The Plutonium Files (52 page)

One by one the doctors crossed the lobby of the Carlton Hotel and took a right toward the big ballroom.
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With its gilded ceilings and elegant furnishings, the hotel resembled an Italian Renaissance palace. Just two blocks away was the White House. The spring sun poured through the tall windows, showering light on the stragglers making their way toward the smell of coffee and the unmistakable hubbub of a meeting about to begin. When they were assembled, with steaming cups of coffee in hand, there were twenty-six of them. It was April 3, 1949, a Sunday morning in Washington, D.C.

Robert Stone, who would deliver the key presentation that day, saw many familiar faces when he looked around the room. Stafford Warren and Andrew Dowdy had flown in from Los Angeles, Hymer Friedell had come from Cleveland, Robley Evans from Boston. For Shields Warren, it was a quick cab ride from AEC headquarters to the gracious hotel at 16th and K streets. Joseph Hamilton was a member of the committee, but he was unable to attend. Wright Langham, a consultant, was absent, too.

The Manhattan Project veterans, their AEC counterparts, and other physicists and scientists present that morning were members of a medical advisory committee for the Nuclear Energy Propulsion for Aircraft, or NEPA, a project to build a long-range bomber powered by a nuclear reactor. Instinctively recognizing that such a project would not work, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Harvard president James Conant had recommended in 1947 that the aircraft proposal be “terminated promptly.” But the Atomic Energy Commission and the Air Force were forging ahead,
and the project would not be canceled until 1963 when President Kennedy acknowledged “the possibility of achieving a militarily useful aircraft in the foreseeable future is still very remote.”
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In the 1940s and early 1950s, though, many scientists and engineers still believed it was possible to construct such an aircraft. One of the key questions confronting the plane’s designers was how much radiation an air crew could tolerate, which in turn would dictate the amount of shielding that was necessary to protect the crew. As one participant put it, “The weight of this shielding is large, and is the most critical item of weight in the design of the aircraft: the shield weight must therefore be known with high relative accuracy.”
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Not surprisingly, the weight of the shielding would determine whether the bomber would fly.

The Manhattan Project veterans had been brought in to help the aircraft builders get some concrete answers about the effects of radiation on humans. A subcommittee headed by Robert Stone had concluded that the only way to get reliable answers was through radiation experiments on healthy humans. But Stone, as well as the other doctors attending the Carlton Hotel meeting, knew that those experiments would pose an ethical dilemma because the exposures could increase the risk of cancer, shorten the lives of the subjects, and produce genetic mutations. Still, Stone’s subcommittee believed that the experiments were necessary and should be performed as long as they followed the three ethical guidelines embraced by the AMA in 1946 as the Nazi doctors’ trial opened in Nuremberg: the voluntary consent of the individual, previous animal experimentation, and proper medical supervision.

Before the group took a vote on the issue, blue, legal-size packages were handed out to participants with security clearances.
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The word “restricted” was stamped across the front of the books. Inside was information culled from the Manhattan Project’s TBI experiments and data from the individuals exposed to radiation during the Los Alamos criticality accidents. Andrew Dowdy, chairman of the medical advisory group, said the report was classified at the AEC’s request because it contained data about some unresolved accident cases (a possible reference to the Allan Kline case) and not because there was any information that would jeopardize national security.

Sometime before lunch, Robert Stone submitted for approval a draft statement from his subcommittee endorsing the experiments. The declaration noted that such studies had been “countenanced” in the past when there was no other way to get the data. Some information on human responses to TBI had been obtained from sick patients, the statement
acknowledged, but those data were limited because the patients’ responses varied greatly, depending on their physical condition. Likewise, the researchers had obtained some data from accident cases, but that information was also limited because “the number of individuals so exposed has been too few to provide statistically significant results and the conditions of exposure are not sufficiently well known.” In conclusion, the group submitted a resolution to go forward: “The information desired is sufficiently important to the safety of the U.S.A. that we believe the use of humans is justified.
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It is understood that any such experimentation would be carried out in accordance with the principles laid down by the Judicial Council of the A.M.A. in 1946.”

When Andrew Dowdy, the chairman, opened the floor for comment, Shields Warren was one of the first to speak. Reflecting perhaps on the difficulties surrounding the plutonium injections, he recommended that any such experiments be unclassified. “I would say not only the information obtained, but the experiments as well,” he said.
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“I think it very important in something of this sort that there be no suspicion that anything is being hidden or covered up, that it is all being done openly and straightforwardly.” Robley Evans agreed. “We don’t have to advertise it, but at the same time it doesn’t want to be concealed, as Dr. Shields Warren has said.”
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Hymer Friedell objected to the TBI recommendation coming only from the NEPA committee: “I am just wondering whether someone else ought not to hold the bag along with us with regard to making such a recommendation.
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Previously in medical experiments the physicians and doctors have made such recommendations because the problem was primarily a medical one—I think this is something larger than that. It is really not a medical problem alone. It has to do with how critical this is with regard to safety of the nation.”

Others objected to the wording in the resolution, “sufficiently important to the safety of the U.S.A.” But Stone said conditions “have got to be pretty nearly necessary before you go giving people …,” his sentence trailing off.

Stafford Warren wanted to make sure the TBI studies would have a long-term component. “Those of us in the Manhattan tried to start it at the beginning of the war and couldn’t because there was a shortage of men and materials. We tried to start it immediately after the war, and it has hung just because nobody would come forth and say ‘This has got [to be] a must.” ’

Although Robert Stone and his colleagues did not describe the kind
of “volunteers” they hoped to sign up for such experiments, in a paper published ten months later Stone suggested that prisoners serving life sentences be used as subjects because they could be easily tracked for a long time. “Life prisoners are the one group of people that are likely to remain in one place where they can be observed for a great many years.”
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The experiment, Stone wrote, could begin by exposing volunteers to twenty-five roentgens. If no changes occurred, he said, “The next logical step would be to give fifty roentgens and repeat it in a week; if nothing happened at this level they could then proceed to expose normal people to one hundred roentgens and probably to one hundred and fifty roentgens.” Stone and the other members of the medical committee felt that as long as exposures were kept below 150 roentgens, there would be only a small chance of producing delayed effects such as leukemia:

Contrary to Stone’s assertion that 150 roentgens presented an extremely small risk of cancer, some doctors at the time felt such exposures would produce a “considerable chance” of cancer in the future.
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In 1995 President Clinton’s Advisory Committee calculated that such doses would increase the risk of leukemia by a factor of seven and double the risk of many other cancers.
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By 4:15
P.M.
on that spring day, the NEPA medical committee unanimously endorsed Stone’s proposal and was ready to adjourn. Stone, after all, had been preaching to the converted. Before the experiments could begin, however, they had to be approved by two panels in the Pentagon: the Joint Panel on the Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare and the Committee on Medical Sciences. The Joint Panel, the civilian-military group that oversaw the biological and medical research at the proving grounds, wholeheartedly supported the experiments and formally approved them in June of 1949, two months after the Carlton Hotel meeting.

But over the next year and a half, there would be wrenching debates about the ethical implications of such studies at the next level, the Committee
on Medical Sciences. In addition to those debates, even compulsive experimenters such as Joseph Hamilton began having second thoughts. After Stone had recommended using prisoners as the experimental subjects, Hamilton rethought his position and, in a letter dated November 28, 1950, advised Shields Warren that for “both politic and scientific” reasons it would be better to secure the data through animal experiments:

Long before Hamilton sent that letter, Shields Warren had already begun having qualms about irradiating healthy humans, confessing in a letter to Robert Stone that he was taking “an increasingly dim view” on human experimentation.
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“The more I consider this problem the more reluctant I am to go along with experiments of this type,” he said in the July 11, 1949, letter. “Consequently, record me as voting against human experimentation.”

The Pentagon’s Committee on Medical Sciences approved the experiments on November 8, 1949. But when it learned that the AEC’s Shields Warren did not favor them, it revoked its endorsement and sent the proposal back to the Joint Panel for further study. The panel merely reaffirmed its position and shuffled the proposal back to the committee.

On May 23, 1950, when the Committee on Medical Sciences met again to consider the experiments, the AMA principles were read into the transcripts. The horrifying knowledge of the atrocities committed by the Nazi doctors was still fresh in the minds of several of the military officers. Colonel Elbert “Frenchy” DeCoursey, the deputy director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology who went to Japan after the bombings and later coauthored a paper with Shields Warren on the casualties, said, “I must say that in my own mind I realize that all of these things are important to know and we must know them, but it is difficult for me to
come to a decision of whether or not you should go into human experimentation on this because of the world opinion on the experimentation in Germany.
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That bothers me.”

Admiral Frederick Greaves, a lifelong career officer who had been awarded a Bronze Star and a Gold Star for his role in the amphibious invasion of Sicily, Italy, and southern France, was also uncomfortable with the idea of human experimentation. “I find it very difficult, too,” he confessed.
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Wallace Fenn, a University of Rochester professor and friend of Shields Warren, said he questioned whether the end would justify the means. “I think the important thing is whether you take the decision to go down this road of human experimentation and work on prisoners, even though they are volunteers, and start the idea that as long as they are prisoners it really doesn’t matter very much what you do to them, and it is no great loss to society, which I think it isn’t, but it is a bad decision.”
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Although the members of the Committee on Medical Sciences had strong reservations about the experiments, they nevertheless approved the experiments at their May 23 meeting. The Office of the Secretary of Defense wanted the AEC’s Shields Warren on board too. But this was one of the occasions where Warren, exquisitely aware of how human experiments could damage the prestige and public relations of the commission, refused to abandon his principles. Thereupon General James Cooney, the military officer who vigorously supported the atomic maneuvers and downplayed the dangers of fallout, led a last-ditch effort to get Shields Warren to change his mind.

On November 10, 1950, eighteen months after the meeting at the Carlton Hotel, Cooney and other officers from the Army, Navy, and Air Force sat down with Warren and his colleagues at AEC headquarters. The bleak November light cast watery shadows over the starched uniforms and polished shoes of the generals and admirals. The mood of the room was undoubtedly somber. The Korean War had erupted on June 25, and many military men believed that it would be only a matter of time before nuclear weapons were used in battle.