The Plutonium Files (38 page)

“What is it that you were told about the drink?” asked attorney Don Arbitblit.
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“It was vitamins,” responded Emma.

“Were you told anything else about the drink?”

“No.”

“Did they say anything about whether the drink was good for you or not?”

“Yes. They said it was good for me.”

Later in the deposition, she was asked, “Before March of 1946, had you ever heard of radiation?”

“When they dropped the bomb was the first I knew anything about radiation.”

“What was it that you knew about radiation?”

“Well, if you can drop something like that and kill people, well you know you don’t want to take it.”

Carolyn was born September 15, 1946, three weeks premature. Emma breast-fed the infant and she began to put on weight quickly. Both mother and daughter were healthy when they were discharged from the hospital eight or nine days later, but Emma’s eyes soon turned swollen and black. They had to carry me back to the hospital.
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My eyes looked like somebody had beat me. They were so swollen and black. I thought, ‘Lord, I’m going blind.’ ” Eventually the swelling subsided and Emma’s life returned to normal. A year after Carolyn was born, she began working in a box factory so she could better provide for her children.

Blessed with a loving disposition and her father’s musical ear, Carolyn quickly became the center of the family’s attention. She liked doing for people,” Emma recalled. She was about nine years old when her older sisters discovered the lump on her right thigh. The child begged her
sisters not to say anything about it until after the holidays. When Emma was finally shown the growth, she was deeply frightened and took her daughter to Vanderbilt Hospital the following day. The mass would have to be removed, the doctors told her. Emma got a second opinion from another physician, named Elkin Rippy. He also felt the lump should be removed and agreed to do the surgery.

During the operation, Rippy discovered Carolyn had cancer. Emma, who was in the waiting room, fainted when he told her what he had found. “When I came to, he told me, he said, Emma, ‘I got it all.’ ” But the cancer eventually came back. The disease spread into the child’s spine, then moved up through her lungs, heart, throat, and finally, into her mouth. Emma prayed constantly and her husband went on a forty-day fast, drinking only fruit juice and water. Emma believed, “If God can make us, then God can heal us.”

Carolyn underwent radiation therapy and four more surgeries. Eventually she became paralyzed from the waist down and was forced to use a wheelchair. A catheter was connected to her bladder and she was fed intravenously. The doctors cut the cancer out of her mouth several times. “It was black. Black cancer inside of her mouth just growing,” Emma recalled in her deposition. As the child’s body withered, her face grew swollen and misshapen from the disease. She was fed intravenously, but sometimes Emma would spoon a little malt water into her mouth. Carolyn finally went into a coma and died on August 28, 1958, about two and one-half years after the cancer was discovered. She was eleven years old.

Emma slipped into a deep depression after her daughter’s death. Her foreman at the box factory often told her to go for a ride when the grief threatened to overwhelm her. She would drive for hours wondering why God allowed her daughter to die such a horrible death. She often thought about killing herself by running her car into a brick wall or tree. But the knowledge that she had other daughters at home who needed her kept her from such an unthinkable act. Eventually she came to accept the loss of her daughter as God’s will and went on with her life.

In 1964, six years after Emma’s daughter died, a new group of researchers at Vanderbilt University decided to do a follow-up study of the women who had been given the radioactive iron cocktails. The study began at a critical juncture in the history of the nuclear weapons program: Atmospheric testing had ended in 1963, but scientists were just
beginning to make the connections between fallout and excess cancers in exposed populations.

The research community was also in an uproar over the controversial findings first reported in 1956 by Alice Stewart, a British researcher and physician.
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Stewart and her colleagues had conducted a vast survey of all children in England and Wales who died of leukemia or cancer between 1953 and 1955 before their tenth birthday. They discovered that one to two rads of radiation delivered to the fetus in utero caused a 50 percent increase in childhood cancer and leukemia.

The findings had enormous ramifications. Scientists had long known that the fetus, with its rapidly dividing cells, was extremely sensitive to radiation. But many physicians were incredulous that such small doses could have such dire consequences. Some raised questions about how Stewart collected the data, arguing that the women who got X rays were a “medically selected group,” or women who had an underlying constitution or disease that predisposed their children to cancer. An independent study by Brian MacMahon of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health confirmed Stewart’s findings.
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But studies of two other groups of “medically selected” women whose babies had been exposed in utero showed no significant relationship between cancer mortality and exposure.

Vanderbilt researchers thought the radioiron study might shed light on the controversy. The women who passed through the clinic and were given the radioactive iron cocktails were also a “medically unselected” group of patients. That is, the radioactive material was administered randomly to any pregnant woman who passed through the clinic doors regardless of her health or nutritional status.

Ruth Hagstrom, a medical doctor in her early thirties, pulled together the old records and set about collecting the epidemiological data. A scientist named A. Bertrand Brill, who had joined Vanderbilt in 1964 following a seven-year stint at the Public Health Service and had done research on the Japanese bombing victims, attempted to ascertain the doses given the mothers and fetuses. “Ruth Hagstrom did all the sleuthing,” he said.
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“My involvement was in the dosimetry part of it.”

The follow-up study was supported by the AEC and the Public Health Service where, as it happened, Paul Hahn had taken a job after leaving Nashville’s Meharry Medical College in 1960. At the time the Vanderbilt follow-up study began, he was chief of the research grants staff of the Public Health Service’s Division of Radiological Health. His division actually funded the follow-up study and Hahn also helped the
Vanderbilt researchers to decipher the old data. “He helped to find the records and interpret what his notations meant and things like that,” Brill said.
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The data collection began in 1964 and took three years to complete. First the researchers had to dig out the records of the pregnant women given the radioactive iron. They found records on 751 mothers. Next they gathered records on a “control” group of pregnant women of roughly the same age who were seen at the prenatal clinic at about the same time who did not receive the radioactive iron. Records on another 771 mothers were obtained.

Both groups of mothers were then sent detailed questionnaires. If the women did not respond, the researchers attempted to contact them and obtain the information through interviews. According to a journalist who questioned them in 1994, both Ruth Hagstrom and officials from Vanderbilt claimed the mothers were informed of their earlier exposure to radioactive iron when the follow-up study was done.
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But Helen Hutchison and Emma Craft said they were never told the true purpose of the follow-up study. “This lady called and told me she was doing a paper on the children that were born at Vanderbilt after the war,” remembered Helen.
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“She called and said, ‘I’m researching the baby boomers.’ ” Emma Craft said the questionnaire she received dealt mostly with cancer and did not mention anything about radioactivity or the radioactive iron. “I filled it out to the best of my ability and sent it back.”
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A January 29, 1965, form letter from Hagstrom to the mothers who received the radioiron begins: “You may remember taking part in a study of diet and eating habits while attending Vanderbilt Obstetric Clinic in the years between 1945 to 1949.” The letter goes on to say that the university is doing a follow-up project and is interested in finding out more about the health of the mothers and children.
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The mothers are asked to fill out an enclosed survey and are told the information will be kept confidential. But nowhere in the letter is there any mention of radioactive iron cocktails given decades earlier or that the true purpose of the follow-up is to find out what harmful effects, if any, were caused by ingestion of the radioactive material.

When the vast amount of data was analyzed, the scientists discovered four fatal malignancies among children who had been exposed to prenatal radiation and no cancers in the nonexposed group. Childhood cancer is extremely rare, and in a 1969 paper published in the
American Journal of Epidemiology,
Hagstrom and her coauthors concluded that the results “suggests a cause and effect relationship.”
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The findings, they continued,
represent a “small, but statistically significant increase …and is consistent with previous radiobiologic experience.” The deceased children included:

   • An 11-year-old boy who contracted liver cancer. The Vanderbilt scientists said the tumor was probably unrelated to the radiation because two of his older brothers also died of liver cancer. However, attorneys representing the mothers noted the other two brothers died at ages twenty-two and twenty-six, suggesting the radioactive iron may have brought on the cancer prematurely.

• A girl, five years and eleven months old, who died of acute lymphatic leukemia. Her mother received the radioactive iron in the twenty-third week of gestation.

• A boy, age eleven, who died from lymphosarcoma. His mother received the radioactive iron in the twentieth week of pregnancy.

• A girl, age eleven, who died of synovial sarcoma of the right thigh that spread to the lungs. Her mother received the radioactive iron when she was thirteen weeks’ pregnant.

   The fourth child fit the description of Emma Craft’s daughter. Carolyn had the same kind of cancer. It started in the same place and in the same leg. She was the same fetal age when the radioiron was administered and the same age when she died. Emma Craft would have immediately spotted the similarities between the child described in the report and her own daughter—but she would not see the journal article for nearly twenty-five years.

Kneeling on the bare mattress springs, holding his young body in a prayerful stillness so that it wouldn’t sway, wouldn’t sink deeper into the coils, Gordon Shattuck dreamed of flight; the adrenaline-filled plunge down the hill behind the boy’s dormitory, through the hole he had dug beneath the barbed-wire fence, across the fields, and onto the railroad tracks that led away from the red-brick institution. The dream, if he concentrated hard enough and long enough, blotted out the throbbing pain in his knees. All of the Fernald boys, many of them grandfathers now, remember the mattress springs; their squeaky unsteadiness as they clambered on top of coils looking for a solid purchase. The punishment was meted out for the slightest infraction, a smart-alecky remark, a disrespectful shrug. If their bodies swayed—and it was hard for them not to—the attendants would slap the soles of the boys’ bare feet with switches. A week or so often passed before the crescent-shaped bruises faded from their knees.

Gordon came from an unstable home. His father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive. His mother, Henrietta, had had her first child at the age of fifteen. By the time she was thirty-six, she had given birth to twenty-one children. Gordon was transferred from foster home to foster home. He kept running away and finally wound up at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts. The barred windows and gloomy buildings touched off an explosion of emotions within him.

Part English, part Irish, and part Native American, Gordon became one of the ringleaders at Fernald. He was small and wiry with black hair and hazel eyes. The institution was tolerable if the boys obeyed the rules
and did what they were told. But for youths like Gordon, life was hard and filled with punishing abuse that left deep grooves of rage in his mind. Especially vivid is the evening an attendant locked him in the men’s room, threw open the windows to the subfreezing temperatures, and poured bucket after bucket of cold water on him until he submitted to the man’s sexual demands. “He molested me, I don’t know how many times,” he said.
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Able-bodied youngsters who were not mentally retarded and had been stashed in Fernald by poverty-stricken families, or the courts, helped run the school. They worked on the farm, picking the corn, tomatoes, turnips, and peas that were canned and fed to residents the following winter. They toiled in the kitchen, repaired the buildings, mowed the grass, and delivered the mail. One boy even reportedly worked in the morgue, slicing human brains into paper-thin sections that were pressed between glass slides. It wasn’t the physical hardship so much as the lugubrious tedium that got to them; like the 1950s sitcoms blaring from black-and-white TVs, the steamed food, the long afternoons in the workshop making wallets, brooms, and mattresses.

Often Gordon was ordered to polish the floors with a heavy block of carpeted wood that hung from a rope harness around his neck. “Rope rubbing,” as the boys called it, was both a punishment and a chore. Back and forth across the wooden floors of the dormitories and hallways Gordon lugged the covered wood. Rope rubbing the floors of the upstairs rooms, Gordon could look down into an exercise yard and see the less fortunate inmates of the institution that staff members once divided into “idiots” (intelligence quotient less than 20), “imbeciles” (IQs of less than 50), and “morons” (IQs over 50). They moaned to themselves and chugged in endless circles, their hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them.
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