The Plutonium Files (23 page)

Wright Langham and Samuel Bassett kept their fears about possible liver damage and other long-term consequences to themselves, and eventually the patients were discharged from the hospital without ever having been told what had been done to them. For the rest of their lives, the injectees carried within their bodies the plutonium they had received on Samuel Bassett’s metabolic ward. “With regard to ultimate effects [of plutonium], it is too early to predict what may occur,” Bassett wrote in a secret, unpublished report.
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For the five decades that followed, it was widely assumed, and reported in the scientific literature, that the patients were very ill and not expected to live much longer. Incredibly, documents released in 1994 and 1995 reveal that that false impression was perpetuated largely by a 1950 Los Alamos report written by Wright Langham, Samuel Bassett, and two other scientists. The Los Alamos report, entitled “Distribution and Excretion of Plutonium Administered Intravenously To Man,” was classified secret and not declassified until 1971.

Three of the eleven Rochester patients did die within one year; but three others lived for thirty years or more. After the experiment was completed, Bassett wrote up a rough draft of what had taken place. In that draft, he noted that the patients selected for injection were “a miscellaneous group of male and female hospital patients for the most part with well established diagnoses”:

Bassett also confessed in his draft report that one of the patients had been misdiagnosed. But his draft was never published. Thus the only published account was the one that came out of Los Alamos under the names of Langham and Bassett and the two other scientists. It omitted Bassett’s description of the patient selection process and his mention of the misdiagnosis. The Los Alamos version, considered for decades the authoritative source on the experiment, states that the patients were “suffering from chronic disorders such that survival for ten years was highly improbable.”
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Other statements later made by Langham himself furthered the impression that the patients’ conditions were terminal. At a chemical conference in 1956, Langham described the patients as “hopelessly sick.”
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And in a 1962 paper, he described them as “terminal.”
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The plutonium experiment was temporarily interrupted in the early summer of 1946 when Langham and Bassett were pressed into service by Stafford Warren for Operation Crossroads, a joint military exercise in which the first two atomic bombs of the peacetime era were detonated on an remote atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Warren had found it so difficult to recruit radiation monitors that he had been reduced to asking anyone who could read or write to join the operation. Langham was hopeful that he and Bassett might be able to talk with Warren about the experiment. It’s likely the three men did spend a little time together, although there are no documents describing such a meeting.

In their absence, a Rochester physician named Helen E. Van Alstine continued to look for “suitable” subjects. In a July 10 letter to Wright Langham, she said, “We were finally successful and had admitted to the special metabolic division on July 8th, a 52-year-old negro male with a diagnosis of severe heart disease.…”
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The subject was Daniel Nelson, who was recuperating from a heart attack when he was shipped to the metabolic ward for “special studies.” The transfer to that ward was the last of a string of misfortunes suffered by Nelson.
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A cook for most of his life, he had lost all his money in the
stock market shortly before the heart attack. He was injected with plutonium on July 16 and given the number HP-10. When he was discharged from the hospital, he had no place to convalesce and finally sought help from a now-defunct rest home for veterans in Mount McGregor, New York. Nelson lived for ten years and eleven months after he was injected, dying of heart disease on June 2, 1957.

Bassett returned to the United States soon after the first atomic bomb was detonated during Operation Crossroads, and was in Rochester by the time Nelson was injected. But Langham remained to see the second shot, an underwater explosion that pushed a dome of radioactive water high into the sky. “The second test at Bikini was really a great show.
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I am sorry that you did not stay to see it,” Langham told Bassett when he returned to Los Alamos. Reinvigorated by their Pacific adventure, the two men were ready to increase the dosage level.

“Shall we try for a terminal case or two?” Bassett queried.
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“I think we should get some terminal cases if possible,” Langham responded.
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But for unknown reasons, Nelson turned out to be the last patient injected with plutonium. The following month Bassett began an experiment in which enriched isotopes of uranium were injected into six people with good kidney function. The uranium injections were apparently part of the larger study that had been planned by the Manhattan Project after the war and their function was to find the minimum dose that would produce detectable kidney damage. Thousands of people were working with uranium in Oak Ridge, and the bomb doctors were eager to find out more about both its radioactive and chemical toxicity.

While the uranium injections were under way, Langham kept nagging Samuel Bassett to collect more urine and stool samples from plutonium-injected patients whenever they were readmitted to the hospital. Additional samples were obtained from hemophiliac William Purcell when he returned to the hospital in early January of 1946 for bleeding of the intestinal tract. Samples were also collected from John Mousso, the East Rochester resident, whenever he was readmitted. Eda Schultz Charlton, a lonely, depressed widow, turned out to be one of their most fruitful subjects.

Eda Schultz Charlton sat on a high stool all day, legs tucked beneath her, inspecting camera shutters at the Kodak plant.
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As she hurried home at night, she may have sensed the winter gathering over the black waters of Lake Ontario. She was a middle-age woman, slightly overweight and filled with vague fears about the future. The war was finally over and the whole country was celebrating, but it was an unhappy time for Eda. Her husband had died of a heart attack a year earlier and her son had not yet been discharged from the Navy. Sometimes she sat up alone in her living room eating handfuls of peanuts and candy. Other nights she just crawled into bed early.

Eda had a touch of hypochondria and a tendency to go on food binges. The hypochondria, almost indiscernible at the time, would flower into a painful obsession during the last two decades of her life. No diagnostic test, no doctor’s words, could staunch the fear of cancer that eventually grew weedy and strong in her mind. Eda camouflaged her insecurities with clothes. She wore beautifully tailored suits, stylish felt hats, and carried small pocketbooks with gold latches. Her permanents were always fresh and her nails well-buffed ovals. Even when she was in her eighties, she continued to wear a tortuous corset of lace and elastic that left deep red marks on her body. The youngest of four sisters, Eda had serious dark eyes and wavy brown hair. She was twenty-three years old when women won the right to vote, and she dutifully walked the narrow path laid out for women of her generation. Except for the brief stint at the Kodak plant, she was a housewife for most of her life.

As the autumn turned into the winter of 1945, Eda had developed numerous minor physical complaints and went to doctor after doctor. One physician had given her a thyroid medication that apparently increased her nervousness. Another had given her three or four injections of B vitamins for back pain. She had gained ten pounds from the peanuts and candy.

Not long after the vitamin injections, she broke out in a rash. Small pimples spread from her hairline, down the back of her neck and shoulders, and over her abdomen. Then her legs swelled abruptly. The swelling suggested something serious might be wrong, and she was admitted to the University of Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital on November 2 for diagnostic tests. The doctors were puzzled by her symptoms but suspected her diet was the culprit. “Her nutrition has been poor because she eats alone, lives alone, has little interest in food, poor appetite, has subsisted largely on sandwiches and coffee and an occasional glass of milk—poor protein, poor vitamins,” states the first of many hospital admission notes.
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Her eyes were clear, her lungs and heart normal. With just two days of bed rest and the hospital’s high-protein, low-salt diet, the rash and swelling in Eda’s ankles subsided. The doctors thought the swelling was caused by hypoproteinemia, a condition in which abnormally small amounts of protein are found in the circulating blood plasma. That condition, in turn, could have been caused by her poor diet. She might also have been suffering from a mild case of hepatitis.

On the eleventh day of her hospital stay, she was transferred to E-3—Dr. Samuel Bassett’s metabolic ward—for “protein studies.” Bassett, in a classified letter written to Wright Langham a day later, confided, “We have also taken in another patient, Eda Schultz, #239876, and expect to begin collection within a few days if she proves to be sufficiently cooperative.”
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At home, Eda was rigid and controlling, setting aside a day for laundry and a day for ironing. She was upset when she found dust under her bed or saw dandelions on the front lawn. She was so formal that even in the presence of family and friends, she referred to her first husband as “Mr. Schultz” and her second as “Mr. Charlton.” But in the hushed hospital wards or doctors’ waiting rooms, she acquiesced to the most intimate probing of her body. “I think she had an inferiority complex,” Helen Schultz, her daughter-in-law, speculated.
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“She was kind of shy and timid around people. She might have done what they told her to do.”

Samuel Bassett was juggling several patients when Eda arrived on E-3. The plutonium-laced urine and stool samples from Amedio Lovecchio and William Purcell were being packed and sent to Los Alamos. Control samples were being gathered from Jean Daigneault and Paul Galinger.

Bassett instructed that Eda be placed on the “house diet” until further notice. An ice bag, codeine, and aspirin were ordered for a pain in her left shoulder. Two days later Bassett told the nurses to begin the collection of urine and stool samples. “Cover with acid at the end of 24 hr period.
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Have pt. void directly into collection jar.” Twice she went on shopping excursions. “She feels that her ankles have not been as swollen recently in spite of increased activity including two shopping trips,” wrote Helen Van Alstine, the doctor who selected Daniel Nelson for injection.
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Eda celebrated Thanksgiving on Bassett’s ward. She may have exchanged a few words with Jean Daigneault or Paul Galinger. On November 27, five days after Thanksgiving, a needle filled with sterile saline was slipped into one of her veins. The saline was injected slowly to ensure smooth entry into the vein. Then the syringe was detached and another containing plutonium was substituted. “The plutonium solution was injected rapidly, after which the syringe was rinsed once by drawing it full of the patient’s blood and discharging the blood back into the vein,” the Los Alamos report written by Wright Langham and Samuel Bassett stated.
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“For obvious reasons,” Langham had pointed out before the experiment even began, “extreme care should be taken to make sure the vein has been entered before the material is discharged.”
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The syringe injected into Eda contained 4.9 micrograms of plutonium, an amount that delivered a total lifetime dose of 880 rem. The radiation exposure that she received each year from the plutonium was equal to sixty-six times what the average person receives annually.
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Eda’s medical records contain no information about the injection. In fact, nothing in the 314 pages of medical records maintained by Strong Memorial Hospital from 1945 to 1979 reveals she was in the plutonium experiment. Only a slight change in the urine collection schedule suggests that anything unusual was afoot on the day of the injection. “Collect urine Spec. in 2–12 hr periods today.
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Collect the second 12 hr Spec @ 8:00 PM. tonight. Tomorrow resume the 24 hr collection,” Bassett wrote.

The decision to keep references to the experiment out of the patients’ medical files was apparently made by the Manhattan Project doctors
before the experiment began. In an October 25, 1946, letter to Samuel Bassett, Wright Langham wrote:

Life on the ward resumed its humdrum pace following Eda’s injection. Seconal was authorized for her if she requested it, as was a water enema, if necessary. On December 11 a young doctor named Christine Waterhouse performed a routine kidney test. A couple of days later Bassett said Eda could start using salt on her food again. With the plutonium circulating in her body, Eda was discharged on December 20, 1945, five days before Christmas.