Part 3 (1/2)

Holland: What was thata”90?

Howland: He got 4.7 [micrograms] once a day, which was 49 [plutonium]a Holland: Well, we will get it out and find out where he is and what he is doing and Iall let you know.

Howland: Louie Hempelmann a has medical results on him. Theyave got the most complete work-up results, because they did all the chemical a.n.a.lysis out there.a Dwight should have the rest of the information.

Holland: The fellowas name was what?

Howland: Eb [sic] Cade.

A month after Cadeas injection, Langham gave a cla.s.sified talk in Chicago to other Manhattan Project doctors about the experiment: aThe subject was an elderly male whose age and general health was such that there is little or no possibility that the injection can have any effect on the normal course of his life,a he began.21 Langham said the plutonium solution that he prepared was designed to produce the amaximum depositiona in human bone. aThis presumably would produce an excretion rate comparable to that of a worker having absorbed the material at a slow rate thereby depositing a maximum amount in the bone where it is probably the most damaging.a22 In charts accompanying the talk, Langham noted that 332 counts per minute were detected in Ebbas urine in the first twenty-four-hour period after injection, declining to 119 counts three months later.23 By contrast, exposed laboratory workersa”individuals with nose counts in excess of 50 counts per minutea”showed only an average of 2.2 counts per minute in their urine samples.24 The excretion rate of human beings was surprisingly low, Langham said, and the leveling off was much slower athan with rats.a Despite the elaborate planning, the experiment was flawed.26 Samples of Ebbas urine from before and after the injection were accidentally pooled together, providing no control sample.25 Scientists also worried that Ebbas kidney damage could have affected the excretion rate.

Five days after the injectiona”and nearly three weeks after the accident a”Ebbas bones were set. The timing of the surgery enabled the scientists to complete one critical component of the experiment: obtain bone samples from Ebb after the plutonium had circulated in his body. The samples showed the plutonium had indeed gone to the bone. In one fragment, scientists detected 82 counts per minute. Fifteen of Ebbas teeth also were pulled, purportedly because Ebb was suffering from gum inflammation and tooth decay.27 The teeth, as well as portions of his gum tissue and jawbone, were a.n.a.lyzed for plutonium content. Plutonium also goes to the jawbone where the teeth are embedded.

Lawrence Suchow, a young enlisted man, spent about a week in June emptying Ebbas bedpan. He had been cautioned to be very careful taking the urine away and never saw any family members or doctors stopping in to see Ebb. Two months or so had elapsed since the accident and Ebb still appeared to be in great pain. aHe was just moaning,a Suchow remembered.28 aHe seemed in terrible shape. He looked to me like he was not going to make it for a few days.a One of the still-unexplained aspects of the case is what happened to Jesse Smith, the driver. He was hospitalized for approximately nine months with a fractured hip. In a letter written two years after the accident, a Major William Clarkson in Oak Ridge asked Hymer Friedell about Smithas case. X rays taken in January 1946 and March 1947 showed that Smithas bones still had failed to heal. And a colleague, he added, ais at a loss to explain the failure of the bone to unite and because of the large amount of laboratory work done while he was hospitalized, was wondering if, perhaps he had received asome stuffa given by a member of this office.a29 In a response to Clarkson written three days later, Friedell said he couldnat remember the manas name who had received the material and suggested that Clarkson contact Joe Howland or Wright Langham. aJoe Howland actually gave the material and he might remember the manas name,a Friedell added.30 aAs I remember it, the individual who received the material was an older Negro and had multiple fractures.a Although Clarkson had asked for information on Jesse Smith, the driver, Friedellas response seems to refer to Ebb Cade. Friedell does not mention the patientas name or the word aplutonium,a so it is not absolutely certain to which of the men he was referring. No written evidence whatsoever has been found suggesting that Smith received plutonium. And if Friedell was referring to Cade, it would be further confirmation of Howlandas version of the story.

9.

NEXT IN LINE: ARTHUR AND ALBERT.

Itas not clear why the Manhattan Project doctors abandoned their plan to use a hospital patient in Rochester or Chicago and chose Ebb Cade instead. But sixteen days after Cade was injected, Arthur Hubbard, a bespectacled and distinguished-looking white businessman from Austin, Texas, was injected with plutonium in Chicago by Robert Stoneas group.

As a young man, Arthur had been recruited to play baseball for St. Edwardas University, a small college in Austin.1 During one game, he glanced up and saw a determined-looking girl named Selma watching him from the stands. The couple fell in love and got married. Eventually they had seven children, one of whom died as a toddler after eating mistletoe at Christmas.

When Arthuras baseball days were over, he purchased land in the hill country outside Austin where he cut down cedar trees, split them into posts, and sold them for fences and firewood. When gas heaters replaced woodstoves, he moved to town and opened Hubbardas Baseball Inn, which sold beer and barbecue sandwiches and became a watering hole for the police chief and the county commissioners.

Arthur had enjoyed excellent health until the latter part of June 1944, when he noticed a swelling under the front part of his chin. The swelling increased to the size of a ahenas egga and was excised four months later.2 Doctors diagnosed Arthur with squamous cell carcinoma and subsequently exposed the affected area to two thousand roentgens of localized radiation. Within two weeks the cancer was back, and Arthur underwent another surgical procedure and another round of radiation.

A friend who was a surgeon urged Arthur to get treatment at University of Chicagoas Billings Hospital. The hospital was just a few minutesa walk from the Met Lab, and many of the doctors who worked at the lab also had privileges at the hospital. aWe knew they were experimenting with some new treatment,a Arthuras daughter, Ripple Guess, said.3 But neither Ripple nor any of Arthuras other children suspected the so-called treatment consisted of an injection of top-secret material that would be used in a weapon soon to be dropped on j.a.pan.

In his late sixties when he contracted cancer, Arthur underwent aseven different plastic operative procedures,a including the removal of his lower jaw.4 Eventually he was fed by tube because his throat and mouth had become so painful that he could no longer swallow. At 9:17 A.M. on April 26, 1945, several weeks after he entered the hospital, he was injected with 6.5 micrograms of plutonium in a citrate solution, a dose equal to 120 times the radiation an average person receives in a year. Afterward, his urine was collected in gallon bottles filled with hydrochloric acid and samples of his stool were placed in aseal-fasta cardboard containers.5 He was a.s.signed the code name CHI-1, a number that signified that he was the first Chicago patient injected with plutonium. A year later Met Lab scientists explained the logic behind the injection in a secret report: Since people were of necessity exposed to some degree to plutonium and since plutonium is known to be very radiotoxic it was obviously desirable to have some method of determining whether or not a given person had any plutonium in him.6 It was equally desirable to be able to estimate as accurately as possible how much was deposited in any person. Animal experiments were used to procure as much data as possible. Some human studies were needed to see how to apply the animal data to the human problems.

Soon after Arthur Hubbard was injected, Joseph Hamilton and his colleagues in Berkeley began scouting the corridors of the University of California Hospital in San Francisco for a suitable human candidate for their own plutonium experiment. For more than a year, Hamilton and his a.s.sociates had been injecting plutonium into rats. Now Hamilton, a compulsive and impatient experimenter, was eager to ratchet the studies up to the next level. In January of 1945, the very month that Los Alamosas Wright Langham perfected the chemical technique for detecting plutonium in human urine and feces, Hamilton notified the Met Labas Arthur Compton that he was ready ato undertake, on a limited scale, a series of metabolic studies with product [plutonium] using human subjects.a7 Although Compton was a religious man, his moral scruples apparently were overridden by his fear of plutonium and his conviction that the human experiments were necessary.

Joseph Hamilton held dual academic appointments: He was a professor of medical physics at UC-Berkeley and a professor of experimental medicine and radiology at UCSF. This arrangement, he said, allowed him access to aclinical material.a The aclinical materiala that caught his eye in May of 1945 was house painter Albert Stevens, a shrunken, pale man on Ward B of the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.8 Albert had long been a familiar figure in the small town of Healdsburg, California, his bladelike body rattling up and down ladders with cans of paint or slouching in a block of shade with an unfiltered cigarette between his fingers. In the 1920s Albert had set off for California in a skinny-wheeled Model T with a birdas nest of furniture piled on top after a doctor told him his asthmatic wife would not survive another year in Ohio. The West was still an uncharted wilderness then, and the rutted roads often bloomed into lakes or vanished in the prairie gra.s.ses. The journey took a year and it was one of the happiest times of his life. In the old photographs, he is tall and slim and always grinning.

The years had taken their toll on Albert, and by the spring of 1945 he bore little resemblance to the smiling young man in the photographs. For several months he had been experiencing extremely sharp pains in his stomach.9 The pain was so fierce, so consuming, it was as if the finches and canaries he kept were free and he, Albert Stevens, were in the cage. He talked to the birds often, coaxing them to sing for his young grandson. Now the musical notes spilled over his shoulders, sweet and clear. But Albert was listening to the drab complaint within him. The pain weakened him, draining the color from his face and hair, until finally he was a prematurely old man.

One doctor said he had lost fifteen pounds; another put it at forty. A local physician suspected Albert had a malignant ulcer that had spread to the liver and advised him to consult specialists at the University of California Hospital.1011 Albert reluctantly agreed. It meant he would miss part of the spring. In his backyard, lumps of hard fruit hung from the orange tree and in the tangled blackberry bushes along the wall. The seventy-five-mile trip south to San Francisco was beautiful. The hills were still a vivid green, and splotches of yellow mustard spilled across the slopes.

Albert arrived at the hospital in San Francisco the first week of May 1945, the week Germany announced its surrender. Just three weeks earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had guided the nation during the war and had approved the atomic bomb project, died. President Harry Truman was briefed on the new weapon on April 25 by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army General Leslie Groves.

Albert was slated to undergo a battery of tests in the hospital. The cost was $5.25 a day plus a $30 deposit.12 The medical expenses were reasonable, but Albert was unemployed and it was a lot of money to sc.r.a.pe together. The hospital also insisted that Albertas family replace any blood used for transfusions, so his son and daughter-in-law flew down from Michigan to donate. Afterward they paced the corridors and waited for the results of the diagnostic tests.

In the first few days of his hospital stay, Albert underwent a routine workup. A urinalysis and chest X ray were normal. His abdomen was concave and tender to the touch. Small curds of milk and coffee grounds were found in his stomach. He was placed on a standard hospital diet and after a few days felt asubstantially improved.a An upper gastrointestinal series was conducted. Both a radiologist and a surgical consultant concluded that Albert probably had cancer but suggested a gastroscopy be done to confirm the diagnosis.13 For some reason, however, the procedure, which involves inserting a scope through the mouth to visually inspect the stomach, was not done. When the other diagnostic tests were completed, the doctors relayed the bad news to the family: Albert had stomach cancer and would probably not live more than another six months. He was fifty-eight years old.

Through some invisible network, perhaps nothing more than a hallway conversation, scientists working on top-secret research for the Manhattan Project learned of Albert. While doctors in San Francisco were doing their diagnostic tests, Joseph Hamiltonas group in Berkeley began preparations for their first human plutonium experiment. Hamiltonas team prepared a solution that consisted of mostly plutonium-238 and a small amount of plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 is 276 times more radioactive than plutonium-239 and therefore has the potential to cause much more biological damage. Plutonium-238 probably was used because it was easier to measure with the crude instruments of the time.

Kenneth Scott, the chubby scientist who had been working at the Rad Lab since John Lawrence had injected his first human patient with radiophosphorous, transported the plutonium from Berkeley to the hospital.14 The son of an aspiring beautician and a locomotive engineer, Scott had worked his way through high school and the University of California at Berkeley and later claimed to have successfully cured animal tumors with LSD15. Like Hamilton, Scottas interest in radioisotopes was accidental, having begun after he went to a abeer party with a bunch of physicists.a16 On May 14 the mixture that Scott had brought to the hospital was injected into one of Albertas veins. Patricia Durbin, the scientist who as an undergraduate worked in Hamiltonas lab, said years later the injection was the equivalent of a acarcinogenic dose.a Albert was designated CAL-1, the first California patient injected with plutonium.17 On the day Albert was injected, five rats were injected with the same solution.18 Two of the rats were killed a day later and the plutonium in their lungs, liver, kidney, and skeleton was measured. The other three rats were allowed to live for the remainder of the experiment.

In an interview several decades later, Kenneth Scott said that UCSF radiologist Earl Miller injected the plutonium into Albertas body.19 Miller had been hired at the University of California at San Francisco in 1940 by Robert Stone and was acting chief of the radiology department while Stone was at the Met Lab.20 For decades Miller denied that he had any involvement in the experiment. aI never, never, never injected any radioactive material into anybody,a he said in May 1995, about two months before his death.21 aThese people,a Miller told other interviewers, athe people that were chosen usually in these studies, they were doomed.22 They were ready to die.a Four days after the injection, with the plutonium coursing through his bloodstream and already settling in his bones, Albert was wheeled into surgery. He was lain on his right side and a pillow placed under his chest. Then a long incision paralleling the ninth rib was made. Surgeons found a ahuge, ulcerating, carcinomatous ma.s.sa that had grown into his spleen and liver.23 Initially the doctors were planning to remove his entire stomach, but halfway through the operation, they decided against it. Half of the left lobe of the liver, the entire spleen, most of the ninth rib, lymph nodes, part of the pancreas, and a portion of the omentuma”an ap.r.o.n of fat covering the internal organsa”were taken out.

According to a note written by the surgeon, the specimens were handed to Earl Miller as they were removed from Albertas unconscious body.24 Miller was to take a portion of each specimen and then send the remainder to the hospital pathology department, where the cancer diagnosis was to be confirmed. The surgeon apparently agreed to the division because he erroneously thought that Albert had been given radioactive phosphorous by the X-ray department for aspecial studies.a The operation was expertly done.25 The incision along the ninth rib was sutured with fine cotton thread and a small catheter was inserted in an opening so that penicillin could be administered for the next forty-eight hours. aThe patient withstood the procedure exceedingly well.26 He was returned to the ward in good condition,a the surgeon wrote.

On May 19, the day after the operation, there is a verbal order from Miller in Albertas medical records instructing that urine and stool samples are to be asaved for Mr. Scott who will collect them each day.a27 On May 21 there is another notation in Albertas medical records that states: aAll specimens going to Dr. Miller.a28 The hospital pathologist, James F. Rinehart, found evidence of a huge, cheeselike ulcer in Albertas stomach. But after carefully examining the specimens under a microscope, he came to a startling conclusion: Albert didnat have cancer. He had a abenign gastric ulcer with chronic inflammation.a29 The ma.s.s removed by surgeons was apparently part of the ulcer.

Disbelief rippled through the medical staff. The surgeon noted that the operation was a aradical procedure to do for a benign process.a30 Earl Miller became extremely upset by the findings and spent days looking at Albertas slides, thinking there was a mistake. But ahe just didnat have it,a Scott recalled of the cancer diagnosis.31 Scott, too, seems to have been troubled by what happened to Albert Stevens. After he retired, he was interviewed for an oral history by Berkeley medical historian Sally Hughes. The interview was conducted in December 1979 at Scottas bedside in Novato, California. Scott, who was then about seventy years old, was diabetic, disabled by a stroke, embittereda”and drunk. Lying in a hospital bed with his wife hovering nearby, Scott told Hughes that he left the Crocker lab in part because Hamilton wanted to do some aincautious experimentsa: Scott: I thought they were morally wrong.32 Hughes: Are you talking now about the human experiments?

Scott: Yes.

Hughes: And he went ahead and did those?

Scott: Yes, he did, and he did the first one with my help.

Hughes: That was the plutonium?

Scott: Plutonium-248 [sic], which we gave to this nice man who was scheduled for stomach surgery. They were surea”Earl Miller, for example, was surea”that he had cancer of the stomach and his probable survival wasnat very great. He was fifty-five, maybe, when I first found him. We injected him with plutonium-238, and the story of it is that he didnat have a cancer that anyone could demonstrate. Earl Miller got very upset with that and looked for days at slides of this manas post-op remains, and he just didnat have it. I got very interested in him as a person, and I contracted through the laboratory to buy all of his urine and feces, for which he would get a monthly check. We would go up once a week and pick it up in acid carbolase in various bottles we left up there with him.

Hughes: Did he know what was going on?

Scott: Never told him.

Hughes: What was the outcome?

Scott: Finally the laboratory wouldnat pay for his feces any more. He was in excellent health. His sister was a nurse and she was very suspicious of me. But to my knowledge he never found out, and he slipped through our fingers at the age of eighty-eight. He died of something.

Hughes: Nothing to do with the plutonium?

Scott: He got many times the so-called lethal textbook dose of plutonium. Patricia Durbin knows more about that. Sheas kept up with his data.

Hughes: In those days it was possible to do experiments on human beings with such ease?

Scott: Yes, yes.

Hughes: What did it involve?

Scott: It involved getting a needy patient who had a known disease, or thought it was known. He came out of the clinic for us at UC. I took the plutonium over there and gave it to Earl Miller, who injected it into this guy.

Albertas medical records show that he signed consent forms for both the anesthesia and surgery. But there is no mention of informed consent for any injection of radioactive material. A doc.u.ment decla.s.sified in 1994 also strongly suggests that neither Albert nor the second California patient injected with plutonium were told of the injections.33 Albert was discharged from the hospital a month after his admittance. Hamilton soon grew worried that he might leave the Bay area, and on July 7, 1945, wrote a letter to Robert Stone asking whether it would be possible to pay him fifty dollars a month to make sure he stayed in the Berkeley area: Kenneth [Scott] and I are very much afraid that the man may sell his house and go to live at some distant point which would, of course, put an end to our most interesting series of experiments.34 This proposal may be totally irregular and out of keeping with Army policy, but since we have, to date, maintained daily collections of all excretions, it would seem most unfortunate not to have the a.s.surance of his continued presence within a reasonable distance from Berkeley.

A couple of days later, Hamilton also wrote to Joseph Howland at Oak Ridge about the problem. Howland responded with a memo suggesting some possible ways to solve Albertas afinancial embarra.s.smenta: 3a. Pay for his care in a hospital or nursing home as a service.35 b. Place this individual on Dr. Hamiltonas payroll in some minor capacity without release of any cla.s.sified information.