Part 13 (1/2)
But times had changed. In early 1994, the lab had sent her a stack of records on her fatheras accident. Only when she read those records did Katie realize for the first time that her fatheras organs had been s.h.i.+pped to researchers throughout the country. aThe cutting him up makes me nuts.33 I donat think they have a right, government or not, to chop up my fatheras parts without his familyas knowledge,a she said.
The Cecil Kelley story was only one of the articles that surfaced in early 1994 about the laboratoryas ghoulish ahuman tissue a.n.a.lysis project,a the decades-long program in which organs, tissues, or even whole cadavers were sent to Los Alamos and a.n.a.lyzed 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 apeople did not know they were sent to Los Alamos.a3435 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 a.n.a.lyzed. His father, Armand Brousseau, a retired engineer, told reporters he never gave permission for the a.n.a.lysis. aThis place,a he said of Los Alamos, ais full of G.o.ds.a36 In one of its most embarra.s.sing disclosures, the lab admitted that it still had seven small una.n.a.lyzed bone samples from Karen Silkwood, an employee at the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation in Crescent, Oklahoma.37 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.
The day before the accident, she had flown to Los Alamos, where she had undergone tests aimed at measuring the plutonium in her body. She had been placed in the labas whole-body counter, and she provided scientists with urine and stools samples, which were then a.n.a.lyzed with an improved version of the chemical process worked out by Wright Langham decades earlier. George Voelz, a close friend of Louis Hempelmannas, and Don Petersen, Wright Langhamas old friend, helped decipher the data.
Following the car crash, George Voelz flew to Oklahoma for the autopsy and took back to Los Alamos some of Silkwoodas organs, including her brain. The organs were reduced to 113 small flasks containing solvent and a small amount of dissolved tissue.38 The flasks remained at Los Alamos until 1992 and were then s.h.i.+pped to the DOEas National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository in Spokane, Was.h.i.+ngton (the same place where some of Albert Stevensas ashes wound up).
Bill Silkwood, Karenas father, was shocked when he learned that Los Alamos had kept his daughteras body parts. He said the lab did not have the familyas permission to take the organs in the first place. aThey stole those organs. How else can you put it?a But the lab said its authority to take the organs came from the Oklahoma medical examiner.39 Alan McMillan, head of the labas Human Studies Project Team, offered in 1994 to return the bone chips to Karenas father. aSince the amount of plutonium present is so small and would present no hazard, the lab could send them to you in their current state.40 Or they could be cremated and sent to you in a proper container. Please let me know what you would like us to do with regards to these remains,a he wrote.
Silkwood wanted the bone chips back so that he could bury them in Texas. But in an interview two years later, he said he never heard another word from Los Alamos. aThey were supposed to apologize and everything but I never heard nothing.41 You know how the government is. They tell you one thing and do another.a As the public pressure mounted, the Department of Energy finally released the medical records on all eighteen plutonium patients. Although their names and other identifying factors were deleted, or aredacted,a the files nevertheless provided enough information for me and several other reporters to unravel the ident.i.ties of all the remaining patients except for CHI-3, the young man from Chicago who was injected with a ma.s.sive amount of plutonium.
When stories about the patients began appearing in the Rochester newspapers, Mary Jeanne Connell, an elderly woman living in the Rochester area, read them closely. There were so many aspects of the experiment that seemed familiar to her.42 She, too, had been hospitalized on Samuel Ba.s.settas metabolic ward at Strong Memorial Hospital in the mid-1940s. Her urine and stool specimens had been collected in special containers. And, like Eda Schultz Charlton, she also had been sent on shopping trips where she was accompanied by hospital personnel.
With a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, Connell realized that she must have been used in a similar experiment. But as it turns out, she had been injected with uraniuma”not plutonium. She was the youngest of the six patients injected with uranium and is the only known living survivor from that experiment. aAll these things have been in my mind all these years,a she said a year or so after her partic.i.p.ation had been confirmed.
A shy young woman raised on a sheep farm in upstate New York, Connell was twenty-four years old when her doctor referred her to the metabolic ward in September 1946. She was five feet two inches tall and weighed eighty-four pounds. Although she was perfectly healthy, the physician wanted to find out why she couldnat gain weight. (Slenderness, she said, runs in the family.) Soon after she was admitted to the ward, she was taken to an animal laboratory on two occasions. The experience, she said, upset her asomething terrible.a During one of the visits, her white-coated chaperon made several oblique remarks about how slowly their animal experiments were going, how they needed human subjects to continue their work. aI think thatas when they decided they were going to have me,a she said.
Connell found herself lying on a gurney with straps across her chest and ankles when she woke up one morning. A large group of doctors had gathered at her bedside and one of them was trying to open a small vial of orange-colored liquid. Everyone in the room appeared to be afraid of the mixture. There was no cork, no cap, no way to open the sealed bottle. Finally someone smashed the vial against of the edge of a table and a small amount of the orangey stuff trickled onto the floor. Connell looked over the edge of the table and couldnat believe her eyes: The material had burned a hole in the floor. aI never forgot that,a she said.
One of the doctors then injected the mixture into her veins. As the radioactive material flooded through her body, she said, aI felt like I was laying on hot coals. I almost pa.s.sed out.a Later she was woozy and sick to her stomach. Numerous doctors came in and looked at her. aThey didnat say anything. They just stood around looking at me.a The date was October 1, 1946. Connell had just been injected with 584 micrograms of enriched uranium, twice the amount researchers at the time believed would cause kidney damage. Her urine and stool samples were collected and a woman stood guard over her day and night. Occasionally two or three attendants took her out for a shopping spree. One of the nurses joked that she was the most famous person in the hospital, but five decades would elapse before Connell finally understood what she meant.
Connell was discharged about three weeks later. The injection forced her to urinate frequently. Over the years, she has suffered from persistent urinary tract infections, kidney pain, and high blood pressure. She doesnat know if she is still excreting uranium but said she often caused electronic equipment at her job to malfunction.
Ba.s.sett and his colleagues did not inform Connell of what was in the vial nor did she give consent for the uranium injection. aI feel hurt and humiliated, everything all at once,a she said. aThe doctors were probably saying to themselves, aWell, she isnat much good for anything. If she dies, so what?a a
42.
JANUARY 1994: THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS.
Less than a month after Hazel OaLearyas disclosures, President Clinton ordered all federal agencies to comb their records for any doc.u.ments related to human radiation experiments and make them public. He also established the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to investigate the studies. With that action, the attention s.h.i.+fted from the Department of Energy and Hazel OaLeary to Ruth Faden and the Advisory Committee.
Faden chaired the committee. She was a bioethicist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and a scholar at Georgetown Universityas Kennedy Inst.i.tute of Ethics. Forty-four years old and coauthor of an authoritative book on informed consent, Faden told a reporter she viewed the appointment as a chance to arewrite the history of ethics and research on human subjects in this country.a1 Both of Fadenas parents were survivors of the Holocaust.2 Her father spent two years in Auschwitz, and her mother was in Birkenau for two years. But Faden said she had a adeep aversiona to drawing any a.n.a.logies to the Holocaust or trading in any way on that experience. aI donat think I have any special claim to anything because of who I am, or more importantly, who my parents are and what they experienced. Nor do I want to draw any straight line a.n.a.logies between what weare studying and the n.a.z.i experience. At the same time, obviously I am the product of that horrible event.a Because of what her own family had gone through, Faden said she recognized how important it was for the committee to leave behind an accurate historical record of the radiation experiments. aThereas nothing more terrifying for survivors of a horrible event than to hear other people trivialize it, or even worse, raise skepticism about whether the event ever occurred.3 Maybe my sensitivity to the importance of leaving the historical record irrefutably straight comes out of that experience.a The White House appointed thirteen other people to the panel. They included two more ethicists, five medical doctors, two lawyers, two scientists, a historian, and a bank vice president. The group met roughly once a month in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., for two to three days from April of 1994 to October of 1995. In general, the first hour or two was set aside for witness testimony; the remaining time was reserved for debate and discussion among the committee members themselves.
The committeeas headquarters, located at 1726 M Street in downtown Was.h.i.+ngton, had the chaotic feel of a law firm on the eve of a big trial. The hallways were stacked with boxes of doc.u.ments from various federal agencies. Desks and floors were piled high with records and paper coffee cups. In one room, two industrial-size copying machines ran twelve to fifteen hours a day, spitting out thousands of pages.
The creation of the committee changed the way the media covered the controversy. Instead of digging up their own stories, reporters began relying on what the panel had found. The committee had two press spokesmen, and its executive director, Dan Guttman, was an affable Was.h.i.+ngton lawyer who enjoyed schmoozing with the media. Before each monthly meeting, the panel would gather up a package of the most sensational doc.u.ments and release them to the press. This process guaranteed that at least once a month the group would be portrayed in countless news reports as auncovering,a arevealing,a or adisclosinga some new Cold War horror. Although staffers did find many important doc.u.ments, much of the work was done by the legions of anonymous Energy and Defense Department employees working in the bowels of various federal archives. The monthly releases also enabled the Clinton administration, whether intended or not, to regain control of the controversy and, as one of OaLearyas aides explained, aslow things down.a None of this was apparent at first. The committeeas formation was viewed with great optimism by activists and the experimental subjects. Finally, they thought, here was an independent panel of experts not connected to the nuclear weapons establishment who would conduct a complete and unbiased investigation of this chapter in Cold War history.
A staff of about seventy people was hired to review doc.u.ments, provide historical context, and help organize the monthly meetings. The staffers for the most part were young and liberal, but the fourteen people the White House appointed to the commission itself were members of the nationas scientific and academic elite. In fact, they bore a remarkable resemblance to the experimenters they were investigating: They came from the same socioeconomic cla.s.s, attended the same colleges, and worked at the same universities that sponsored the experiments. Ruth Fadenas employer, for example, Johns Hopkins University, developed and refined the radium nasal treatments, which were administered by doctors throughout the country and significantly increased the subjectsa risks of cancer and other diseases. None of the victims of the experiments or their relatives were appointed to the panel, even though many presidential committees are required to include a representative from the affected community.
Counting the staffers and the appointed members, the committee had about eighty-five people working on the radiation experiments, but it quickly became apparent that not even that large a group would be able to keep up with the tidal wave of doc.u.ments. Almost immediately, the panel was deluged with tens of thousands of records that the federal agencies had uncovered in response to Clintonas search directive.
In all, an estimated 6 million pages related to the governmentas little-known radiation studies were gathered up by the federal agencies and the military branches between late 1993 and 1997 and made available.4 A small percentage of the doc.u.ments had been decla.s.sified, but the majority were records technically open to the public but not readily accessible. They came from federal repositories, university archives, storage rooms, filing cabinets, personal files, and even family garages.
Faden acknowledged in December of 1994 that the committee was overwhelmed by the doc.u.ments. Despite this admission, she actually broadened the scope of the panelas work to look at how well the rights of patients in contemporary experiments were being protected. At her direction, two large projects examining contemporary experiments were undertaken by outside contractors at a cost to taxpayers of several hundred thousand dollars. One involved interviewing 1,900 patients in waiting rooms throughout the country; the other was a detailed a.n.a.lysis of 125 contemporary research projects.
The General Accounting Office in December of 1994 noted that the committee ahad done little of the ethical and scientific a.n.a.lysis called for in its charter.5a Yet, the GAO added, aDespite these difficulties, the Committee has chosen to expand the overall scope of its work.a Faden staunchly defended the expansion, saying the panel couldnat make any meaningful statements about the past without investigating whether similar problems were occurring in contemporary experiments. aWe have to look at the contemporary situation and say, aOK, what is the likelihood that this could happen now?a And if thereas any plausibility to the view it could happen today, what do we need to do to change it?a The committee attacked its a.s.signment on several fronts simultaneously.6 Some staff members reviewed, a.n.a.lyzed, and searched for doc.u.ments while others crisscrossed the country interviewing the scientists who had conducted the experiments. At the monthly meetings, the appointed members listened to personal testimony from witnesses who had firsthand experience with the horrors being investigated or whose family members had been victimized. They then tried to develop an ethical framework that they could use to judge the experiments and make recommendations for medical monitoring or financial compensation.
Between meetings, the members exchanged copious e-mail messages. For Faden, a handsome woman with curly, dark hair, chairing the meetings was exhausting work: ten minute breaks, hour lunches, then back to the table for more debate. aTotally draining,a she said after one of the marathon sessions.7 aYou have to be vigilant every single minute. This must be what it feels like if youare a good judge or a good trial attorney.a Faden almost always lived up to her Solomon-like duties. She was courteous to the witnesses and solicitous of her colleagues. But there was an edgy quality to her and she could be extremely abrupt. One of her most important tasks was to keep the committeea”a group of congenial, high-powered professionals such as herselfa”from becoming splintered as it worked in a fishbowl of public scrutiny for eighteen months. The committeeas recommendations would carry more weight if a unanimous report was delivered to President Clinton. Dissenting opinions, which were not infrequent on ethics panels, would weaken the reportas impact.
Although the committeeas job was to a.n.a.lyze the unethical radiation experiments that had taken place during the Cold War, some of the members seemed uncomfortable when the victims actually appeared before them. The committee members had little knowledge of the nuclear weapons complex or its history, and they were understandably confused when the speakers began talking about atmospheric test series with names like Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, and Upshot-Knothole. Oftentimes an embarra.s.sing silence followed the testimony. Faden usually instructed the speakers to leave their records with the staff. Implicit in the instructions was the promise that the cases would be investigated. But hundreds of thousands of records were already flowing in, and some of the doc.u.ments, which often had taken the witnesses years to collect, were forwarded without much scrutiny to the National Archives when the committee was disbanded eighteen months later.
43.
HARVEST OF SORROW.
By train, plane, and automobile, in buses and carpools, the witnesses traveled what were often thousands of miles to speak at hearings in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., or at outreach meetings in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Spokane, Sante Fe, and Knoxville. Eager to maintain its neutrality, the Advisory Committee gave the speakers no funds for travel expenses, no money for hotels, no petty cash for copying fees. But that policy did not deter these people. Many had been waiting years to tell their stories of deception and betrayal. Their testimony demonstrated in a dramatic way the breadth of the experimentation program and the deep distrust many Americans felt toward the nuclear weapons complex.
Some witnesses broke down in tears as they paced the hallway before the meetings. Others cried as they unwrapped family photographs and propped them up at witness tables so the world could see that the mother, father, grandparent who was irradiated was a human being and not a laboratory animal. In halting and unpolished voices, they gave witness to outlandish and bizarre Cold War events that one committee member later described as asurrealistic.a The meetings drew dozens of residents who lived downwind of Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge, who testified that they, too, had been exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation and were unwitting guinea pigs in Americaas Cold War.1 Uranium miners recounted the extraordinary lung cancer epidemic that struck their villages after they began digging the ore from mines on the Colorado Plateau. Representatives from Inupiat villages of the North Slope of Alaska told of an experiment in which eighty-four Eskimos, seventeen Indians, and nineteen whites were given iodine-131. Marshall Islands residents, often accompanied by interpreters, noted the vast increase in illness and disease following years of atmospheric testing on their tropical atolls.2 aThe only thing we knew is what we were observing and that the children that were born were like animals and they werenat children at all,a said a Ms. Matayos.h.i.+ through an interpreter.3 The first aoutreacha meeting was held from October 11 to 13, 1994, in San Francisco, a block or so from Union Square. In a booming voice, atomic veteran Israel Torres described the July morning in 1957 when Shot Hood rocked his trench. Hood was a seventy-four-kiloton bomb, more than three times the size of the weapon dropped on Nagasaki and the largest ever detonated at the Nevada Test Site. aI was thrown from wall to wall in the trench.4 It felt like a giant vacuum was trying to suck me out, but I fought the suction,a he remembered.
As she waited to speak at the San Francisco meeting, Darcy Thrall, born and raised five miles from the Hanford plutonium complex in Was.h.i.+ngton state, fingered a mysterious dog tag that she had been given by scientists when she was in the second grade.5 One day, she told the panel, a man came into her cla.s.sroom in Richland, Was.h.i.+ngton, and escorted her to a room where some bottles and cups were sitting on a table. She was given a white substance to drink and then taken outside to a waiting van. Inside the van were men and women in white uniforms. She was instructed to lie on her back and was sent through a noisy, tube-shaped machine. Afterward, she was given a log book in which her parents were to write down everything she ate and drank. Her family grew their own vegetables, raised their own cattle, and ate fish from the Columbia River. Several weeks later the scientists returned to her second-grade cla.s.sroom and sent her through the machine again. She was given the dog tag and instructed to wear it at all times. The tag is engraved with her name and address and has the initials aR-Pa in the left-hand corner and aSa in the right corner.
Although the significance of the dog tag is unknown and it is unclear what Thrall drank, doc.u.ments show that scientists working at Hanford regularly monitored school children to determine what kind of radionuclides were in their bodies. Researchers were particularly interested in families such as Thrallas because they would have absorbed larger amounts of radionuclides than someone who purchased astore-boughta food. The van that Thrall was taken to was undoubtedly one of the two mobile whole-body counters operated by Batelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory. The children were often given comic books to read while they waited to be measured. aNone of the more than 3,000 children measured in the mobile whole-body counter to date,a wrote a scientist sometime after 1967, ahave had body burdens of radionuclides outside the range antic.i.p.ated on the basis of our known environmental conditions.a6 When Darcy Thrall went public with her story in 1994, she received many threats, and one of her pets was killed at her home in Was.h.i.+ngton state. aI had a great, huge, old, old turkey.7 And one morning I woke up and when the sun came up I could see steam rising in the pasture. And I went out there and found my turkey, and he had been stabbed over and over again so far I could put my hand this deep in his chest. He was still alive.a Thrall was afraid for her daughter and her other animals and asked the committee to help her. aItas something that happened. I donat know any, any big secrets, or anything.a At the Cincinnati meeting held October 21, family members remembered the tears and vomit of loved ones who underwent total-body irradiation. aI believe my father was in the wrong place at the right time,a Katherine Hagar observed.8 Hagaras father, Joseph Mitch.e.l.l, Patient No. 51, was scheduled for surgery for lung cancer. Instead he was given 150 rads of total-body radiation and died seventy-four days later. Doris Baker spoke lovingly of her great-grandmother, Gertrude Newell, Patient No. 20, who was exposed to 200 rads of total body radiation. aWill someone please tell me why our government let this happen?a she pleaded.9 Other witnesses who worked at nearby weapons plants also spoke at the Cincinnati meeting. Owen Thompson, who said he was ajust a dumb hillbilly, big and strong,a was a.s.signed to a special team that buried radioactive wastes at night while guards with machine guns stood by.10 The waste was brought by hay wagons to the dump site, and giant bulldozers used in strip mining plowed the material into the ground. aI did my country wrong,a Thompson confessed.11 Gene Branham, a union representative and longtime worker at a uranium production facility outside Cincinnati, talked about the network set up by the government to s.n.a.t.c.h the body parts of deceased workers before they were embalmed.12 The body s.n.a.t.c.hing got so bad, he said, union members often set up vigils to make sure that the DOE didnat grab the corpse before it was buried.
A frigid wind blew through downtown Spokane on November 21 as dozens of residents who once lived on or near Hanford piled into a chilly meeting room. Nodding in the direction of the highly contaminated complex 130 miles away, they described immune system diseases, thyroid disorders, cancer, allergies, and reproductive problems that they believed were caused by radioactive emissions. Gertie Hanson, who grew up in northern Idaho about 140 miles from Hanford, did an informal survey of young girls who graduated from high school in the early 1950s.13 Twenty-nine percent of the forty-nine women who responded to her survey had suffered miscarriages in their early childbearing years, she said.
Pat Hoover, in a written statement, recalled that when she was about thirteen or fourteen men clad in white coats would visit her physical education cla.s.s or her health cla.s.s. aWe a.s.sumed that these were doctors.14 Now looking back, I have no idea if they were doctors, chemists or workers from the Hanford plant with no medical background; but they came in looking like doctors, stood behind us and felt our throats with their hands.a Many teenage girls had odd fingernails with horizontal ridges, she said, and were given a chemical supplied by Pacific Northwest Laboratory that would afixa the problem. (The adoctorsa were probably palpating the girlsa necks for thyroid nodules; the ridged fingernails could be a sign of hypothyroidism, or underactive thyroid, which can be caused by radiation exposure.) Brenda Weaver lived for most of her life seven miles from Hanford in an area known as Death Mile. Her family, she said, always seemed sick with asomething weird.a Weaver was put on thyroid medication at the age of twelve and had an ovary removed at age fourteen. Her brother was taken to the hospital when his eyes began bleeding. In the early 1960s, the sheep on her fatheras farm were born with missing legs, missing body parts, and missing eyes. Her daughter, Jamie, was born in 1965 without eyes. aShe has eyelashes and eyelids and tear ducts, but no eyes.15 It makes life difficult, itas hard to be blind.a Weaver said she believes wholeheartedly her daughteras birth defect and those in the sheep were caused by the radioactive emissions from Hanford. aWe were irradiated, used as guinea pigs by our government. I could hardly believe it, but I do remember, as a kid, men in white coats with Geiger counters coming to the farm. They were out in the fields taking parts of dead animals, food. The weather balloons would come over onto our property,a she said. aWe thought that this meant that our government was taking care of us, and if there was anything going on at Hanford, surely they would tell us, right?a In Hanfordas early years, scientists intensively studied the animal and plant life surrounding the nuclear complex, often posing as cowboys or ropers or agricultural agents. Accompanied by two Manhattan Project security officers, a scientist named Karl Herde pretended he was an animal husbandry specialist in 1946 when he measured radioactive-iodine in the thyroids of farm animals. aI was successful in placing the probe of the instrument directly over the thyroid at times when the owneras attention was focused on the next animal or some concocted distraction,a he later wrote.16 aAt that time the revelation of a regional iodine-131 problem would have had a tremendous public relations impact and furthermore the presence of other nuclides (some known but some not recognized or identified) was of possible National Defense significance.a The Spokane meeting drew speakers with other kinds of stories to tell. Kathy Jacobovitch said her father worked on the three ahota Navy s.h.i.+ps hauled back from the Pacific Proving Ground and died of advanced lung cancer. Jacobovitch, who was asked by her mother to look into her fatheras radiation exposure after his death, learned from military records that her father was exposed to 135 hours of radiation. aI noticed that while my dad was coming home ahot,a mom was pregnant with me.a17 Jacobovitch has been diagnosed with lupus disease, an autoimmune disorder she believes is related to the exposure she received in the womb.