The Plutonium Files (9 page)

“Depending on their skill, the workers tipped the brush from 1 to 15 times per dial, and painted 250 to 300 dials per day.
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A worker who licked one milligram of paint from her brush 4 times per dial, 300 dials per day, 5 days per week, would therefore ingest about 4,000 micrograms of radium in 6 months,” a young scientist named Robley Evans would later calculate in a paper published in 1933.

Their dresses spattered with the radium paint, the young women would go home and amuse their families by showing them how they glowed in the dark. A few applied the paint to their lips, eyelids, and teeth when they went out on dates.

One of the first dial painters examined by Martland was a thirty-five-year-old woman who was suffering from rapidly progressing anemia.
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She
had worked as a dial painter for six years and was in good health until June of 1925, when bruises began appearing on her body. Soon her gums began to bleed and the tissue on the roof of her mouth and throat began to slough off. Knowing that she had been exposed to radium, Martland performed some tests on her before she died. When a radioactive counter was placed near her body, the instrument began clicking. Although she was exhausted and near death, the woman was asked to blow into a rubber tube that fed into a large glass container. Her captured breath contained significant amounts of radiation in the form of radon gas.

When Martland conducted the autopsy, he found hemorrhages on the woman’s abdomen and legs and on her internal organs. Her bones were so radioactive that when he wrapped a bone sliver in a piece of dental film, the material fogged the film. Martland was convinced that the woman’s death had been caused by radium and mesothorium, a shorter-lived and hotter isotope of radium also used in the luminous paint mixture.

Radium, which had been discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie, behaves like calcium in the body. While most of it is excreted rapidly, some is absorbed in the bloodstream and deposited mainly on the skeleton. As radium decays, it produces radon, an alpha-emitting gas that diffuses through the bloodstream, enters the lungs, and is expelled. Radium also emits gamma rays, which can be detected outside the body.

When Martland examined other young dial painters, he found their bodies and breath were also highly radioactive. The physical effects of the high doses were devastating: Although many of the women were not yet thirty years old, they were so crippled from bone fractures they couldn’t stand without the aid of canes. Their bone marrow, the life-giving factory that produces the red and white blood cells and platelets, failed. Their jaws were so damaged from the constant bombardment of the alpha particles that the bones were in danger of snapping when the women yawned or rolled over in their sleep.

Soon after the first grisly deaths were reported, several families filed lawsuits. The cases were widely publicized and the dial painters deluged with nostrums promising a cure. In France, Madame Curie advised the girls to eat raw calf’s liver to counteract the anemia. “I would be only too happy to give any aid that I could,” she said.
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Eventually the lawsuits were settled out of court, but the paint companies refused to accept legal responsibility.
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Even though Harrison Martland had issued a stern warning about
the dangers of radium, the radioactive material continued to be mixed into vaginal jellies, face creams, elixirs, and candy sold throughout the United States. Doctors prescribed radium for every imaginable ailment ranging from arthritis and gout to “debutante fatigue.” In 1932, the horrifying death of Eben Byers, a Pittsburgh millionaire, finally brought the dangers of radium to the attention of the American people.
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A bon vivant and ladies’ man, Byers began consuming a tonic called Radithor for an old football injury. Each bottle contained a microcurie of radium and a microcurie of mesothorium. The radiation initially irritated Byers’s blood-forming organs, producing a temporary increase in red and white blood cell production and a momentary sense of well-being. The concoction made Byers feel so good that between 1927 and 1931 he consumed perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 bottles of Radithor and began giving it away to his girlfriends.
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Soon the devastation set in. Byers’s athletic frame withered to ninety pounds and he turned a ghastly shade of yellow as his bone marrow and kidneys failed. His jaw and part of his skull were surgically removed in an effort to stop the advancing disease, but the operations were useless, and he died.

Officials at the Los Angeles County Health Department, fearing they might soon be swamped with similar cases, sought help from Robert Millikan, a famous Nobel scientist from Cal Tech. Millikan referred the officials to one of his promising graduate students, Robley Evans, who had developed some of the most sensitive radiation detection equipment in the world. As a result, Evans developed a lifelong interest in the dial painters and became one of the world’s experts in radiation biology.

After completing his Ph.D. under Millikan at Cal Tech in 1932, Evans moved to Berkeley, where he spent the next two years doing postgraduate work. Ernest Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer were just beginning their remarkable careers, but Evans did not succumb to the charms of either man. He was hard-headed, cold to the point of rudeness, but not without a sly sense of humor. In 1934 Evans, his wife, and two young children piled into his four-cylinder Plymouth and drove east to MIT, where he became a professor of physics and founded the Radioactivity Center. There Evans continued his research on the radium poisoning victims. In his 1933 paper on the dial painters, he reported that as little as two micrograms of radium in the body, or two millionths of a gram, had proved “fatal” in some women.

By the spring of 1941, with the armed forces preparing for a war that had not yet been officially declared, Evans’s work on radiation was
deemed so important that a Navy medical officer approached him and threatened to draft him if he didn’t provide the Navy with maximum permissible levels for radium and radon.
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The Navy was interested because it used many kinds of luminous instruments on its ships. Evans rapidly assembled a committee, which included Harrison Martland as well as representatives of the radium industry. By then Evans had data on twenty-seven dial painters who had radium burdens in their body. Seven had less than 0.5 microcuries; the other twenty had amounts greater than 1.2 microcuries. (A microcurie is a millionth of a curie. Named after Madame Curie, the curie measures the activity, or rate of decay, of a radioisotope. By contrast, a microgram measures the actual weight.) Evans reviewed the data on the dial painters and then turned to the committee and said:

Although twenty-seven cases were certainly too small a sample upon which any scientific conclusions could be drawn, over the next four decades Evans and his colleagues examined some 2,000 people with radium in their bodies.
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He reported in 1981 that he had never seen any symptoms in people with less than 0.1 microcuries in their bodies. Therefore, he concluded, the standard was still good.

But Robert Stone, the worried leader of the Met Lab’s Health Division, did not have the benefit of four decades’ worth of information. All he knew was that the so-called tolerance dose for radium had been based on only twenty-seven cases. And that was the only data the Met Lab had upon which to base its own protection standards for a wide range of internally absorbed radioisotopes—including plutonium.

Given the scanty data, Robert Stone turned to human experimentation to get the information he needed. His first experiments were aimed at better
understanding the effects of small doses of external radiation on humans. By 1943, a year after he took over the Met Lab, he was supervising three experiments at hospitals in San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. Most subjects used in these experiments were cancer patients who were undergoing radiation treatment for their diseases but had relatively normal blood counts. Stone explained the problem this way in the introduction to the California study:

In each of the three Met Lab—sponsored experiments, the patients were subjected to radiation administered over their entire bodies in a procedure called total body irradiation, or TBI. Stone maintained that total body irradiation was a bona fide procedure aimed at benefiting the patients. The Manhattan Project, he asserted, was merely taking advantage of the treatments to do blood studies. But statements made by researchers at the time suggest exactly the reverse was true: The blood studies seemed to be the primary focus of the exposures and little, if any benefit accrued to the patients.

Not surprisingly, the first experiment was conducted at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco. The study began in October of 1942, shortly after Stone joined the Met Lab, and continued through June of 1946. Bertram Vojtech Adelbert Low-Beer, a mild-looking scientist with a round face and a dark fringe of neatly trimmed hair, ran the experiment while Stone was in Chicago.

Low-Beer had fled Czechoslovakia in 1939. At the urging of Mark Oliphant, an Australian physicist who had strongly encouraged the Americans to pursue the atomic bomb, Low-Beer had joined the University of Birmingham. He had just begun his radioisotope research when war broke out in England. John Lawrence invited him to the Rad Lab in
Berkeley in 1941, and with a recommendation from Robert Stone, he was appointed to the medical faculty at UCSF two years later. He was a pleasant man, even jovial at times, but was known to get “extremely worked up” over sloppy or careless work, according to Stone.
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Like Robert Stone and Joseph Hamilton, Low-Beer had close ties to both the San Francisco hospital and the Rad Lab. He was an expert in the physics, chemistry, and biology of how radioactive substances behaved in human tissue.

Over the four-year period, twenty-nine patients, ranging in age from twenty to seventy-five, were irradiated at UCSF. The exposures per sitting varied from 5 to 20 roentgens and the total dosages ranged from 27 to 394 roentgens. (To put this in perspective, scientists believe 350 roentgens, delivered at one time and without counteractive measures, such as antibiotics, fluids, and bone marrow transplants, will kill 50 percent of those exposed.)

The physical effects of the irradiation on the patients are unknown because the scientific paper written by Stone and Low-Beer addresses only the blood changes. Many blood samples were drawn before the radiation was administered, during the treatment itself, and for a number of weeks afterward. The two experimenters found that radiation exposure did reduce the number of blood cells, particularly white cells, circulating in the body.
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A second TBI experiment was conducted from December of 1942 until August of 1944 at Memorial Hospital in New York—the hospital where Hymer Friedell and Louis Hempelmann had worked before the war. The lead experimenter was Lloyd F. Craver, a doctor who had just co-authored a paper stating that TBI was a “discouraging” treatment for patients suffering from generalized cancer. Despite his negative results, Craver conducted an experiment in which eight patients were to be irradiated with a total of 300 roentgens. The planned doses ranged from 10 to 15 roentgens per sitting. The selection of patients was the “most difficult part of the project,” Craver wrote, because the subjects had to be in good enough condition to survive “the combined effects of their disease and the irradiation for at least six months in order that some conclusions might be drawn as to later effects of the irradiation.”
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The experiment didn’t work out the way Craver had hoped. Three patients died within two months of the treatment. The others continued to live for a while but did poorly. Craver blamed the deaths and deterioration to the patients’ diseases and not the radiation, concluding that “such doses of radiation should be well tolerated by healthy persons.”
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A third TBI experiment was conducted at the Chicago Tumor Clinic beginning in March of 1943 and continuing through November of 1944. The lead investigator was J. J. Nickson, a young doctor who was only three years out of medical school.
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The fourteen subjects used in the experiment were divided into three groups. The first consisted of eight cancer patients who had “neoplasms that could not be cured but still were not extensive enough to influence general health.” The second group consisted of three patients who had illnesses that were “generalized and chronic” (one of the three was a twenty-five-year-old woman who had a history of “pain and stiffness of the joints”). The third group was composed of three healthy young white men who volunteered to be irradiated with seven roentgens a day over a three-day period. That group was of “particular interest,” Nickson wrote, because the men most closely resembled the Met Lab workers themselves.
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Nickson found no changes in the blood counts of the three men.