The Plutonium Files (2 page)

In none of these places
—Science Trends,
the newspaper articles, or the congressional report—were the patients identified by name. They were known by code numbers only. I wondered who these people were; what happened to them after they left the hospital with the silvery, radioactive metal circulating in their veins—if they ever left at all, that is.

In the months and years that followed, I worked on the story in my spare time—tracking down technical reports, talking to scientists, and filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Energy, the modern-day successor to the Manhattan Project. The DOE sent me a few scraps of paper, on which anything that might have helped me to identify the patients seemed to have been deleted. Those scraps, they told me, were all the department possessed on the long-ago study. I
knew from my reading that there was much more information available and that the DOE was not complying with either the spirit or the letter of the Freedom of Information Act. At Los Alamos, an official denied that such an experiment occurred—despite the fact that it had been described in the 1986 congressional report. The bureaucratic stonewalling was infuriating and only served to increase my determination to uncover the patients’ identities.

I put the interview notes, the reports, the documents in a manila folder and filed it away. Every few months I’d pull out the folder, hoping to find something that had been overlooked. Using the skimpy data, I gradually developed profiles of the patients. I put the information on eighteen sheets of yellow, legal-pad paper—one for each patient. I knew their race and gender; their birth and, in some cases, their death dates; the hospitals where they were injected; and the diseases they suffered from. But I didn’t know their names and, quite frankly, never thought I would.

In the fall of 1991, I went to Stanford University on a John S. Knight Fellowship and left my folder behind. It was a year in which we were encouraged to set aside the deadlines of daily journalism and explore the riches of the university. So I didn’t work on the story at all that year. But my first week back on the job, in July of 1992, I pulled out the folder again. In an almost absentminded way, I shuffled through the papers. Suddenly, on the page in front of me, two words that the DOE had neglected to delete jumped out. These were the words that would finally unlock the story. There must have been something about seeing them afresh that jolted me into awareness. The document stated that one of the government scientists had written “to a physician in
Italy, Texas,
about contacting patient CAL-3….”

I didn’t know where Italy was, but I knew a lot about “CAL-3” from the crude profile I had developed.
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He was an African American who would be about eighty years old if he were still alive. Doctors plunged a hypodermic needle loaded with plutonium into CAL-3’s left calf on July 18, 1947, in a San Francisco hospital.
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He was the last of the eighteen patients injected. Three days later the left leg was amputated at midthigh for what was thought to be a preexisting bone cancer.

I got out a map of Texas and began looking for Italy. It was a small dot nearly swamped by the snarl of interstate highways that spoked out from Dallas. I knew I could find CAL-3 in Italy even if it meant going door to door. But, as it turned out, locating him was not that difficult. I called Italy’s City Hall and described the man I was looking for.

“You’re looking for Elmer Allen,” a woman on the other end told me, “but he died a year ago. Do you want his wife’s number?”

Suddenly the windowless press room seemed to be swimming with light, but I think it was because I was holding my breath. The minute I got the number, I thanked the lady, hung up, and dialed Mrs. Allen. she answered on the first or second ring. Without going into a lot of detail, I described a little of what I knew about the experiment. Fredna Allen was very pleasant but didn’t want to meet with me until she had discussed the matter with her daughter, Elmerine Allen Whitfield. When I asked Mrs. Allen if I could contact Elmerine directly, she readily agreed and gave me her number in Dallas.

Elmerine listened intently while I told her about the experiment and why I thought her father had been one of the patients. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of silence, she said, “Okay. You can come on.” she gave me instructions to her home and said that her mother would meet us there.

The following afternoon I arrived in Dallas and checked into a hotel near the airport. Since I wasn’t scheduled to meet Fredna and Elmerine until the following morning, I decided to drive down to Italy. When I pulled into one of the parking spaces on Main Street, a glaze of heat and dust lay over everything. The town seemed completely deserted, as if everybody were off at a funeral. The storefronts looked like they had been punched from cardboard. Suddenly the possibility that Elmer Allen and CAL-3 were the same person seemed like a long shot. What could Italy, Texas, have to do with the Manhattan Project? But luck was with me that day.

When I stepped out of my car, I saw an African American man who could have been anywhere from sixty to eighty years old sitting on one of the benches. He had just slipped off his leather cowboy boots and was wriggling his feet in obvious relief. His name was Joe Speed. I asked him if he knew Elmer Allen. They had been good friends, he told me. We talked for a little while. Then I asked him if Elmer had ever said anything about how he lost his leg or the long-ago hospitalization in San Francisco.

Joe Speed’s eyes swept the deserted street and then focused on a spot somewhere in front of his feet. Elmer, he began, had talked about the doctors who bustled in and out of his hospital room “practicing” to be doctors. “He told me they put a germ cancer in his leg.
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They guinea-pigged him. They didn’t care about him getting well. He told me he would never get well.” Joe Speed delivered this information swiftly, then
looked at me sideways as if to say he didn’t believe the story either. But his comments were a powerful confirmation that Elmer and CAL-3 were the same person.

The following morning I met with Fredna at Elmerine’s house, a large, four-bedroom in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Before I arrived, Elmerine had gotten out a dictionary and looked up the word “plutonium” for her mother. As we sat at the kitchen table and talked, the awkwardness between us gradually evaporated. Fredna had taught school for thirty-five years and had a sweet, trusting disposition. Elmerine was a school teacher too, but she had come of age in the 1960s and had stood on picket lines in college. She was outspoken and had opinions on just about everything.

Fredna brought several documents to the interview, including an old blue mimeographed itinerary of a trip that she and Elmer had taken to a hospital in Rochester, New York, in 1973, some twenty-six years after the injection. I knew from my research that CAL-3 was one of the three survivors whom scientists had examined in Rochester as part of a follow-up study of the plutonium experiment. None of the doctors ever told Fredna that the real purpose of their study was to measure the plutonium circulating in her husband’s body.

The dates on Fredna’s records matched exactly the dates on my documents. Her recollections were also consistent with what I knew about CAL-3. By the time the interview was over, I was certain that I had finally found one of the patients. Fredna and Elmerine were also convinced. Although the knowledge of the experiment would cause her a lot of sadness in the years to come, Fredna was a deeply religious woman and her initial reaction was mild. “I’m not angry,” she began carefully.
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“It just gives me a better view of how people will do you when they feel like you don’t know better.” But Elmerine’s response was much harsher. In a curt voice that she undoubtedly used when she was trying to bring her eighth-grade class to order, she said, “I’m very upset, but being African American, I stay angry about a lot of things.”
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With the trip to Italy, Texas, the process of transforming the plutonium patients from numbers into human beings had begun. CAL-3 was not just a laboratory animal who provided scientists with a wealth of data about how plutonium was deposited in muscle and bone. He was husband to Fredna, father to Elmerine and her brother, William; a man who
cleaned bricks, upholstered chairs, repaired shoes, and plowed the rich dark soil the farmers called black gumbo.

When I returned from Italy, I worked on the story full time for another two months. Then the political season was upon us and other assignments got in the way. But the story now had a momentum of its own. The newspaper’s attorneys filed a new, meticulously worded Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Energy. With near-daily prodding from attorney Loretta Garrison, the documents began trickling in. In the spring of 1993, I returned to the story full time; and, in the space of a few months, I had pieced together the identities of another four people who had been injected with plutonium. They too became real: Albert Stevens, an easygoing house painter; John Mousso, a mild-mannered handyman; Eda Schultz Charlton, a shy, nervous housewife; and Fred Sours, the much-beloved town supervisor of a suburb near Rochester. Although Sours died soon after the injection, the rest would live for decades, plagued by a myriad of physical ailments.

About sixteen months after that trip to Italy, the
Tribune
published the first of a three-day series on the experiment. When the first installment rolled off the press, I sat at my desk expectantly, waiting for calls from outraged readers. I didn’t get one phone call from the public that day, but reporters from the hometowns where the five patients lived began calling to get more information, and a few reporters from Japan contacted me. Still, the story went largely unnoticed by the national media until Department of Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, who had been appointed less than a year earlier, officially condemned the experiment at a December 7, 1993, press conference, which she had called to announce the DOE’s new policy of openness and candor. Speaking toward the end of the conference, O’Leary said what she had just learned of the experiment horrified her: “I was appalled and shocked. It gave me an ache in my gut and heart.”
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Soon after O’Leary’s press conference, President Clinton directed the federal agencies to make public any records dealing with the human radiation experiments. He also appointed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to look into the controversy. As the documents on the plutonium experiment poured from the government warehouses and people used in other experiments came forward, it became apparent that the story was much bigger than anyone had imagined. It turned out that thousands of human radiation studies had been conducted during the Cold War. Almost without exception, the subjects
were the poor, the powerless, and the sick—the very people who count most on the government to protect them, Clinton would later point out.

Many of the Manhattan Project doctors who took part in the plutonium injections showed up as advisors or participants in the postwar studies. Although they played a key role in the experiments, they had only supporting parts in the bomb project. They were on a first-name basis with such legendary figures as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, but they themselves have remained among history’s obscure players. During the Manhattan Project, their job was to protect the health and safety of workers at a time when little was known about the effects of radiation on healthy people. Fearing a cancer epidemic among the project’s employees, they embarked upon a crash course to learn everything they could about the effects of radiation delivered externally or internally through the ingestion or inhalation of radioactive materials. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only intensified the urgency of their research. What did radiation do to human genes, reproductive organs, and fetuses?

With the building of the atomic bomb, an industry equivalent in size to General Motors had been born in the United States. After the war, the lavishly expensive atmospheric testing of atomic bombs began at the Pacific Proving Ground, and the Nevada Test Site. Responding to these developments, medical researchers found ever-new areas of inquiry to pursue. In closed-door meetings in Los Alamos and Washington, D.C., they and other scientists investigated such issues as how much radioactive strontium America’s children were collecting in their bones from fallout and how many more bombs could be exploded before the radioactivity would exceed a level that the doctors had deemed safe.

In addition to studies focused specifically on issues relating to the bomb and its fallout products, many other experiments used supposedly harmless amounts of radioactive materials, so-called tracer doses, to investigate questions relating to human metabolism. Officials of the early Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian department that succeeded the Manhattan Project in 1947, promoted radioisotopes with a missionarylike zeal. Doctors and scientists desperately hoped the splitting of the atom would produce something good for humankind, possibly even a cure for cancer. Radioisotopes produced in the Manhattan Project’s nuclear reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were shipped to qualified scientists throughout the world. Over the years the “radioisotope distribution program,” which began partially as a public relations ploy to show that
the bomb builders were willing to share information with civilian outsiders, grew by leaps and bounds.

Some radioisotope research conducted by civilian scientists contributed to a better understanding of how the human body works and to the development of new diagnostic tools to detect cancer and other diseases. But many studies were repetitive, poorly conceived, and frequently the subjects did not know what they were being given. Like the plutonium experiment, which was flawed in design and led to some erroneous conclusions, they were not just immoral science, they were bad science.

The Army, Navy, and Air Force also funded numerous experiments designed to help them learn more about how to fight effectively on the nuclear battlefield. What were the effects of shock, blast, and radiation on ships, planes, tanks, and, most critically, men? Were there efficient ways to decontaminate men and machinery? As the narrator of one recently declassified film about the testing program explained in 1952, “We’re trying every angle and every gadget we can to find out what really happens when an atomic bomb kicks out fiercely at the world around it.”
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