was irradiated twice, underwent twenty-four biopsies, and was injected twice in the testicles
with tritiated thymidine. “They brought a little box in, a little tin box or a lead box with a handle on it.
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And when I asked what that was, they said it had a syringe with some radiation in it. And he explained to me that he was going to inject it into me. And he said it wouldn’t hurt me or nothing, it would just sting a little bit. Which wasn’t the truth. It stung a whole lot and hurt a whole lot.” Hetland said he developed degenerative bone disease of the spine and lost part of his stomach as a result of the radiation. He wrote in 1985: “It was no better than the experiments conducted by the Germans on prisoners in concentration camps in my opinion—this experiment on me with live radiation has caused me over twenty years of pain and it has nearly destroyed my body.”
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Another inmate, Art Clawson, told a reporter for the
Oregon Times Magazine,
“I spent years in jail, and I’ve never done a crime like these experiments.
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The only word I can think of is crime. When you start playing with people’s physical well-being, their body and emotions, that’s got to be one of the worst laws you can break.”
Many of the convicts also said that the inmates operated the X-ray machine. “I operated the control panel myself,” Baxter Hignite said when questioned under oath about the experiment.
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“Did you set the dial for the amount of radiation that was to be administered?” an attorney asked.
“No. Usually there would be another inmate do that.”
“Who was that?”
“Well, there’s been several of them over the years.…”
“You say that these men set the amount of radiation?”
“Yes. And they assisted in the same ways that I have too.”
“Were there occasions when only inmate technicians were in the control room?”
“Yes.”
“Was that the normal procedure?”
“No. Usually there was a doctor in the hospital. Dr. Heller or one of his designates. Dr. Warner, Dr. Howieson.”
“Were there ever occasions when there were no doctors in the immediate area where this was taking place?”
“Yes.”
“While someone was being radiated?”
“Yes.”
The men who participated in the Heller program said they did it for the money, pure and simple. The payments seemed like a pittance to outsiders. But to convicts with no money, friends, or family, the Heller
program was a gold mine and the payments undoubtedly constituted a coercive factor in the informed consent process. Prisoners at that time received twenty-five cents a day in wages. Just for being on the Heller program, they got five dollars a month, which was the equivalent of twenty days of work. A biopsy on one testicle brought in ten dollars, equal to forty days’ pay. And the hundred-dollar payment for the vasectomy was the equivalent of 400 days of work.
“So whenever you needed some money you would ask for a biopsy?”
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an attorney asked Dale Hetland.
“Yeah, I would like to have had one every month if I could have had one, for the money. I didn’t like them. I liked the money.”
The AEC established an advisory committee composed of radiation consultants to oversee both the Heller and Paulsen programs. The committee met in Seattle in 1963, 1965, and 1967. The AEC commissioners themselves were briefed on the experiments in 1968 when Glenn Seaborg was chairman.
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The function of the Seattle meetings, according to one AEC document, was to conduct a “penetrating” review of the two experiments with “the view being the opportunity to repeat or extend this type of work probably will not occur again soon, and that every effort should be made to assure project objectives.”
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Walter Snyder, an Oak Ridge scientist who attended the first meeting, likened the risks from the experiment to “perhaps smoking, being overweight, etc.”
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Following the first meeting, Heller was encouraged to study the effects of radiation on the male chromosomes, a complex and difficult endeavor in which he had little experience. The AEC also was interested in the effects of low chronic doses of radiation on the testes. Heller subsequently irradiated the testicles of one convict over an eleven-week period with five rads of radiation per week. He remarked in his progress report for 1965–1966 that small chronic doses delivered over a long period of time caused more damage than the same amount of radiation delivered at once.
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By 1968 the AEC knew that as little as eight rads produced a detectable decrease in sperm counts.
The AEC’s Paul Henshaw visited the Oregon State Prison on July 21, 1964. On the day of his visit, Heller zapped his first subject with 600 rads: a forty-nine-year-old convict and the oldest man in the program. In a memo to his files, Henshaw said nothing about that procedure but described in glowing terms the cooperative attitude of the inmates and prison officials:
It was apparent at once that there was indeed an attitude of eagerness about the work—a feeling of pride about being able to participate in the investigative program.
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Participants were seen to assist in record keeping, management of program schedules and equipment, and even in doing some of the technical work (e.g. sperm counts). It was obvious, also, that whatever elements of derision associated with the necessary sexual aspects, which can so easily become a feature, were either nonexistent, essentially, or had been overcome. The men seemed to be proud of their part in a scientific program and pleased with the prospect of vasectomy as a final result. Actually, as Dr. Heller manages the selection of subjects for participation, they must express a desire and actually ask for a vasectomy. Of interest is the fact that some of the participants have willingly agreed to accept dosages that will produce some degree of scrotal skin burn. This seems clearly understood and anticipated as a matter of routine. After seeing the participants, the writer was taken to meet Warden Clarence T. Gladden. He was matter-of-fact in his manner and his reference to the study being promoted. He gave no indication of dissatisfaction concerning it. Although matter-of-fact in manner, he expressed a feeling that scientific studies, such as the one being performed by Dr. Heller, actually exerts a favorable influence on prison life. While he did not say as much directly, he made the writer feel that he was—the Warden—pleased that the Atomic Energy Commission is maintaining direct contact with the work he is promoting in his institution.
Around Christmas of 1964, Heller got a letter from Douglas Grahn, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory who cochaired a panel formed in 1961 to evaluate radiation exposure during manned space flights. The panel was reconstituted in 1964 to reevaluate the biological problems of space radiation when NASA began considering flights lasting from two weeks to a year or more.
In his letter, Grahn said the space panel (which included a number of old hands, among them Shields Warren, Wright Langham, James Nickson, and Clarence Lushbaugh) was concerned about radiation damage to the testicles of astronauts. He asked Heller if he would be interested in sharing his information as a consultant to the panel. An Oak Ridge doctor, Grahn confided, “indicated you do have some very critical
information for our consideration, and we certainly hope that you will be able to help us one way or another.”
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Eleven days later Heller sent Grahn a three-page letter outlining how various radiation doses affected the male testes and sperm development. “Have you or your panel any suggestions regarding other information you should like to have, or other parameters that might be worth studying?” Heller queried.
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“This opportunity afforded to us, which may or may not be repeated or continued, should be made to yield the greatest possible pertinent information.”
The following year Heller attended two meetings of the Space Radiation Study Panel at the National Academy of Sciences headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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Ironically, after military and civilian experts had spent many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, Heller believed he had found the ideal dosimeter: human testicles. Heller told NASA officials that he could estimate precisely the radiation doses received by astronauts if he was allowed to do testicular biopsies before and after the space missions. But the astronauts had no desire to submit to such a procedure. Said Meta Heller, “They only cared about the adventure.
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They just weren’t scientifically oriented.”
One of Heller’s ideas, she said, was to have testicular biopsies done on all men working in the weapons plants. Then if a worker was involved in an accident, the doctors could take a second testicular biopsy, compare it with the sample on file, and accurately assess the radiation dose. “It would have been good industrial medicine, you know, because everybody knew the goddamn dosimeters weren’t all that accurate,” Meta Heller said.
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Grahn said he was somewhat uncomfortable around Heller. There was a “certain collegiality” among the members of the space panel that went back decades.
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But Heller was “too pushy,” he said. “At the same time, there was a little sense of insecurity.”
C. Alvin Paulsen did not have much contact with Heller while the two radiation experiments were under way. Paulsen said he was intent upon establishing his own identity in the scientific world and had face-to-face meetings with Heller only when they were cohosting one of the marathon “show-and-tell” meetings of the AEC’s outside advisory committee. Paulsen, who was sued in the mid-1990s by several men after the case received widespread publicity, said in a deposition, “The Atomic Energy
Commission, when they came here for reviews, based on efficiency in economics, required us to be in the same room, both teams reporting the data.
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There was no collaboration of a scientific nature.”
Paulsen had worked for Heller when he was a medical student at the University of Oregon Medical School from 1947 to 1952. Then he moved east to Detroit, where he did his internship and residency at the Detroit Receiving Hospital, the same hospital where Heller had done his training. When Paulsen returned to the West Coast, he joined the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation and resumed his research with Heller. At that time, Heller was conducting the hormone experiments at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Although Paulsen has played down his involvement in the hormone experiments, he is listed as a coauthor on several scientific papers written about those studies.
Paulsen worked at the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation from June of 1958 until 1961 and then became a full-time faculty member at the University of Washington and chief of endocrinology at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. Heller was disappointed about losing Paulsen but recognized that he “was gaining a certain amount of stature on his own,” Meta Heller recalled.
Paulsen said he was apparently chosen by Hanford officials to examine the three men injured in the April 1962 accident because of a textbook article he had written on the testes. Two months later, he was talking with AEC officials in Washington, D.C., about a possible research proposal. Dave Bruner, the AEC’s assistant director for medical and health research, wrote in a letter to Paulsen, “I personally do not see why people are nervous about such research, but it is somewhat unconventional and it does deal with a peculiarly sensitive area of human individual rights.”
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Paulsen said in his deposition that he consulted with numerous corrections and medical officials about the experiment, including Lauren Donaldson, an old buddy of Stafford Warren’s who had established an elaborate program to study how the radioactive waste discharged into the Columbia River might affect the salmon population. Then Paulsen came up with his proposal to irradiate prisoners’ testicles.
Paulsen said he secured the approval to proceed with the experiment from the superintendent of the state penitentiary, the director of state institutions, the assistant dean at the University of Washington’s medical school, and the chairman of the medical school’s Clinical Research Committee.
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Initially Paulsen planned to use a radium source on the
prisoners’ testicles, but he switched to X rays after he was told the dose would be too uncertain.
An energetic scientist with dark hair and bushy eyebrows, Paulsen was usually surrounded by a group of uncommunicative assistants when he visited the prison. Although he was amiable enough, he always seemed to be in a rush. “Now he looks old.
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But back then, he was on fire,” Don Byers, an inmate who was serving time for armed robbery at the Airway Heights Correctional Center in Washington state, said in an interview in 1995. Rob White, another former prisoner, said Paulsen “had a magnetic personality. He didn’t talk down to us. He seemed to accord us some dignity as human beings.”
White, now a retail clerk at a garden center in Seattle, was a radiation volunteer, or RV No. 14. White said he joined the program because of the money and the fact that the experimenters promised to write the parole board. While the experimenters did not reveal what they intended to say to the board, the convicts nevertheless viewed it as a strong incentive. “That was rather important to most of us,” White recalled. “The money was also important, of course, because we were making fourteen cents an hour making license plates.”
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White said Paulsen made the experiment sound like “glorified chest X-rays,” telling the men they might experience a “sunburn type of reaction.” White and other former test subjects said Paulsen never warned them of the possibility that they might contract cancer, but Paulsen said in his deposition the prisoners were orally informed of that risk.
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