Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
The Plutonium Files (16 page)
On May 14 the mixture that Scott had brought to the hospital was injected into one of Albert’s veins. Patricia Durbin, the scientist who as an undergraduate worked in Hamilton’s lab, said years later the injection was the equivalent of a “carcinogenic dose.” Albert was designated CAL-1, the first California patient injected with plutonium.
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On the day Albert was injected, five rats were injected with the same solution.
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Two of the rats were killed a day later and the plutonium in their lungs, liver, kidney, and skeleton was measured. The other three rats were allowed to live for the remainder of the experiment.
In an interview several decades later, Kenneth Scott said that UCSF radiologist Earl Miller injected the plutonium into Albert’s body.
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Miller had been hired at the University of California at San Francisco in 1940 by Robert Stone and was acting chief of the radiology department while Stone was at the Met Lab.
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For decades Miller denied that he had any involvement in the experiment. “I never, never, never injected any radioactive material into anybody,” he said in May 1995, about two months before his death.
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“These people,” Miller told other interviewers, “the people that were chosen usually in these studies, they were doomed.
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They were ready to die.”
Four days after the injection, with the plutonium coursing through his bloodstream and already settling in his bones, Albert was wheeled into surgery. He was lain on his right side and a pillow placed under his chest. Then a long incision paralleling the ninth rib was made. Surgeons found a “huge, ulcerating, carcinomatous mass” that had grown into his spleen and liver.
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Initially the doctors were planning to remove his entire stomach, but halfway through the operation, they decided against it. Half of the left lobe of the liver, the entire spleen, most of the ninth rib, lymph nodes, part of the pancreas, and a portion of the omentum—an apron of fat covering the internal organs—were taken out.
According to a note written by the surgeon, the specimens were handed to Earl Miller as they were removed from Albert’s unconscious body.
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Miller was to take a portion of each specimen and then send the remainder to the hospital pathology department, where the cancer diagnosis was to be confirmed. The surgeon apparently agreed to the division
because he erroneously thought that Albert had been given radioactive phosphorous by the X-ray department for “special studies.”
The operation was expertly done.
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The incision along the ninth rib was sutured with fine cotton thread and a small catheter was inserted in an opening so that penicillin could be administered for the next forty-eight hours. “The patient withstood the procedure exceedingly well.
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He was returned to the ward in good condition,” the surgeon wrote.
On May 19, the day after the operation, there is a verbal order from Miller in Albert’s medical records instructing that urine and stool samples are to be “saved for Mr. Scott who will collect them each day.”
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On May 21 there is another notation in Albert’s medical records that states: “All specimens going to Dr. Miller.”
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The hospital pathologist, James F. Rinehart, found evidence of a huge, cheeselike ulcer in Albert’s stomach. But after carefully examining the specimens under a microscope, he came to a startling conclusion: Albert didn’t have cancer. He had a “benign gastric ulcer with chronic inflammation.”
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The mass removed by surgeons was apparently part of the ulcer.
Disbelief rippled through the medical staff. The surgeon noted that the operation was a “radical procedure to do for a benign process.”
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Earl Miller became extremely upset by the findings and spent days looking at Albert’s slides, thinking there was a mistake. But “he just didn’t have it,” Scott recalled of the cancer diagnosis.
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Scott, too, seems to have been troubled by what happened to Albert Stevens. After he retired, he was interviewed for an oral history by Berkeley medical historian Sally Hughes. The interview was conducted in December 1979 at Scott’s bedside in Novato, California. Scott, who was then about seventy years old, was diabetic, disabled by a stroke, embittered—and drunk. Lying in a hospital bed with his wife hovering nearby, Scott told Hughes that he left the Crocker lab in part because Hamilton wanted to do some “incautious experiments”:
Scott: I thought they were morally wrong.
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Hughes: Are you talking now about the human experiments?
Scott: Yes.
Hughes: And he went ahead and did those?
Scott: Yes, he did, and he did the first one with my help.
Hughes: That was the plutonium?
Scott: Plutonium-248
[sic],
which we gave to this nice man who was scheduled for stomach surgery. They were sure—Earl
Miller, for example, was sure—that he had cancer of the stomach and his probable survival wasn’t very great. He was fifty-five, maybe, when I first found him. We injected him with plutonium-238, and the story of it is that he didn’t have a cancer that anyone could demonstrate. Earl Miller got very upset with that and looked for days at slides of this man’s post-op remains, and he just didn’t have it. I got very interested in him as a person, and I contracted through the laboratory to buy all of his urine and feces, for which he would get a monthly check. We would go up once a week and pick it up in acid carbolase in various bottles we left up there with him.
Hughes: Did he know what was going on?
Scott: Never told him.
Hughes: What was the outcome?
Scott: Finally the laboratory wouldn’t pay for his feces any more. He was in excellent health. His sister was a nurse and she was very suspicious of me. But to my knowledge he never found out, and he slipped through our fingers at the age of eighty-eight. He died of something.
Hughes: Nothing to do with the plutonium?
Scott: He got many times the so-called lethal textbook dose of plutonium. Patricia Durbin knows more about that. She’s kept up with his data.
Hughes: In those days it was possible to do experiments on human beings with such ease?
Scott: Yes, yes.
Hughes: What did it involve?
Scott: It involved getting a needy patient who had a known disease, or thought it was known. He came out of the clinic for us at UC. I took the plutonium over there and gave it to Earl Miller, who injected it into this guy.
Albert’s medical records show that he signed consent forms for both the anesthesia and surgery. But there is no mention of informed consent for any injection of radioactive material. A document declassified in 1994 also strongly suggests that neither Albert nor the second California patient injected with plutonium were told of the injections.
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Albert was discharged from the hospital a month after his admittance. Hamilton soon grew worried that he might leave the Bay area, and
on July 7, 1945, wrote a letter to Robert Stone asking whether it would be possible to pay him fifty dollars a month to make sure he stayed in the Berkeley area:
Kenneth [Scott] and I are very much afraid that the man may sell his house and go to live at some distant point which would, of course, put an end to our most interesting series of experiments.
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This proposal may be totally irregular and out of keeping with Army policy, but since we have, to date, maintained daily collections of all excretions, it would seem most unfortunate not to have the assurance of his continued presence within a reasonable distance from Berkeley.
A couple of days later, Hamilton also wrote to Joseph Howland at Oak Ridge about the problem. Howland responded with a memo suggesting some possible ways to solve Albert’s “financial embarrassment”:
3a. Pay for his care in a hospital or nursing home as a service.
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b. Place this individual on Dr. Hamilton’s payroll in some minor capacity without release of any classified information.
4. It is not recommended that he be paid as an experimental subject only.
If Scott’s memory is accurate, the solution they apparently arrived at was to pay Albert for his urine and stool samples. Albert’s son, Thomas, said he remembered that his father kept the samples in a shed behind the house. His father believed the collections were part of his follow-up care. “They sent an intern and a nurse down once a week from the hospital.
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He was led to believe it was all done because of the operation he had. They kept saying he was doing very well, that it was an unusual operation.”
Thomas and his sister, Evelyn, who were both in their thirties at the time of the experiment, said their father seemed completely unaware that he was part of a medical experiment. All that they knew for sure was that their father’s medical care was free. “My mother and I figured they were using him for a guinea pig,” Evelyn said.
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“We knew they were using things they weren’t sure of. But he was dying, and we were praying that something would help. And it did help.” So they believed, because Albert’s children were never told that their father did not have cancer. For
decades, Thomas said he checked “yes” on every medical form asking if there was a history of cancer in the family.
In 1946, almost a year after Albert’s injection, the Berkeley group published a classified report titled “A Comparison of the Metabolism of Plutonium in Man and the Rat.” The abstract begins: “The fate of plutonium injected intravenously into a human subject and into rats was followed in parallel studies.”
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A description of the body parts removed from Albert on the operating table—the specimens that were not delivered to the pathology department—appears in the report. “Four days after the plutonium had been administered, specimens of rib, blood, spleen, tumor, omentum, and subcutaneous tissue were obtained from the patient.”
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Albert’s rib was scraped with a sharp instrument, split longitudinally, and the marrow removed. The different parts of the bone were ashed and analyzed for plutonium. Most of the material had gravitated to the marrow and trabecular bone, the lacy spongelike bone threaded with marrow. The experiment showed that rats excreted plutonium more quickly than human beings, the report noted, thus making “the problem of chronic plutonium poisoning a matter of serious concern for those who come in contact with this material.”
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The authors of the “Man and Rat” paper included Josephine Crowley, H. Lanz, Kenneth Scott, and Joseph Hamilton. In 1947 C. L. Marshall, an AEC deputy declassification officer in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, refused to declassify the report: “It contains material, which in the opinion of the management of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, might adversely affect the national interest,” he wrote.
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The refusal is one of the only documents made public so far in which national security is cited as a reason for not declassifying information related to a human experiment.
T
RINITY
S
ITE
While Ebb Cade, Arthur Hubbard, and Albert Stevens struggled to regain their health, the Manhattan Project’s medical doctors turned their attention to the desolate area in southern New Mexico where the world’s first atomic bomb would be tested. The war in Europe was over, but the beaches on the small island of Okinawa, the stepping-stone to the Japanese mainland, were red with blood. The casualties were horrendous on both sides. While Marines went from cave to cave with flame-throwers and grenades, suicidal kamikaze pilots were inflicting heavy casualties and unspeakable terror on American ships.
At the Met Lab, scientists had grown divided over whether the atomic bomb should be used against Japan. A subcommittee headed by Nobel laureate James Franck was formed to examine the social and political implications of the revolutionary new weapon.
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Its members included Glenn Seaborg, James J. Nickson, the young medical doctor involved in the TBI experiment at the Chicago Tumor Clinic, and, of course, Leo Szilard. After much debate, the group concluded the bomb should not be used against Japan for two reasons: First, such a powerful weapon would necessarily involve the killing of thousands of people and engender an attitude of fear, suspicion, and hate toward the United States. Second, the United States might wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons by international agreement after the war, but its position would be weakened if the bomb had already been used. The Franck committee urged that the United States demonstrate the power of the new weapon before the eyes of the world on a barren island.
No one lobbied harder for this position than Leo Szilard, the Met
Lab’s enfant terrible and the scientist who had done so much to get the entire bomb project going. Arthur Compton, who was trying to hold his tumultuous staff together, disagreed with Szilard but presented his views fairly in his postwar memoirs:
There were few who sensed as clearly as did Szilard the shock that would be felt throughout the world if the atomic bomb destroyed large numbers of Japanese lives.
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This he thought of as an international crime and believed that many in all parts of the world would share this view. He had been willing to approve and even to urge the use of the bomb against the Germans, for in this case it would be an evil less than that of the human destruction he felt sure would result if the Nazis should gain the victory. He could not persuade himself that the case was the same with regard to the Japanese.
The Met Lab’s debate was mirrored at the national level by members of the innocuously named Interim Committee. The all-civilian group, which was headed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, had been created to consider issues relating to the use of the new weapon. Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur Compton acted as scientific advisors. The committee bandied about the idea of demonstrating the weapon’s power on a uninhabited island but rejected it for several reasons: First, even if the initial atomic bomb test was successful, there was no guarantee the second bomb wouldn’t be a dud. Second, the Japanese might attempt to interfere with the delivery of the weapon or put American prisoners of war at the detonation site. Third, the panel thought it was doubtful that Japan’s fanatic military leaders would be inclined to surrender after witnessing a bloodless demonstration. And finally, the group believed such a test would eliminate the important element of surprise. Although Ernest Lawrence would become a powerful advocate of bigger nuclear weapons after the war, his hard-line nature had not yet emerged and he was the last of the scientific advisors to give up on the idea of a peaceful demonstration.