The Plutonium Files (22 page)

William Purcell, a forty-eight-year-old hemophiliac who was assigned the number HP-2, was injected five days after Lovecchio. Purcell was a cheerful, red-haired Irishman who had been admitted to the hospital thirty-eight times.
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He was well known and well liked by the staff and was listed as the proprietor of a cigar store on his death certificate. Bassett confessed in a letter to Wright Langham and Louis Hempelmann that he had been unable to get the three control samples of blood from Purcell prior to the injection. “The reason being that he is a hemophiliac who has been in the hospital for studies of blood clotting.
¹⁹
This had led to a thrombosis of one of his veins which we felt should be given time to heal, and hence, we kept our venous punctures down to a minimum. I will be able to furnish the requisite number of post injection blood [samples].” Purcell’s condition eventually improved, and he was injected with plutonium on October 23. He died on August 4, 1948, two and a half years later, from what doctors described as “brain disease.”

Eda Schultz Charlton, HP-3, and Jean Daigneault, HP-4, were both injected on November 27. Charlton, a housewife, was to live for another four decades. Daigneault, who was only eighteen years old, died on April 19, 1947, a year and a half after the plutonium was administered. Daigneault suffered from Cushing’s syndrome, a metabolic disorder characterized by a moon-shaped face and excessive weight in the trunk. She was studied intensively by doctors interested in that disease. On one occasion, when she was put on a rice and raisin diet, she told her sister that she craved a hot dog. As a teenager, she had won the western New York women’s breast stroke swimming championship.
²⁰

Paul Galinger, HP-5, a tall, thin man with trembling hands and slow speech, was fifth in line. He was a machine shop foreman whose handicapped son had died the previous year. Doctors diagnosed Galinger, then fifty-six, as suffering from depression and an incurable nerve disorder now called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “So far he has cooperated quite well but has a difficult personality,” Bassett confided to Langham.
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“The prognosis is poor and fatal termination can be expected within a year.” Galinger was injected on November 30, 1945, and died on April 29, 1946. Even before he was dead, Bassett had begun making plans to retrieve his organs. “This may be counting our chickens before they are hatched but I thought it might be well to settle on some of these details before we are confronted with the necessity of obtaining specimens.
²²
I presume you would like a sample of blood from the heart or lungs?” Bassett inquired in a letter to Langham.

His carefully laid plans notwithstanding, Bassett learned only by
chance that the much-anticipated autopsy was under way, and he had to rush to the hospital to lay claim to the specimens he wanted from Galinger’s body. “We arrived after all the dissection had been completed and only had about thirty minutes in which to get the material together,” he told Langham.
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In another letter he added, “The specimens from both the large and small bowel so nearly filled the jars that there was an insufficient space for the alcohol and hence a good deal of decomposition has occurred.
²⁴
This probably holds true for the liver samples also. I have added a little formalin to each of the intestinal samples to try to reduce formation of gas.”

By the end of 1945, five of the eleven injections had been completed and the Rochester program was beginning to have the efficient feel of an assembly line. But there were still a lot of messy details to work out, even acts of God to cope with. As the holiday season approached, Bassett worried the experiment would grind to a halt. “It begins to look now as if we might be without patients at Christmas.
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No one seems to want to be in the hospital on that particular day. I will do what I can, however, to keep the production line going.”

Bassett’s efforts were unsuccessful and there were no new injections in Rochester during the month of December and January. They resumed February 1, 1946, with John Mousso, HP-6, a gentle-tempered handyman from East Rochester, a village seven miles east of the city. Mousso, forty-four at the time, was admitted to the hospital for multiple infections on his eyelids and toes, but the underlying illness that plagued him was Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland disorder that made him nauseated, lethargic, and achy. Mousso was a familiar figure in East Rochester: sweeping out the fire hall, shoveling snow from the church steps, emptying the penny meters along leafy streets named Elm, Oak, and Hickory. Bassett described Mousso as a “well developed, but thin male with deeply pigmented skin.”
²⁶
Supported by his deep love for his wife, Rose, Mousso was to live for many decades after the injection was administered. But he returned to the hospital often, and on several occasions, doctors surreptitiously gathered excretion samples from him.

Edna Bartholf, HP-7, was injected February 8. Edna was fifty-nine years old and suffered from rheumatic heart disease. Except for the “marked” swelling that extended from her hips to her feet, she looked healthy. But when Bassett placed his stethoscope to her chest, he heard the irregular heartbeat. Bartholf had spent her life in Morganville, a tiny hamlet near Rochester that today has a population of 150. She was active
in the Congregational Christian Church, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Ladies’ Aid Society, and other groups. “Her church was the thing she was most interested in,” her niece, Winifred Thater, recalled.
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Bartholf lived another nine months after the plutonium was administered, dying on October 27, 1946, of pulmonary failure.

Next was Harry Slack, a sixty-nine-year-old janitor at a local YWCA and an alcoholic suffering from malnutrition and cirrhosis of the liver. Little is known about Slack’s life. He enlisted in the Army at the age of twenty-one to fight in the Spanish-American War, but his company made it only as far as Virginia. Slack had been admitted to the hospital on December 12, 1945, because he had been having trouble breathing and his abdomen was enlarged. Bassett described him as a “poorly nourished, weak, thin male who is slightly confused.”
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Slack’s health continued to decline while he was in the hospital, and he was “moribund” when the plutonium injection was administered on February 20, 1946. Six days later he died of pneumonia. Apparently surprised by Slack’s sudden death, Bassett dashed off a letter to Wright Langham: “I hope this next part of the letter will not prove too much of a shock to you since we have run through an acute experiment.
²⁹
No collections of urine or feces were made in this instance.”

The experiment hadn’t been a total loss, however. An autopsy had been performed less than six hours after Slack’s death, and researchers would have his organs to analyze. “We were somewhat pressed for time and perhaps did not obtain as much in the way of bone samples as we might have,” Bassett added.
³⁰
He was certain, though, that the plutonium had mixed sufficiently in Slack’s body and would be detectable in the harvested organs.

Langham
was
a little startled by the news. But he in turn had something even more startling to suggest, which apparently was inspired by rumors he had heard about the experiments taking place in Chicago: Inject the next terminal patient with fifty micrograms of plutonium, he instructed. Such a dose would be equal to fifty times the amount that several researchers, including Langham himself, had estimated could be tolerated without harm in the human body: “This would permit the analysis of much smaller samples and would make my work considerably easier.
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I have just received word that Chicago is performing two terminal experiments using 95 micrograms each. I feel reasonably certain there would be no harm in using larger amounts of material if you are sure the case is a terminal one.”

Bassett, in a reply dated March 27, appeared to have been troubled
by the idea that the plutonium may have hastened Slack’s death but nevertheless agreed to try to implement Langham’s plan:

Slack was actually the eighth person injected but was given the code number HP-11. The reason for the inconsistency is unknown. Perhaps the experimenters originally planned not to include Slack in their study because of the failure to obtain any urine or stool samples but then changed their minds as they were compiling their data for their final report.

About two weeks after Slack’s demise, Janet Stadt, HP-8, a forty-one-year-old woman suffering from scleroderma, a chronic skin disease that hardens and fixes the skin to underlying tissues and eventually disrupts the functioning of the internal organs, was injected. Bassett described Janet Stadt as a “thin and pale female” and carefully chronicled the symptoms of her disease: Her eyelids were tight and the skin was drawn around her mouth.
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The flesh on her hands was so thick and taut her fingers could not uncurl completely.

Stadt’s son, Milton, said at a public hearing in 1995 that his mother’s disease was so painful that she eventually became addicted to painkillers. “I had to get up in the middle of the night, sterilize needles, fill them with Demerol, and she would inject herself with Demerol for the pain,” he said.
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To add to her misery, Janet Stadt received 1,000 rem of radiation during her lifetime, the highest dose of any of the Rochester patients, according to calculations performed in 1995 by the Los Alamos scientists.
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She died on November 22, 1975, nearly three decades after the injection was administered. Her death certificate states that the cause of death was malnutrition caused by cancer of the larynx.

Milton Stadt did not learn that his mother had been injected with plutonium until he received a call from Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary in 1994. “My mother,” he said, “went in for scleroderma, which is a skin disorder, and a duodenal ulcer, and somehow she got pushed over into this lab where these monsters were.”
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Fred Sours, HP-9, was injected April 3. In the town of Gates, a suburb of Rochester, Sours held the position of supervisor, a job roughly equivalent to mayor. He was sixty-four years old and suffering from dermatomyositis, a rare disorder in which the skin becomes inflamed and the muscles grow weak. His face was red; his eyelids and ears also were red and swollen. “Man appears chronically ill, skin is dry and loose,” wrote Bassett.
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Sours died on July 2, 1947, of pneumonia, a year and three months after the injection. When the townspeople of Gates heard the news, they lowered the town flag to half mast for four days and the town board issued a proclamation stating: “His honesty was known to all, and the well-being and interests of the town, of which he was the chief executive officer, were his early aim during his official life.”
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While the people of Gates were mourning Sours’s demise, Manhattan Project doctors were harvesting his organs. The plutonium was everywhere—in his liver, spleen, kidneys, and bones—everywhere except for his heart.

Bassett received a steady stream of polite but critical letters from Langham while the injections were under way. The Mason jars containing the urine and stool samples often arrived at the New Mexico laboratory broken or leaking. The samples were sometimes mislabeled, and in some cases, the labels were missing altogether. Too much human material had been stuffed into some of the containers and not enough preservative had been poured into others. Only a month after the injections started, Langham found himself overwhelmed by the volume of urine and stool samples. “I would like to suggest,” he said in a letter to Bassett, “that the next patients selected be individuals whose conditions will not require high fluid intake and extremely high diet levels of mineral or nitrogen.”
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On another occasion, Langham complained that the iron content in the patients’ diets was interfering with the radiochemical analyses. Bassett then began sending Langham an inventory of the patients’ diets. Among other things, Jean Daigneault was getting pineapple juice, potatoes, squash, ground round steak, and macaroni. William Purcell, the hemophiliac, was getting lots of vegetables, a slice or two of American cheese, and an occasional cup of coffee. Amedio Lovecchio, the Sicilian immigrant who suffered from a bleeding ulcer,
was
on a “very peculiar” diet prior to the injection, Bassett conceded.
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“We took him on short notice with the understanding that we would carry out the medical treatment as already planned.”

Before the human injections began, three rats were injected in their tail veins with the same plutonium solution that Langham and Bassett
planned to administer to the patients. Only a small percentage of the plutonium went to the rodents’ livers, which made the two scientists more confident that the plutonium injected into the human subjects “would not be taken up in high concentration by a single organ such as the livers,” Bassett wrote.
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Belatedly, after ten of the eleven injections had been completed, Langham recognized that they had been overly confident. Dangerous amounts of plutonium were, in fact, accumulating in the patients’ livers: “The amazing feature regarding the tissues [of Paul Galinger] was that 48 percent of the material was found in the liver.
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This result is extremely alarming to me. Results obtained at Chicago more or less confirm the finding. The results indicate that complexing the Plutonium with citrate does not prevent the deposition in the human liver as it does in the case of the rat.”