Part 5 (1/2)
Less than a week after Eda Schultz Charlton was injected with plutonium, Una Macke, a frightened and desperately ill woman, pushed through the doors of Chicagoas Billings Hospital. She was hoping to find a doctor who would help her. Instead she unwittingly delivered herself into the hands of Manhattan Project scientists who were on the lookout for amoribunda patients.1 A pet.i.te, thoughtful-looking woman, Una had traveled to Chicago from Ohio several months earlier to consult a hematologist after experiencing pain around her ribs, sternum, and the small of her back. The hematologist diagnosed her as having infectious mononucleosis, but the diagnosis didnat fit her symptoms. She began experiencing fevers at night, a raging thirst, and a loss of appet.i.te.
On December 3, 1945, she was admitted to Billings Hospital for diagnostic tests. Beneath the hospital gown, her body was shockingly frail. There was a faint bluish tint around her lips and nose and her face was deeply lined, making her look a full decade older than her fifty-six years.2 Una had no husband, no children. Her father, John H. Macke, was a manager of the John s.h.i.+llito Company, a department store in Cincinnati, Ohio, and author of a book on how to measure and cut carpets.3 The antiseptic smells and the polished corridors of the hospital might have seemed familiar to Una. When she was young, she had been extremely ill with tuberculosis of the spine and lungs. She had licked the disease and, with the exception of occasional sinus problems, had enjoyed good health since.
Soon after she was settled on the ward, doctors performed a biopsy, removing tissue from her head and left armpit. The results were ominous: Una had widespread cancer, which had probably originated in the left breast. As she tossed in her hospital bed, soaking her gown with perspiration, a solution called aUa medication was prepared by scientists at the Met Lab, a ten-minute walk from the hospital.
Christmas came and went. The scant records donat indicate whether she had any visitors. Two days later, on December 27, the aUa medication was started. Almost immediately Una began to vomit.4 She was unable to eat, unable to drink, unable to hold anything down in her stomach. Seventeen days later, on January 13, 1946, she died.
Two hours after her death, her body was whisked to an autopsy room. On the slab, she was hardly bigger than a child: five feet one inch tall and eighty-five pounds. aOn the head,a wrote a pathologist, ais a large quant.i.ty of graying red hair.a5 Her mouth and teeth were in good repair, the tongue covered by a dark brown coating. In her right armpit and groin, several walnut-size nodes were palpable to the touch. aThe muscles are thin, somewhat pale and poorly developed.a6 aThe emptied heart weighs 250 gms.a The cancer had spread to her liver, small intestine, spinal column, and pelvis. The bone marrow had been almost completely replaced by tumor. The pathologist examining the tissues also made a surprising but not unheard of finding: Una was suffering from a second cancer called lymphoblastoma. The pathologist compared postmortem tissues taken from Una with biopsy material removed before the aUa medication had been administered. He found lymphoblastoma in the biopsy tissue, a finding that ruled out the possibility that the second cancer awas induced by the medication.a Unaas organs were scooped from her body and placed into containers filled with a 95 percent alcohol solution.7 Alcohol was used because the Rochester studies had revealed that formalin tended to leach plutonium out of the specimens. The body parts later were dried, ashed, and converted into an acid solution. Then they were measured for radioactivity. The bone marrow was the hottest, emitting 1,399 counts per gram of tissue.8 The aUa medication administered to Una was not a medication at all; it appears to have been a code word for plutonium. A health physicist who reviewed Unaas medical records concluded the dose could have delivered enough radiation to Unaas liver to cause nausea. The nausea and the inability to eat may, in turn, have hastened her death.
The same day Una was injected, a young man suffering from Hodgkinas disease was also injected with plutonium. The man, who died about 170 days after the injection, is the only one of the eighteen plutonium patients whose ident.i.ty remains unknown. Una was a.s.signed the code number CHI-2 and the Hodgkinas patient, CHI-3. They were the last two people injected with plutonium in Chicago.
What distinguishes the injections of Una and CHI-3 from those that occurred at other Manhattan Project sites was the size of the dosesa”94.91 micrograms of plutonium.9 That was nearly one hundred times what scientists in 1945 believed that a healthy workeras body could tolerate without harm and equal to more than 1,700 times the radiation that the average person receives in a year from natural and man-made sources.10 It was out of envy of the superior data he thought such doses might yield that Wright Langham had written to Samuel Ba.s.sett asking him to be on the lookout for terminal patients whom they could inject with larger doses.
The records that have been made public so far do not reveal who authorized the doses. The lines of authority between the Met Labas Health Division and the Manhattan Project were fuzzy, and it could have been either Robert Stone or Stafford Warren who gave the go-ahead. As for the doctor who actually performed the injections, the scientists gave conflicting statements to AEC investigators many years later when they were asked about them. Scientists Edwin Russell and J. J. Nickson are listed as authors of a 1946 scientific report describing the injections and postmortem a.n.a.lyses of Arthur Hubbard and Una Macke. Leon Jacobson, R. Lesko, and W. Monroe are listed as a.s.sistants.
Edwin Russell told AEC investigators that he prepared the plutonium solutions and that Leon Jacobson injected the material into the patients.11 But Jacobson, who went on to become chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicagoas Pritzker School of Medicine, denied any involvement in the experiment. He said he aknew very little about it, next to nothing.a12 In 1946 six Met Lab employees drank a plutonium solution concocted by Edwin Russell.13 The study was probably done so scientists could confirm that plutonium was not readily absorbed by the GI tract. One of the volunteers was Robert Carr Milham, of Augusta, Georgia. Now in his seventies and in good health, Milham said in 1995 he was clearly informed about the nature of the experiment. The drink tasted like alemonade,a he added.14 aSome people who were near terminal death, I believe, preceded us.a
16.
POSTWAR BERKELEY: THE FINAL INJECTIONS.
Joseph Hamilton was in the Sierra Nevada panning for gold with his wife and sister-in-law when a neighbor came running up and breathlessly informed them that some kind of fantastic weapon had just been dropped on j.a.pan. Hamilton knew perfectly well what kind of weapon his neighbor was talking about, but like virtually every other scientist on the Manhattan Project, he had been so indoctrinated in the ways of secrecy that he had not told anyone about the bomb, including his wife, Leah. At last, the secret was out. He turned to his wife and sister-in-law and said, aThatas been my work.a The women began talking excitedly, but Hamilton soon returned his attention to the trout-filled creek and the glittering pan of rocks in his hand.1 As he breathed in the brisk mountain air, Hamiltonas mind no doubt raced ahead to the postwar period. Although he knew there would be changes, Hamilton acted as if the war was not over when he returned home to Berkeley. In the days and weeks to come, he continued to run the Crocker lab, the heavily guarded facility that he oversaw, with his usual secrecy, locking his papers each evening in a heavy office safe. Like clockwork, he filed his dry, technical reports with the Manhattan Engineer District, updating project leaders on ongoing experiments and informing them of the additional studies he was planning. In September of 1945, the month that Wright Langham went to Rochester and Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell were in j.a.pan, he sent the Manhattan Project the following memo on his next study: The next human subject that is available is to be given, along with plutonium 238, small quant.i.ties of radio-yttrium, radio-strontium and radio-cerium.2 This procedure has in mind two purposes. First, the opportunity will be presented to compare in man the behavior of these three representative long-lived Fission products with their metabolic properties in the rat, and second, a comparison can be made of the differences in their behavior from that of plutonium.
Hamilton hoped to perform his next injection within two months, but for unknown reasons, the experiment was not carried out until April of the following year. The patient targeted to receive the multiple injections was Simeon Shaw, a four-year-old boy who arrived in the United States on April 16, 1946, on a U.S. Army Transport Command plane from Sydney, Australia.
Simeon, or aSimmya as he was called, was the youngest of three children, a lively little boy with sparkling eyes and dark hair. He was from Dubbo, Australia, a small farming community in western New South Wales, 260 miles northwest of Sydney. Around January 6 of that year, Simmyas six-year-old sister, Helene, was rocking him in a hammock on their front porch when he tumbled out and onto the ground.3 Simmy began to cry loudly, alarming his father, who came out to the porch and scolded Helene severely for her carelessness. The commotion so frightened Joshua, the oldest child, that he ran into the garden and stood in front of a green chili bush. Then he plucked off a chili and ate it. aThere is a whole blank from there,a Joshua recalled.4 Simmy complained of pain in the right leg, but in a few days he was careening around the farm again with his usual, wild happiness. A week or so later his mother, Freda, noticed a tender, swelling ma.s.s on the inside of the boyas knee. She took him to a local doctor who diagnosed the injury as a fractured femur. Simmyas leg was placed in a cast and the X rays forwarded to a radiologist in Sydney.
After carefully studying the film, the radiologist came up with a shocking finding. Simmy appeared to have an osteogenic sarcoma, a form of bone cancer, and probably would not live for more than nine months. Desperate and disbelieving, the Shaws sought other medical opinions. Eventually they decided to take the child to the University of California Hospital in San Francisco for treatment.
How the family learned of UCSF or who in Australia referred them remains a mystery. An Australian doctor, whose name has been deleted from medical records released by the Department of Energy, had consulted his counterparts in the United States.5 Perhaps contact was made through this conversation. A note in Simmyas medical records states that the child was referred from Australia by a aMajor Davis through the Red Cross.a Once the decision was made to go to the United States, events moved at lightning speed.6 Freda applied for a nonimmigrant visa, and within a matter of hours, the two were boarding the U.S. Army plane in Sydney. So grave was the plight of the small boy that American troops headed home from the Pacific campaign had been off-loaded to make room for them.7 Once they were in the air and the roar of the engines had lulled Simmy to sleep, Freda, a young woman with long dark hair, may have begun playing and replaying in her mind the blurred events of the last four months, searching for an explanation for the unthinkable prognosis her son had just been handed.
Fredaas husband, Samuel, was a wool buyer from Gorki, Russia, who had immigrated to Australia years earlier. Freda, who was fifteen years younger than her husband and a British citizen by birth, was a gifted musician. She had a lovely singing voice and played the piano, cello, and violin. Although she was only thirty-two years old, the extra flesh she carried around her shoulders and hips had dragged her into an early middle age.
The large plane flew east for eight thousand miles across the blue wrinkled expanse of the Pacific Ocean, stopping for fuel in Brisbane, New Caledonia, and Fiji. When they reached Honolulu, Red Cross officials took mother and son sightseeing and then prepared a fresh bed for the childas last lap to San Francisco.8 The ragged brown edge of a new continent appeared in their plane window just four days after Freda had applied for the visa.
The transport plane touched down at a small airfield north of San Francisco. A Red Cross ambulance was pulled up nearby and a knot of reporters and photographers were milling about. Freda tottered down the ramp with her child. She was wearing an old-fas.h.i.+oned hat, a print dress, and a dark coat. Draped around her shoulders was a slender braid of mink.
Simmy looked like a character out of a Charles d.i.c.kens novel, skin and eyes glittering with fever, his right leg swaddled in a cast. The photographers moved in with their boxy cameras. The boy giggled, reaching for the spent bulbs. Someone gathered up a whole bag of bulbs and shoved them into his hand. Freda, exhausted and disoriented, was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with grat.i.tude. She thanked the Army and the Red Cross for helping to arrange the flight. The doctors in Australia, she said, had told her it was urgent to get to UCSF within a week. aInside of one hour, American Army officers and Red Cross workers had arranged priorities for us as paying pa.s.sengers,a she said.9 aI want everybody to know how kind they have been.a Freda refused even to acknowledge the possibility that UCSF would not be able to help her son. aIam hopeful,a she said, abecause I have to be.a The next day the story of the arrival of mother and son was carried in newspapers around the United States: aMercy Flight Brings Aussie Boy Herea; aSydney Boy Admitted to U.S. Hospital After Flighta; aSpecialists Hope to Cure Boy, 4.a Then the reporters moved on to the next a.s.signment. For Freda and Simmy, though, the story was just beginning.
Once he was in the hospital, the experiment on Simmy had to proceed quickly. s.h.i.+ps and men were already ma.s.sing in the Pacific Ocean for Operation Crossroads. Many of Hamiltonas a.s.sistants would be going. Even Hamilton himself, on one occasion toting a bottle of bourbon for the sweaty troops, would be flying back and forth.
Still carrying the bag of spent flashbulbs, Simmy was placed in a wheelchair and rolled to his hospital bed. The admittance office waived a lot of the paperwork. aTheir traveling expenses, previous specialists, etc. have been tremendous,a one official hurriedly noted. Freda gave the physicians the X rays and medical reports she had carried with her from Australia. Curiously, there was no letter of referral or summary of Simmyas illness.
The child was given a detailed physical examination. Codeine and aspirin were prescribed for his pain and an elixir of phen.o.barbital was ordered to help him sleep. Freda stayed at the Parna.s.sus Guest House across the street from the hospital. Her joy at arriving in the United States evaporated quickly when doctors allowed her to see Simmy only three times a week. aThey say if I go more often they will not be able to do anything,a Freda told her husband in a telephone conversation.10 Simmy was also distraught by the separation. aHe wants to see his mother continually,a an entry on his medical chart states.
Simmy began to grow more feverish a few days after he was admitted. Additional aspirin was ordered. Ice packs were placed on his forehead. Alcohol rubs were administered. A severe infection materialized in his middle ear, and ten days after his arrival, his left eardrum was punctured so pus could drain out.
Incredibly, on April 26, the same day his ear was punctured and his temperature was hovering at 104 degrees, Simmy was injected with three radioisotopes: plutonium-239, cerium, and a third isotope believed to be yttrium.11 He was the youngest of the eighteen plutonium patients and the only foreign citizen. CAL-2 was his code name.
The radioisotopes injected into Simmy were slightly different from the ones Hamilton outlined in his memo. Instead of plutonium-238, plutonium-239 was injected. Radioactive strontium was eliminated, and one of the scientists involved in the experiment suggested the yttrium injected into Simmy may actually have been rubidium.
Simmyas fever continued to seesaw after the injections. It dropped to normal a day later, and then rose again to 104 degrees. The infection spread to the right ear, which was also drained. Although his temperature kept fluctuating, surgeons decided to go ahead and do a bone biopsy. Australian doctors had specifically recommended against a biopsy, but the reason for their objection is not clear. After Freda signed a consent form for the anesthesia, the child was wheeled into surgery and a rubber tourniquet was wrapped around his upper leg. Surgeons removed an aoblong sectiona of bone.12 aThen with curved gouges more material was removed from the center of the tumor for radioactive studies as well as biopsy.a Small bits of muscle and tissue were also taken out for study. Finally the incision was closed and the child was returned to the ward.
A note in Simmyas medical records states that some of the specimens were sent to Earl Miller. Another doc.u.ment states that the data on the uptake of the radioactive materials could be obtained from Miller by aresponsible individuals.a But Miller said in an interview shortly before his death that he was not involved in Simmyas case.13 aIf I had any contact with this kid it might have been through reading his films.a14 Freda placed two calls to Australia, the first on April 25 and the second on May 9. Samuelas secretary listened to the conversations and transcribed them. Simmyas brother, Joshua, said this was probably done because his Russian-born father didnat speak English well and the phone connections were terrible.15 Some of the transcripts contain blank s.p.a.ces, which Joshua said probably represented words the secretary couldnat understand. The transcripts are filled with a poignant sense of confusion and urgency. They were kept by Simmyas father for decades and were handed down to his surviving children after he died.
The day after the radionuclides were injected, Freda placed the first call to her husband. aThey have given him an injection and will be giving him another one on Sat.u.r.day,a she reported.16 There is no further information about what Freda was told about the injections; nor has any evidence made public so far indicated that Freda was informed about the plutonium.
Simmyas diagnosis, unlike Albert Stevenas and Eda Schultz Charltonas, was accurate. X rays showed the child had two additional lesionsa”one in the upper thigh and one in his left arm. The disease probably had nothing to do with the fall from the hammock.
Fredaas agitation, meanwhile, continued to mount. In the second conversation with her husband, she said, aThis afternoon they said they have not any hope at all.17 The resident specialist has told me there is no hope.a Simmyas fever continued to fluctuate during the rest of his hospital stay. He was given large doses of penicillin and more aspirin for the pain in his leg. There was a debate about whether to administer adeep X-ray therapya or to amputate the leg. Both options were discarded because it was felt that the cancer was too far advanced. Freda was advised, however, that if Simmyas tumor became excessively large or ulcerated through the skin, amputation might be necessary.
A fresh plaster cast was placed over Simmyas leg and he was discharged on May 25. The child seemed improved and was trying to put weight on the injured leg. Ominously, though, an X ray done four days after the discharge suggested the tumor actually was increasing in size.18 Six weeks had elapsed since Fredaas joyous, hopeful arrival in the United States. aSailing June 14th Need Money Cable Immediately Love,a she wrote in a telegram to her family.
Simmy and Freda took a slow boat back to Australia. The journey took a month, and the two may have pa.s.sed some of the Navy vessels transporting scientists and sailors to Operation Crossroads. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Simmy celebrated his fifth birthday. When they reached Australia, Simmy and his mother took up residence in the Riverview Hotel on the outskirts of Sydney. Simmyas father joined them there. The eight-room hotel, which is still standing, was owned by Samuelas sister. Joshua, the eldest son, said the family probably stayed in Sydney because they were strapped for cash.
Through the summer, fall, and winter, Freda, Simmy, and Samuel were together, sharing a large room in the front of the hotel. There were cooking facilities, perhaps a hot plate in the room. Simmy slept in the only bed.
Freda, who had had her fill of doctors and mercy flights, used homeopathic remedies in a desperate attempt to ease the childas pain. Mrs. O. S. Adams, a Californian who may have befriended Freda while she was in the United States, sent her a packet of clover bloom. aAt last I have the clover bloom for your little boy,a she wrote.19 aCover with water, boil two or three minutes strain and serve when cool enough.a The letter and the envelope, with its six centsa worth of stamps, were also kept by Simmyas father.
The clover bloom was fragrant and full of hope, but no match for the bone cancer. The disease did its work, brutally and efficiently. Finally there was nothing left to do but hold Simmy. aThe last time I went into his room, Simmy was screaming with pain.20 I couldnat stand it,a said Joshua. aThe next thing we were driving back to Dubbo. I was sitting in the backseat and I asked my mother where Simmy was. She said he was staying in Sydney for a while. I could see she was very upset.a Simmy died on January 6, 1947, a year after the fall from the hammock. His death deeply affected the Shaw family. Samuel never mentioned Simmyas name again and shut himself off from his two other children. If Joshua or Helene touched him, he went to the sink and washed his hands. aFrom Simeonas death onward, there was a void.21 I canat remember one happy moment,a Joshua said.
A couple of years later, a secretary for Bertram V. A. Low-Beer, the UCSF radiologist who conducted the TBI experiment for the Met Lab, wrote to Freda. Low-Beer was interested in how Simmy was feeling. aWe realize you may have been busy and overlooked the letter, but we are very interested in knowing how your son, [name deleted], is feeling at the present time.a22 Low-Beeras secretary told Freda she was welcome to use the bottom of her letter for her reply. A stamped, self-addressed envelope was enclosed. aHoping to hear from you soon,a she added. Freda never responded.
Soon after the experiment on Simmy was completed, Joseph Hamilton and his colleagues headed to the beautiful lagoon in the Pacific Ocean where the worldas first peacetime atomic bombs were detonated during Operation Crossroads. But his human experiments were not over yet. In November of 1946, some five months later, he was again pleading with the Manhattan Engineer District for small amounts of plutonium-238 so he could continue his studies.23 The next human guinea pig in Berkeley was injected not with plutonium, but americium, a radioactive element discovered by Glenn Seaborg in 1944, which is created by bombarding plutonium-239 with neutrons. The subject was Hanford Jang, a sixteen year-old boy from Canton, China, who spoke no English. Often referred to as CAL-A, Jang was suffering from the same disease as Simmy: an osteogenic sarcoma. The cancer was located in his left femur and had spread to other parts of his body.
According to the scant records on the case, Jang was injected with americium on June 10, 1947, at the Chinese Hospital in San Franciscoas Chinatown. On the day of the procedure, a note in his medical records states: aAn injection has been given this patient at 10:30 a.m. today, henceforth all urine and feces shall be collected separately daily in individual containers provided to be collected daily at 9:00 a.m. by messenger from the radiation laboratories of the University of California at Berkeley.24 Please date all bottles.a Another note in his records states: aKeep clear of urine. Keep cool. Keep in container and in bucket of ice.a Scientist Kenneth Scott instructed researcher Josephine Crowley to amake arrangements for daily car trips to S.F. for excreta for first two weeks.a25 He continued, aWe will use the same procedure as with Mr. S. See JGH for particulars.a aMr. S.a was probably a reference to Albert Stevens. aJGHa was Joseph Hamilton.
Although doctors had decided not to amputate Simmyas leg because the cancer was too widespread, they went ahead and amputated Hanford Jangas leg despite the fact that his cancer, too, had metastasized. The amputation was performed two days after the injection. The limb was then sent to Berkeley, where it was dissected and the americium measured in the bone, tumor, connective tissue, and muscle.26 The teenager died eleven months later, on June 15, 1948, and was buried in the Six Companies Cemetery, a Chinese cemetery in San Francisco. The Department of Energy admitted years later there was ano evidence of disclosurea about the experiment in Jangas medical records.27 Although Hamilton certainly supervised the human experiments, itas not clear whether he actually injected the patients. aI donat think Dr. Hamilton, himself personally, ever injected anybody with anything.28 I donat think he ever wanted to practice medicine after he finished his interns.h.i.+p,a Patricia Durbin speculated in an interview with government officials in 1994. aHe basically turned [away from] medical practice and became a laboratory bench scientist. He was terrified of patients. He was terrified of people.a Hamilton was so afraid of human touch, Durbin added, that he once wanted to fire one of his pregnant secretaries because he was worried he would have to deliver the baby himself.
Within weeks of the Hanford Jang injection, Joseph Hamilton and his a.s.sociates began looking around for another human subject. They eventually set their sights on Elmer Allen, an African American railroad porter originally from Texas whose life had been turned upside down by an accident. Code-named CAL-3, Elmer was the third and last patient injected by the Berkeley group and the final subject used in the entire experiment. Elmer outlived the other seventeen patients and the doctors who injected him, succ.u.mbing to pneumonia in 1991. But his was one of the most tragic stories of all.
As the fog streamed in over the hills of San Francisco, blanketing the city in a cloud of swirling whiteness, Elmer Allen hobbled from doctor to doctor, hoping to find somebody who could help him get back on his feet again. He and his young wife, Fredna, had moved to Richmond, California, in the East Bay area after World War II. The color of their skin didnat seem to matter as much in California as it did back home in Texas, where segregation was still rigidly in place. They had met in a bustling train station in El Paso. Fredna had missed her connection and was crying when Elmer, his eyes serious and thoughtful beneath the porteras cap, appeared at her side. aI can get you on the next train,a he said. He followed Fredna back to her hometown of Italy, Texas, where they were married.