The Plutonium Files (72 page)

They sifted through their memories. The dates fit. But the thought that Vanderbilt would do something like that didn’t. The idea challenged their sense of orderliness, the way the world had operated for fifty years. When Helen Hutchison heard the news, she told her daughter, “Vanderbilt couldn’t do anything like that. I just don’t believe anything like that happened. They wouldn’t do that to us.”

Vanderbilt found several boxes of records on the experiment in a remote warehouse. With those records, the university was able to identify approximately 240 of the 829 women given radioactive iron.

Helen Hutchison was one of them. In March of 1994, she received records confirming that she had been given 4.16 milligrams of radioactive iron on July 25, 1946. “It’s unthinkable,” she said.
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“To take something that powerful and that unknown and test it on women, it’s beyond comprehension.”

Vanderbilt began aggressively defending itself against charges that the experiment was unethical and unsafe. “While it would not be acceptable today to give radioactive isotopes to pregnant women, it is also clear that this was carefully evaluated at the time, and there was a feeling then it was safe,” Joseph C. Ross, Vanderbilt’s associate vice chancellor for health affairs, told the
New York Times.
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“We want to be as helpful as we
can, but to create the feeling that we’ve done something wrong, we don’t want to do that.”

Vanderbilt University officials enlisted the aid of scientists and statisticians to refute its own report, which found cancers in the children exposed in utero to the radioactive iron. Henry N. Wagner, a professor of medicine and radiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said Ruth Hagstrom’s study was riddled with errors. Her conclusion that three of the malignancies constituted a statistically significant increase was “totally unwarranted by the data,” he claimed in a court affidavit.
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Hagstrom agreed with her critics and downplayed the cancer deaths. But when the publicity had subsided and I asked her in a telephone interview two years later whether she personally believed the radioactive iron caused the malignancies, she responded, “I don’t know. We don’t know any better now than we knew then.
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I mean, the data’s just not there. All we can say is what’s in the paper.”

Scientists in Oak Ridge reanalyzed the Vanderbilt data and came up with “a few tens of millirads” for the total fetal doses.
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These were the lowest exposures ever assigned to the unborn infants and many times lower than what the original experimenter Paul Hahn had estimated. The Oak Ridge scientists conceded that it would “never be absolutely determined” whether the malignancies in the Vanderbilt infants were caused by radiation exposure, but they added that most experts believed that fetal abnormalities occur when the doses are much higher.

The Oak Ridge analysis drew strong criticism from Roland Finston, a retired Stanford University health physicist and an expert witness hired by attorneys representing the mothers. Finston, who had helped me calculate the radiation doses to the plutonium patients, contended the malignancies found among the children present a “convincing profile” of cancers that might be expected from in-utero exposure to radioactive iron. “All of these cancers are either known to be radiogenic, or are closely associated with the hematopoetic and lymphatic systems where radioiron would be expected to have its effects.
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We can also be sure that the Vanderbilt experiment has already resulted, or will inevitably result in the future, in several ‘genetic deaths’ in the descendants of the exposed women and children, as well as genetic diseases of varying severity.”

Emma Craft called the hot line set up by the Department of Energy. When she got a busy signal, she sat down and wrote a letter to U.S. Senator Jim Sasser, a Democrat from Tennessee. Apparently tipped off by Sasser, reporters began knocking at her door. One of them showed
her the Ruth Hagstrom report, which described the eleven-year-old girl who died from the synovial sarcoma.

The description of the unnamed child fit her daughter, Carolyn Bucy. They were the same age, the same gender, and the cancer started in the same place in the same leg. Emma said she knew immediately that it was her daughter. “I knew it explained my baby.
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And I knew that was her. And I can’t tell you how mad I got. I was hurt, mad and upset all at the same time because I knew it was her when I read the report.”

Emma did not receive documents from Vanderbilt confirming that she had received the radioactive iron. But the similarities between Carolyn and the unnamed eleven-year-old cancer victim described in Ruth Hagstrom’s report were too numerous to be coincidental. Emma said that the Vanderbilt doctors closely monitored her daughter’s illness and later tried to obtain her body for an autopsy.
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All the grief she suffered when her daughter died came surging back. At first she sought only an apology from Vanderbilt and an acknowledgment of what they had done. When the apology failed to materialize, she joined the class-action lawsuit. “What I went through was for no reason at all,” she said in her deposition.
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“I could accept God taking her but not man.”

U.S. District Judge John T. Nixon refused to dismiss the class action lawsuit against Vanderbilt University and the other parties. A jury, he said, could “reasonably find” that the university and its doctors fraudulently concealed the nature of the experiment from the women.
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The judge pointed to the fact that Darby told the women the radioactive drink was a “cocktail” and that the letters sent to the women in the follow-up study did not disclose that they had been given radioactive iron. Furthermore, he said, there is a suggestion that the university may “have lost or destroyed records while on notice of liability.”

Emma was not in the best of health and worried about whether she would live long enough to see the case through to a conclusion. An apology from Vanderbilt, she said, would no longer do.

Harold Bibeau, who had been irradiated in Oregon, read about Hazel O’Leary’s press conference in a Portland newspaper one morning. He decided to go public with his story on
Northwest Reports,
an investigative television news program in Portland. For Bibeau, who had managed to rebuild his life when he was released from prison, the decision did not come easily. He was married and had a nine-year-old son. Except for his wife and a few close friends, nobody, not even his son, knew about his
past, and going public carried a large personal risk. “Something had to be done.
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And as far as I knew, nobody else was willing to do it.”

Although it was the first time many Oregonians had ever heard of the experiments, corrections officials had been trying to find a way to provide follow-up care to Carl Heller’s subjects for years.

The Oregon legislature had passed a law in 1987 requiring that the Department of Corrections provide a free annual examination to individuals who had taken part in the Heller program. Oregon prison officials asked James Ruttenber, then with the Centers for Disease Control, to develop a protocol for medical follow-up. Ruttenber recommended that all of Heller’s subjects, including those who were in the hormone experiments, undergo annual exams.

Ruttenber also contacted C. Alvin Paulsen, Heller’s protégé, to see if a similar program could be set up for the Washington prisoners. Paulsen was “noticeably defensive” and unwilling to provide any information, Ruttenber said. “I think he even implied at one point in the discussion that providing information would be potentially incriminating.
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I don’t think he meant that in the sense that he had done anything criminally wrong but that he would be providing information that would be against his interest.”

By the time Hazel O’Leary held her press conference, corrections officials had begun providing physical exams for a handful of subjects irradiated by Carl Heller who were still in prison and a few living in the community. But Oregon authorities felt that since the federal government funded the program, it should also pick up some of the tab. “I hope that you will consider making available some kind of medical surveillance for these people through the federal government that does not require that they first identify themselves as a prisoner,” Frank Hall, director of Oregon’s Department of Corrections, said in a letter to O’Leary.
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The atomic veterans, who had been battling to get adequate compensation since the 1978 congressional hearings prompted by Paul Cooper’s story, felt they had something in common with the other experimental subjects. As the
Atomic Veteran’s Newsletter
put it:

In countless newspaper articles published throughout the United States, aging vets described the glowing fireballs that came up over the Pacific Ocean, the choking dust they breathed in at the Nevada Test Site.

Some veterans and civilians began talking about the bizarre medical treatments in which rods tipped with radium were placed in their nostrils for disorders ranging from earaches to infected tonsils. Wilhelm Hueper, the scientist who had once provoked the wrath of Shields Warren when he wrote about the dangers in the uranium mines, had warned of the unforeseen risks of nasopharyngeal treatment in 1954. But Hueper’s warning went largely unnoticed and the treatment was widely used. The Centers for Disease Control has estimated that between 8,000 and 20,000 servicemen were treated with nasopharyngeal irradiation and that a total of 500,000 to 2 million Americans may have received the treatment.
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That number is huge, but what makes it even more worrisome is the fact that several contemporary researchers have warned that patients who received the nasopharyngeal irradiation run a greater risk of contracting head and neck cancers. A Dutch researcher calculated that individuals exposed to radium rods in the Netherlands appear to have twice as many verified cancers as a nonexposed control group.
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And American patients typically received doses that were nearly four times larger than the Dutch patients received.

Cherie Anderson, a California woman now in her fifties, received the nasal radium treatments for sinus problems when she was about six years old.
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Her mother told her the rods looked like Fourth of July sparklers. She developed polio when she was eight; had two benign breast tumors removed at age twenty-two; developed strange red blood cells at thirty and nodules on the thyroid at thirty-five; and by forty-one, had lost almost all of her teeth. Anderson believes the radiation damaged her immune system and upset her hormonal balance. “The dentists said a woman my age should have all her own teeth,” she told a reporter. “They
were baffled. But when I mentioned the radiation treatments, they said, ‘Ah, ha, that’s it.” ’

In a house trailer in Edgewood, New Mexico, a three-hour drive from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Katie Kelley pored over documents she had received from the lab about her father, Cecil, the plutonium worker who received the massive dose of radiation in the 1958 criticality accident. “A wide-mouthed mayonnaise jar. They packed my father’s brain in a wide-mouthed mayonnaise jar,” she said, her voice filled with disbelief.
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Katie had been trying since 1974 to obtain information from Los Alamos National Laboratory about her father’s death. But she said lab officials had repeatedly rebuffed her efforts, claiming the data on her father was classified.

But times had changed. In early 1994, the lab had sent her a stack of records on her father’s accident. Only when she read those records did Katie realize for the first time that her father’s organs had been shipped to researchers throughout the country. “The cutting him up makes me nuts.
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I don’t think they have a right, government or not, to chop up my father’s parts without his family’s knowledge,” she said.

The Cecil Kelley story was only one of the articles that surfaced in early 1994 about the laboratory’s ghoulish “human tissue analysis project,” the decades-long program in which organs, tissues, or even whole cadavers were sent to Los Alamos and analyzed for plutonium content. In a 1994 press release, lab officials said they had obtained consent for the tissue samples, but Jim McInroy, the lead scientist in the study, admitted in a private meeting a few months later that “people did not know they were sent to Los Alamos.”
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The organs from Michael Brousseau, a fifteen-year-old boy who died in Los Alamos in 1968 from complications caused by a birth defect, were among the body parts analyzed. His father, Armand Brousseau, a retired engineer, told reporters he never gave permission for the analysis. “This place,” he said of Los Alamos, “is full of gods.”
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In one of its most embarrassing disclosures, the lab admitted that it still had seven small unanalyzed bone samples from Karen Silkwood, an employee at the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation in Crescent, Oklahoma.
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Silkwood, a union worker, was killed in a car crash on November 13, 1974, when she was on her way to meet with
New York Times
reporter David Burnham about safety violations at the plant. The accident
became the subject of a highly successful movie starring Cher and Meryl Streep.