The Plutonium Files (27 page)

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 didn’t 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 porter’s cap, appeared at her side. “I can get you on the next train,” he said. He followed Fredna back to her hometown of Italy, Texas, where they were married.

Everything went well those first two years in California. Elmer was working as a railroad porter for the Pullman Company and Fredna as an aide in a health clinic. They had two children, a four-month-old son and a daughter who was not yet two. “We were optimistic about the future,” Fredna recalled.
²⁹
But then an accident occurred on September 3, 1946, a minor accident really, which would set in motion a chain of events that would forever alter their lives. Elmer was trying to get off a train in Chicago when the train jolted suddenly and threw him to the side, injuring his left knee.

He went to the company doctor in Chicago and saw another when he returned to Oakland. The Oakland doctor diagnosed the injury as a fracture and advised Elmer to wrap his knee in an Ace bandage and apply heat. But the pain and swelling didn’t go away. Finally Elmer was referred to a private physician named Lloyd Fisher. Puzzled by the knee’s inability to heal, Fisher removed some fluid and sent it off to a pathologist for a second opinion. The consulting pathologist diagnosed the wound as a bone cyst and found no evidence of cancer. “The principal picture is that of newly forming bone, organizing hemorrhage, and chronic inflammation.”
³⁰
Fisher then referred Elmer in June of 1947 to
UCSF’s outpatient clinic. “Of great teaching value,” one clinician later penned on Elmer’s medical records.

The injury had put a terrible strain on Elmer and his young family. The Pullman Co. had discontinued his checks and stopped paying his doctor’s bills. Rent was $35 a month; insurance, $4.20; and his union dues, $3.
³¹
His net assets consisted of $25 in cash. He was $60 in debt, most of which represented doctors’ bills.

One of the first things that the UCSF doctors did was take another set of X rays. By that time, Elmer was taking painkillers and his knee had swollen to three or four times its original size. The radiologist concluded the changes could have been due to infection superimposed by a surgical defect, “but the probability of a bone sarcoma must be seriously considered.”
³²
The same radiologist reversed his opinion a few days later when he did a second set of X rays: “This is probably an osteogenic sarcoma … however, the possibility of a chronic infections process superimposed on a surgical defect must be seriously considered.”
³³
A biopsy was performed July 14 to settle the question. Following a microscopic examination of the cellular material, a pathologist concluded that Elmer did indeed have bone cancer.
³⁴
Doctors told Elmer that his left leg would have to be amputated in order to halt the spread of the disease, a procedure that is still considered an acceptable treatment for patients suffering from cancer of the long bones. Although the disease usually is fatal by the time it is diagnosed, X rays showed that Elmer’s cancer had not metastasized.

It’s not clear how Joseph Hamilton and his associates learned of Elmer Allen. Probably someone in UCSF’s radiology department became aware of his case because of the numerous X-ray studies. Several Manhattan Project veterans were working in the radiology department at that time, including Robert Stone, Earl Miller, and Bertram Low-Beer.

The doctors did not immediately schedule Elmer for surgery after the definitive cancer diagnosis was made. Ray Mullen, one of Elmer’s primary physicians, wrote in his medical chart that the amputation would be “postponed until Monday in order to have radioactive tracer substances prepared (plutonium) and standardized.
³⁵
Pt. will have tumor uptake studies done.” This is the only time in which plutonium is specifically mentioned in Elmer’s medical records.

At 3:30
P.M.
on Monday, July 18, 1947, Bertram Low-Beer and several other doctors gathered around Elmer’s hospital bed. According to a lengthy note that appears to have been written by Low-Beer, Elmer was told the following: “The experimental nature of the intramuscular injection of the radioactive tracer sample was explained to the patient, who
agreed on the procedure.
³⁶
The pat. was in fully oriented and in sane mind.”

The so-called consent form does not state what the radioactive material was, and relatives said it was unlikely that Elmer, who had a limited education, would have understood what the doctors were talking about anyway. “If they told my father that he was injected with plutonium, that would be like telling him he was injected with ice cream,” said his daughter, Elmerine.
³⁷

The plaster cast on Elmer’s left leg was split down the side and removed. After flecks of plaster were sponged away, a bull’s-eye was drawn in the middle of his calf. Then a syringe loaded with plutonium was plunged into the center of the circle. The needle sunk down two centimeters, or eight-tenths of an inch, depositing the plutonium deep into the calf. When the needle was withdrawn, a physician wrote, “No blood appeared on aspiration and no bleeding after removal of needle.”
³⁸

Elmer was observed carefully for three days following the injection. On the first evening Dr. Mullen noted that Elmer was experiencing “no pain or discomfort whatsoever.”
³⁹
The next day Mullen scribbled: “A good day with only slight throbbing pain in region of knee.” On the third day Elmer was taken to surgery.

A tourniquet was wrapped around the upper thigh, then the skin and underlying muscles were peeled back and severed. The nerves and arteries were isolated and snipped off. Finally, a saw was used to cut through the thigh bone. Following the amputation, Elmer was wheeled out of the operating room in “good condition” and given morphine, codeine, and aspirin to relieve the pain. The severed limb was sent “to pathology and radiological study.”

Elmer was a model patient.
⁴⁰
Mullen, who witnessed the plutonium injection, was delighted with his speedy recovery. On July 28 he scrawled: “Feeling much better. Anxious to get up on crutches.”
⁴¹
Two days later he wrote: “Has been up in wheel chair with great joy. Wound dressed and appears to be healing well [without] any infection … a fine patient.” On August 1, Elmer was “in wheel chair most of day. No pain from stump. Penicillin [discontinued]. Afebrile. Eager to find work after convalescence—not depressed.”

Elmer’s leg was taken to Berkeley, where the plutonium at the injection site was carefully measured. When Patricia Durbin was asked how the Berkeley scientists managed that, she responded, “It just takes big beakers, that’s all.”
⁴²

Elmer was the only patient injected in a muscle rather than a vein.
The reason is not clear, but Manhattan Project doctors had been concerned about plutonium-contaminated wounds and punctures ever since the spring of 1944, when Joseph Hamilton had advised they should be treated like snake bites. The Met Lab’s J. J. Nickson had warned his colleagues the following year: “For large, grossly contaminated wounds on the hand, the satisfaction of the dictates of this method of treatment might well necessitate the amputation of the hand.”
⁴³
In Los Alamos, Louis Hempelmann had begun excising wounds that were only potentially contaminated.
⁴⁴
Between 1944 and 1945, seventy-eight wounds were excised, but only three contained significant amounts of plutonium and the practice was discontinued because it discouraged employees from reporting minor injuries.

On August 7, Elmer was discharged from the hospital. Soon the flush of exuberance faded and the impact of the amputation began to sink in. For Elmer, an African American trying to fish up a livelihood in a segregated country, the railroad job had been a godsend. Now there would be no more graceful leaps onto moving trains, no evening strolls through the sleeping cars. He haunted the wharves in San Francisco, where he bought and sold fish. But that didn’t bring in enough money to support his family. A couple of years later Elmer and his wife bundled up their two children and went home to Italy, Texas. “He wanted to make a good living for his family,” Fredna said.
⁴⁵
“After he lost his leg, he just gave up all hope.”

Wearing a new prosthesis from California’s vocational rehabilitation department, Elmer tried to readjust to life in Italy. The intense humidity, which made the summer heat feel more like gravity than air, was particularly hard on the young couple. They had grown used to California’s blue skies and tangy breezes. Then there was Italy’s rampant segregation. The little town had two mayors and two city councils in the 1950s—one for whites and one for African Americans. “He was disgusted. He never wanted to come back here.
⁴⁶
He had so many hopes and dreams for his family,” Fredna recalled. For his children, those dreams would come true. His son, William, and his granddaughter, April, became engineers. His daughter, Elmerine, became a school teacher. But for Elmer himself life would hold little promise.

“He could do anything,” recalled his friend Joe Speed.
⁴⁷
“But there was nothing for him to do.” One job after another fell through. Elmer began having epileptic seizures and could no longer commute to Dallas, where work was more plentiful. When the seizures occurred, Fredna would put a spoon in his mouth. “He would chew the spoon to pieces—his tongue,
too,” Elmerine remembered.
⁴⁸
Elmer made toys for schoolchildren, kites from brown paper bags, lampshades from Popsicle sticks, and flower baskets from egg cartons.

Soon Elmer began drinking heavily. Eventually he became one of Italy’s town characters, slumping on a bench on Main Street, telling outlandish stories about the amputation and the doctors who flew in and out of his room “practicing” to be doctors. He told his friend, Joe Speed, that he had been used as a guinea pig. But no one, not even his family doctor, believed him.

David Williams, a doctor in Waxahachie, Texas, who treated Elmer for the last twenty years of his life, said Elmer informed him during one of their first visits about the plutonium injection.
⁴⁹
The physician said he put the information “in the back of my bonnet” and watched him for indications of the long-ago exposure. Williams didn’t know whether to believe Elmer or not. “I wondered. I also wondered if it was a portion of his paranoia and whether or not it was a crutch for him to not function as he should have functioned. His conscience needed a salve to where it was O.K. for his wife to be teaching and so forth.”

Williams also didn’t encourage Elmer to talk about the experiment. “I didn’t think there was a lot of gain there. Do you follow? In other words, I didn’t turn him off, I’d listen, but I felt like he had other more ongoing problems that were more pressing and that we needed to deal with day-to-day rather than going back to that.” Williams eventually wound up diagnosing Elmer as a paranoid schizophrenic. “What I saw was a fellow who had a loss of limb and became an emotional cripple because of it. He took to the bottle and then got off that. He probably had paranoid schizophrenia all of his life. As far as doing things, I thought he was using this possible exposure as a crutch, a reason, rather than doing as well as I would have liked to have seen him do.”

Medical authorities in California attempted to keep in touch with Elmer but eventually communication ceased—possibly due to the fact that the physicians overseeing his case died. Dr. Bertram Low-Beer, who was at Elmer’s bedside on the day of his injection and wrote the consent form that was placed in his medical file, died of leukemia in 1955. The disease, which is believed to have been caused by an accidental overexposure to radiation in Czechoslovakia, was discovered during a routine blood test and came as a terrible shock to the scientist and his wife. Low-Beer was “passionately dedicated” to the idea of safety, his widow said.
⁵⁰
“It’s extremely ironic that he should have been a victim.”

Joseph Hamilton was diagnosed with leukemia the year that Low-Beer
died. After years of watching Hamilton play Russian roulette with radioactive materials, none of his colleagues was surprised by his illness. Hamilton was melancholy, though. “He became sad when he was dying,” Earl Miller said.
⁵¹

Hamilton continued to work up until a month before his death. His secretary, Grace Walpole, carried his papers back and forth to the hospital. “He was very sad. But he just sort of went along as though nothing was wrong.
⁵²
And, of course, he seemed to work a little more frantically.” Hamilton died February 18, 1957, at the age of forty-nine. The University of California listed his death as an “industrial accident,” but no one could explain the accident or when it happened. “You know,” he told Patricia Durbin in a conversation before he died, “the sad part is that all the easy experiments have been done.”
⁵³

With the injection of Elmer Allen, the first phase of the plutonium experiment was completed. In 1967, exactly twenty years later, a second phase would begin when Patricia Durbin, who had washed dishes in Joseph Hamilton’s lab and went on to coauthor twenty papers with him before he died, began looking into the whereabouts of the patients. To her amazement, she would discover that Elmer Allen, Eda Schultz Charlton, John Mousso, and Janet Stadt were still alive.