The Plutonium Files (25 page)

• June 28, 1976: “Mrs. Charlton complains of excessive fatigue
today. She feels worse than she has ever at any time in the past. She states that she is fairly convinced from Dr. Guattery and myself that she does not have a cancer, but on the other hand, she has never felt worse in her life.”

• November 21, 1978: “…   she has had symptoms of a ‘creepy crawly’ feeling up the side of her face, tremendous anxiety probably associated with these symptoms. When asked point blank if she were afraid she had cancer, she denied this but repeatedly brings up the possibility of cancer.”
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   Tormented and obsessed, Eda was to live another four years. She developed serious physical problems that were compounded by the lifelong depression. She was moved to a health-related facility at a local hospital after she underwent surgery for a bowel obstruction. A second surgery followed. Then she had a heart attack, fractured her hip, and finally suffered a stroke. At 7:30
P.M.
on January 24, 1983, just two months shy of her eighty-sixth birthday, Eda Charlton died of “acute cardiac arrest,” her death certificate states.

After her death, Guattery sent a clinical summary of Eda’s final years to scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. “At no time during the years that I was Mrs. [name deleted] physician did I see any evidence of carcinoma,” he wrote.
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“This was specifically looked for, especially with her background history.”

Eda’s funeral was small and poorly attended. Other than Fred and Helen and their immediate family, only one other nephew was present. The business with plutonium, the name of the radioactive material that Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg said rolled off the tongue better than “plutium,” had vexed her until the very end. Sometime before she died, she asked her son, “Do you suppose that stuff they gave me did anything to me?”

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 Chicago’s 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 “moribund” patients.
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A petite, 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 didn’t fit her symptoms. She began experiencing fevers at night, a raging thirst, and a loss of appetite.

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.
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Una had no husband, no children. Her father, John H. Macke, was a manager of the John Shillito Company, a department store in Cincinnati, Ohio, and author of a book on how to measure and cut carpets.
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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 “U” medication was prepared by scientists at the Met Lab, a ten-minute walk from the hospital.

Christmas came and went. The scant records don’t indicate whether she had any visitors. Two days later, on December 27, the “U” medication was started. Almost immediately Una began to vomit.
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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. “On the head,” wrote a pathologist, “is a large quantity of graying red hair.”
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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. “The muscles are thin, somewhat pale and poorly developed.”
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“The emptied heart weighs 250 gms.”

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 “U” medication had been administered. He found lymphoblastoma in the biopsy tissue, a finding that ruled out the possibility that the second cancer “was induced by the medication.”

Una’s organs were scooped from her body and placed into containers filled with a 95 percent alcohol solution.
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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.
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The “U” 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 Una’s medical records concluded the dose could have delivered enough radiation to Una’s 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 Hodgkin’s
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 identity remains unknown. Una was assigned the code number CHI-2 and the Hodgkin’s 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 doses—94.91 micrograms of plutonium.
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That was nearly one hundred times what scientists in 1945 believed that a healthy worker’s 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.
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It was out of envy of the superior data he thought such doses might yield that Wright Langham had written to Samuel Bassett 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 Lab’s 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 analyses of Arthur Hubbard and Una Macke. Leon Jacobson, R. Lesko, and W. Monroe are listed as assistants.

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 Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, denied any involvement in the experiment. He said he “knew very little about it, next to nothing.”
¹²

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 “lemonade,” he added.
¹⁴
“Some people who were near terminal death, I believe, preceded us.”

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 Japan. 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, “That’s been my work.” 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, Hamilton’s 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 Japan, he sent the Manhattan Project the following memo on his next study:

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 “Simmy” 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, Simmy’s six-year-old sister, Helene, was rocking him in a hammock on their front porch when he tumbled out and onto the ground.
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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. “There is a whole blank from there,” Joshua recalled.
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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 mass on the inside of the boy’s knee. She took him to a local doctor who diagnosed the injury as a fractured femur. Simmy’s 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.
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Perhaps contact was made
through this conversation. A note in Simmy’s medical records states that the child was referred from Australia by a “Major Davis through the Red Cross.”

Once the decision was made to go to the United States, events moved at lightning speed.
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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.
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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.

Freda’s 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.