The Plutonium Files (34 page)
Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
Even in 1950, when Joseph McCarthy was making charges in the Senate about the Communist leanings of AEC scientists, documents show Warren was fearless in the closed-door showdowns with admirals and generals. But he was at heart a practical man, flinty and cold as the New England soil his forefathers settled on in the 1600s and fully capable of playing the villain. “You must realize,” fellow scientist Merril Eisenbud once said of Warren, “some people are patriotic enough to lie.”
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Shields Warren was born in 1898, just two years after Stafford Warren, into an old New England family of Methodist ministers, educators, and farmers. His baby name was “Shewannie.” One of his grandfathers was the first president of Boston University; the other was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and the “unwilling lawyer” for Mark Twain.
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His father was a philosophy professor at Boston University and dean of the school of liberal arts.
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His earliest memories were of Cape Cod: the smell of salt marshes and tide pools and the choppy north Atlantic, somnolent and calm under a June sky. Using a cloud as a light source, the young Warren focused the lens of his first mail-order microscope on the organisms in the tide pool.
Their translucent, geometrical shapes burst into view and he was hooked. Between Greek and Latin classes at a public school in Brookline, Massachusetts, he crammed in science courses, preparing himself for a career in zoology.
Like his father and grandfather, Warren also attended Boston University. He graduated in 1918 with a bachelor’s degree and immediately enrolled in the Army. He came down with the flu in artillery training camp, and while he was recovering, Armistice was declared. “The mortality was terribly heavy,” he remembered in a 1972 oral history interview.
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“This convinced me that there ought to be a better way of doing medicine than this, and while I was convalescing I made up my mind that medicine was what I wanted to do.”
Warren decided to enroll in medical school at Harvard. In the meantime, he had a small “grubstake” from the Army and nearly a year off, so he decided to see America—by rail. “I decided the best way of doing this would be to hobo.”
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Warren worked his way across America, experiencing a slice of life that young, well-bred men such as himself rarely saw. He stoked a freight train through the Rockies, worked in the shipyards in Portland, flipped pancakes in a lumberjack camp in the Pacific Northwest, picked fruit in California, and cut wheat in Oklahoma. The hobo life left him with a sense of self-sufficiency and the feeling that he could meet any challenge.
Warren graduated from medical school in 1923. Following another trip, this time to Europe, he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and continued to teach there until he retired. When he was a young resident, he autopsied several patients with Hodgkin’s disease and learned to his amazement that they had died not from the disease, but from the radiation treatment they’d been given. “Apparently nobody knew what happened when anybody had been irradiated,” he recalled.
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At the time of his AEC appointment, he was the author of “The Effects of Radiation on Normal Tissues,” a compilation of scientific papers, which the AEC considered the definitive work of the time regarding the effects of radiation on the human body.
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Warren maintained a punishing schedule during his first few years on the job, making regular loops to the Manhattan Project’s laboratories at Los Alamos, Chicago, and Berkeley and its monolithic uranium and plutonium-producing factories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and eastern Washington state. During the trips, he tried to assess the health risks to
workers and pollution problems. One of the first things he wanted to make sure of, he told AEC officials years later, was that there were no “epidemics” brewing at the former Manhattan Project sites.
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By 1947 the AEC was acutely aware that radioactive waste was going to be a huge problem. Government officials debated whether to dump the material in the oceans, store it in vaults until radioactive decay had progressed sufficiently, collect it in garbage cans and bury it on federal property, or shoot it into space by “interplanetary rockets.” At Hanford a biologist had discovered that radioactivity levels in fish in the nearby Columbia River were on an average 100,000 times greater than the radioactivity in the water itself.
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But Hanford officials were determined to keep the information from becoming public: “It is recommended that all river contamination studies indicating the extent to which aquatic life in rivers concentrate and hold radioactivity should be classified ‘Secret,’ ” an official wrote in 1948. “It is further suggested that all problems related to radioactive contamination of our rivers be tightly held until reasonable solutions to these problems are available.”
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Warren spent the first few months on the job trying to get a handle on what was going on. “When I took over at AEC, we had to pick up threads at each installation, and find out from the people there what had been going on, what the local practices were,” he said.
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“There were zero records that I received when I came to AEC and [I] had to depend primarily on word of mouth and the medical regulations and what medical history I could get from contractor personnel of the various installations.”
Around Christmas of 1947, Shields Warren met with Joseph Hamilton. The two doctors, both lean, well-dressed men, were reminiscing about the early days of radioisotopes when suddenly the conversation veered into dangerous territory. Warren told AEC investigators, who interviewed him in 1974 about the plutonium injections, that he and Hamilton had been discussing “isotopic injection” when Hamilton made an oblique reference to the “utilization of plutonium.”
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Hamilton began the conversation by saying that Warren must have a “shrewd suspicion” about the radioisotope research the Berkeley group had done during the war. Warren replied that he was aware of the work from Hamilton’s published reports. “Yes, but there are some unpublished things that you probably haven’t heard of,” Warren remembered Hamilton saying.
Then Hamilton plunged into the details of the three plutonium injection cases in California. At the time of Hamilton’s disclosure, Albert Stevens was trying to restart his house painting business, Simmy Shaw was dead, and Elmer Allen had just been seen in UCSF’s outpatient
clinic several weeks earlier. (“… feels fine, has gained weight, has good stump,” a doctor noted in his medical chart.)
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“I had not known of any work in humans in plutonium up to that time. So I talked with him a little bit about it, and we did not get any facts, figures or numbers,” Warren told AEC investigators. The two men did discuss whether the California patients gave consent for the injections because doctors at the time were “reasonably sensitive” about that issue. “You know,” he quoted Hamilton as saying, “we have had something of a problem in this because there were very rigid restrictions on the use of the word plutonium’ and the handling of the material and letting anyone know that there was any such stuff.” Warren continued:
Dr. Hamilton told me that he had explained to the patients that they would receive—now I ve got to put my thoughts in order in this—that they would receive an injection of a new substance that was too new to say what it might do but that it had some properties like those of other substances that had been used to help growth processes in patients, or something of that general sort. You could not call it informed consent because they (the patients) did not know what it was, but they knew that it was a new, and to them, unknown substance.
Warren said he became concerned when he heard about the injections. “All I knew about plutonium—there was practically nothing written down that was available—was that it was very nasty stuff.” Following the meeting, Warren talked the matter over with his trusted colleague, Alan Gregg. “We’ve got a sticky problem here,” Warren quoted Gregg as saying.
Warren said he eventually learned by “osmosis” that additional patients had been injected with plutonium in Rochester, Chicago, and Oak Ridge. “One might say I would pick up a stray bit of information one place or another.” He said he assumed records on the experiment existed, but he did not see them. “And when I inquired of Bob Stone, he said he thought it depended primarily on people’s memories.”
Warren and Gregg ordered new rules drawn up by the radioisotope distribution committee, a panel that approved the use of radioisotopes in human research. Then the two men let the matter drop. “We saw no point in bringing this up after the fact as long as we were sure that nothing of this sort could happen in the future. This is because we assumed that those patients were all dead at that time.”
Warren said he did not know of the “continuing contact” some of the scientists had with the plutonium patients during his tenure. “To the best of my knowledge, from the time that I took over, there were not any injections made. And I would have insisted that they not be made if this had been brought up to me at that time.”
Documents and excerpts from Warren’s own diaries reveal that events surrounding Joseph Hamilton’s disclosure were not quite the way Warren described them. Nor was his role quite so innocent. These records suggest that Warren learned the full extent of the plutonium experiment almost immediately, not years later as he implied in his interview with AEC investigators. Recently released documents also show that Warren’s employees at AEC headquarters in 1950 authorized additional metabolic studies on Eda Schultz Charlton and John Mousso, two of the Rochester plutonium patients. The documentation makes it highly unlikely that Warren himself was not aware of the “continuing contact” with those patients or that he did not know that some subjects were still alive. Some newly declassified records also suggest that Warren may have even directed trusted colleagues to make low-key inquiries. One such document is the 1948 transcript of the telephone conversation with Rochester physician Joseph Howland in which he is asked about Ebb Cade.
Autocratic by nature, quiet and self-contained, not prone to emotional outbursts or idle chatter, Shields Warren quickly adapted to the AEC’s culture of secrecy, maintaining the classification policies that had begun to be formulated in early 1947, before he arrived. Biological, medical, and environmental reports that might promote lawsuits or have an adverse affect on public relations were routinely classified and locked away from public view. Shields Warren was just as determined as AEC general manager Carroll Wilson to keep the plutonium experiment concealed. In 1948, for example, he refused to declassify two reports dealing with the injections and agreed to the publication of the 1950 Los Alamos report coauthored by Wright Langham and Samuel Bassett provided the document be given a “confidential” classification and that its circulation be limited.
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A wealth of records released in the mid-1990s show unequivocally that the AEC covered up the plutonium experiment in part because of embarrassment. But Warren denied in the AEC interview that embarrassment was a factor: “I don’t think we thought of it from that angle carefully at that time. We regarded it [the experiment] as an accomplished fact that we would not ourselves do.”
Warren was also hesitant about letting Robert Stone publish a paper
on one of the wartime TBI experiments because he feared the report would bring adverse publicity or lawsuits. Stone was infuriated by Warren’s hesitation and dashed off a heated letter: “With regard to the first statement concerning adverse publicity, I thought this item was taken care of when we stated in the paper that the patients were incurable by any known means of therapy,” he said.
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“With regard to the lawsuit part of the program, I think that this could be taken care of readily by the elimination of the initials of the patients. I must confess that the inclusion of the initials of the patients slipped past my editorial eye or they would have been taken out. With the initials removed, there will be no means by which the patients can ever connect themselves up with the report.”
Shields Warren was also worried about releasing a report by Los Alamos scientist Norman Knowlton that described the blood changes in a group of chemists exposed to an average of 0.2 roentgens of gamma rays per week in Bayo Canyon. Located three miles east of Los Alamos, Bayo Canyon is the site where the implosion studies for the atomic bomb were done. Knowlton had found “highly significant decreases” in the blood counts of ten scientists who worked there between December 1946 and June 1948 in comparison to a control group of twenty-four individuals who received no exposure.
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An AEC insurance official cautioned against the release of Knowlton’s report:
The results of the studies indicate that the tolerance levels for chronic exposure to gamma radiation which have been accepted both within the A.E.C. and elsewhere may be too high.
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We can see the possibility of a shattering effect on the morale of the employees if they become aware that there was substantial reason to question the standards of safety under which they are working. In the hands of labor unions the results of this study would add substance to demands for extra-hazardous pay. We can also see the definite possibility that general knowledge of the results of this study might increase the number of claims of occupational injury due to radiation and place a powerful weapon in the hands of a plaintiff’s attorney.
(Knowlton’s report eventually was published, and none of the terrifying scenarios predicted by the AEC declassification officer materialized. Knowlton, who now lives in St. Louis, Missouri, said that he still has “no idea” what caused the blood changes.
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He said he subsequently
obtained “piles of blood counts” from exposed and nonexposed workers and took them to a statistician in New York to analyze, but they could find no correlation between exposures and blood changes.)