The Plutonium Files (65 page)

The investigators were instructed to handle the Manhattan Project doctors, by then venerable, white-haired authorities in their field, with kid gloves. “During interviews, every effort will be made to avoid causing distress to the persons interviewed although it is recognized that some distress may inevitably result from discussions centering around the issue of informed consent.”
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The AEC investigators prepared detailed memos of their discussions with the bomb doctors. The memos reveal how uneasy the original participants felt about the experiment twenty years later. Several denied any involvement whatsoever in the project; others claimed their memories were hazy; a few even pointed the finger at other scientists. The following are excerpts from some of the interviews, which were all conducted in the spring of 1974:

   • Stafford Warren was interviewed on April 22 at his office in the UCLA Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology.
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Warren,
the medical director of the Manhattan Project who reported directly to General Leslie Groves and supervised the overall injection program, left the investigators confused about his role in the experiment. “He did not indicate that he himself was opposed to such a program; however, he also did not indicate that he had specifically authorized one,” Sidney Marks later wrote. But coinvestigator Leo Miazga had a different interpretation of Warren’s remarks. “Leo felt that Dr. Warren had indicated tacit consent to the program being carried out whereas I had the impression that Dr. Warren had not participated in the meetings where final decisions were reached to go forward with the program,” Marks wrote.

• Andrew Dowdy was contacted by telephone by the two AEC investigators while they were still in Stafford Warren’s office. Dowdy, the supervisor of the University of Rochester’s Manhattan Annex, had attended the September 5, 1945, planning meeting for the Los Alamos—Rochester portion of the experiment and later had advised against the distribution of the Wright Langham—Samuel Bassett report because of possible “unfavorable public relations” and “legal entanglements.” Wrote Marks: “During the conversation, Dr. Dowdy said that he knew something of what went on but very little about the details. I asked whether Sam Bassett had reported to him and he said that Sam Bassett had, but this would be at intervals like every 6 months or so, but that he did not have intimate knowledge of the goings-on in connection with this study.” Marks wanted to visit Dowdy, who was in retirement at Laguna Hills near Los Angeles, but Dowdy told him that he felt that visit would not be “sufficiently rewarding” to justify the trip.

• Robert Fink was also contacted by telephone by the two investigators while they were in Stafford Warren’s office. Fink, according to documents, was designated to calibrate the plutonium solutions for injection at Rochester and also attended the September 5, 1945, planning meeting. Fink was reluctant to discuss the matter, Marks wrote, questioning “whether our credentials were proper and whether we might not be reporters rather than official personnel. I told him that we would be glad to present our credentials to him when we would visit with him and that we were very interested in finding out what he might know since Dr. Warren felt that he would have known something about the situation.” Fink agreed to meet with the two AEC investigators, but before they had left Stafford Warren’s office, he called back and canceled. “He said that he had confused the issue of polonium with plutonium and that it was only the polonium patients that he had worked on at all. In other words, that he would have had no knowledge of the plutonium cases.”

• Hymer Friedell, Stafford Warren’s second-in-command, was interviewed on April 25 at his office at Case Western Reserve University. Friedell, who had attended the Los Alamos meeting at which it was agreed that a human being would be injected with plutonium, told the two investigators he was “not present at any meeting when the decision to proceed with the program was actually taken.” Wrote Marks: “Dr. Friedell virtually denied any direct involvement in the injection at Oak Ridge and also in any of the programs conducted at the other three sites.”

• Louis Hempelmann, the young, panicky doctor who had pumped out Don Mastick’s stomach some thirty years earlier, was questioned on April 17 and again on May 1. Hempelmann told AEC investigators he had little knowledge of the plutonium injections carried out in Rochester, Chicago, and Berkeley. The AEC investigators then showed Hempelmann the memo he had written to J. Robert Oppenheimer urging that a patient in Rochester or Chicago be injected with plutonium. “When we showed that memo to Dr. Hempelmann, he could not recall the meeting clearly nor that particular discussion.” Hempelmann continued to maintain his ignorance of the experiment, and in an interview in 1992, a year before his death, he said, “I don’t know what was done at the time or what was found.”

• Joseph Howland, described by some of his colleagues as a “manic depressive,” met with an AEC investigator on April 24 at the Holiday Inn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Howland never wavered in the version of the story he had been telling since 1948. He said he injected Ebb Cade with plutonium, but only after he had been ordered to do so by Hymer Friedell. “Dr. Howland emphatically stated that no consent was obtained from the patient at any time.”

• Kenneth Scott was interviewed on April 18 at his home in California. Scott, who assisted in the California plutonium injections, was as plainspoken as Joseph Howland. Scott said he prepared the solution to be injected into Albert Stevens and took it to Earl Miller in San Francisco. He said he was not present when the actual injection was made and couldn’t comment on who made the actual injection or whether the patient was properly informed.

• Earl Miller was contacted on the afternoon of April 17. Miller was the radiologist at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco who, according to medical records, received the plutonium-laced body parts from Albert Stevens and Simeon Shaw. He told AEC officials that he had no knowledge whatsoever of any plutonium injections. Oddly
enough, “he also volunteered the opinion that the matter were best allowed to languish and not be disclosed publicly until all individuals had died.”

• Leon Jacobson was interviewed on April 16 in his office. Jacobson was a hematologist who had worked as Robert Stone’s deputy at the Met Lab and went on to become chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Chicago and director of the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital. At Jacobson’s request, three other gentlemen were present in the room for the interview: Jacobson’s administrative assistant and two professors from the medical school. Jacobson was alleged by scientist Edwin Russell to have performed the actual injections of the Chicago patients, but when questioned “stated repeatedly that he knew very little about it, next to nothing.” He did suggest, however, that investigators talk to a Stanford University professor named J. Garrot Allen, who also had a security clearance and would have been “more likely to have known something about those patients than Dr. Jacobson himself.” The investigators subsequently interviewed Allen, who knew nothing about the project and whose name does not appear in any documents or scientific reports related to the injections.

• J. J. Nickson, coauthor of the scientific paper describing the injections of Chicago patients Arthur Hubbard and Una Macke, was questioned on April 23 in Memphis, Tennessee. Nickson had seemed “perfectly willing” to discuss the experiment when the AEC investigators contacted him by phone. “When we arrived at Dr. Nickson’s office,” Marks wrote, “his attitude seemed to have changed in that the frankness that seemed to prevail during our telephone conversation was replaced by a considerable reticence to enter into any substantive discussions. During the interview he claimed that he did not have any detailed knowledge of the matter and had handled only the isotope end of it but that he had not had contact with the patients. We showed him documents including a paper that he had co-authored with Ed Russell that went into considerable detail about the clinical summaries and the analyses on the two Chicago patients. He went through the document but indicated that that did not improve his memory of the situation. We also showed him a number of monthly reports that he had written to either Dr. Stone or Dr. Jacobson that dealt with the follow-up of analyses on these patients but he again refused to elaborate on the contents of those reports or to indicate that they had jogged his memory.”

• Shields Warren was interviewed at his laboratory in Boston on April 9. Warren already knew that four of the injectees were still alive
because both Patricia Durbin and Robert Rowland had contacted him. Warren told AEC investigators about his long-ago conversation with Joseph Hamilton and the steps he took to make sure no such injections ever happened again.

Despite the stonewalling by the original experimenters, AEC officials had a fairly accurate picture of what had occurred during both phases of the experiment. In a report stamped “official use only,” they concluded that “certain violations of ethical standards” had taken place.
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Specifically, they found:

   • Written evidence that disclosure had been made to only one patient. (That patient was Elmer Allen, but the consent form in his medical records does not describe what Allen was told or that he was injected with plutonium.)

• Informed consent was not obtained from the surviving patients involved in the 1973 follow-up studies. However, the AEC officials added there was no reason to believe the patients “suffered harm or discomfort” as a result of the studies.

• Disclosure to all but one of the next of kin of the deceased plutonium patients “could be judged misleading” because the radioisotopes were represented as having been injected as an experimental treatment for the patients’ diseases.

   Officials at AEC headquarters ordered scientists from the Center for Human Radiobiology to inform the family doctors of the surviving patients of the injections. Those physicians then were asked to break the news to the patients. Scientists were also to recontact the family members of deceased patients and inform them of the real reason why the AEC wanted to exhume the bodies of their relatives.

James Liverman, in a memo to his files, noted that the planned disclosures alarmed several high-ranking military officials. U.S. Army Brigadier General R. W. Green, deputy surgeon general of the Army, was particularly worried. “General Green was considerably concerned that no good was to be achieved in his view by surfacing a whole series of issues when nothing could in fact be done at this point in time with regard to changing those issues and that the patients or their relatives might in fact be worse off because of the public, social or psychological trauma.”
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Robert Sproull, then the president of the University of Rochester, was also disturbed. “His response was immediate and unrestrained in his
view that ‘no useful purpose could be served to the patients, the University, or the Commission by informing these patients at this point in time of an event now thirty years past,’ ” Liverman wrote.
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“He felt that the value to be gained was so far offset by the possible hazards that we should face the need for a response in the event of public disclosure rather than inform the people of long past events.”

Sproull said in an interview in 1992 that he couldn’t recall whether the memo accurately reflected his sentiments at the time. “Things were done then during the war that would not be done at all now.
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You don’t use the word ‘nigger’ now at all. But if you uncovered something fifty years old and somebody used the word ‘nigger,’ it would sound as if he was a terrible person. So it was done in a different society, a different world, really.… In the spirit of the time, the people treating them thought they were actually doing a favor to the patients because the patients were about to die and there was some possibility that this foreign stuff, this unknown stuff, might in fact help them, and without that help, they were guaranteed to die. The curious thing was that they didn’t.”

Christine Waterhouse agreed to tell Eda Schultz Charlton and John Mousso. But Waterhouse said in an interview many years later hat she couldn’t remember whether she told them or not. “The telling of the patients, or the telling of the relatives, was not a significant enough factor for me so that I can remember distinctly telling them or not telling.”
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Janet Stadt was never informed of the injection because her doctor “concluded that the mental status of the patient precludes proper disclosure.”
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cochk] Austin Brues was instructed by the AEC to make a personal visit to Elmer Allen’s physician in Texas and inform him of the long-ago plutonium injection. Brues agreed to make the disclosure, but he also took the opportunity to persuade Elmer’s doctor to help the AEC with future follow-up work. He took a night flight to Dallas on May 21, 1974. He met Walter Weyzen, an AEC official from headquarters, near the Dallas—Fort Worth airport and the two drove to Milford, Texas, to meet with Dewey Roberts, who was then Elmer’s physician. Brues summarized the discussion in a trip report:

Elmer’s physician “was quick to form the belief” the plutonium injection may have cured the tumor, Brues wrote. “We tried to cool this but with questionable success. (I had given warning of this possibility before accepting the assignment.)” Brues asked the physician to inform Elmer about the nature of the injection, adding that “the record seems to indicate only that he gave voluntary consent to an injection of radioactive material.”