The Plutonium Files (58 page)

Litton was readmitted to the hospital a few days before the TBI procedure was scheduled. At 6:30
A.M.
on May 22, the date of his irradiation, he was given a radioactive concoction containing lanthanum-140 and iron-59. Then he was given 90 ccs of water and breakfast. The
medical records say nothing about the function of the radioisotopes, but they apparently were administered as part of another, separate experiment.

An hour and a half after Litton had ingested the radioactive isotopes, he was escorted down a twisting corridor to METBI. The chamber was a concrete-shielded room eight feet wide, eight feet high, and eight feet long.
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Litton climbed into an aluminum bed suspended in the middle of the room. When everyone had left, the protective shields covering eight radioactive sources located in the floor and ceiling slid back and he was bombarded from all sides with radiation. Using a series of mirrors, the operator could watch Litton from a control panel as the radiation was administered. The procedure began at 9:31
A.M.
and was completed at 10:43. Litton suffered no ill effects from the fifty roentgens or the radionuclides. When he was discharged several days later, he was given ice cream containers for his stool samples and told to return them to the hospital. A page in his medical records clearly refers to the TBI treatment as an “experiment.”

Litton continued to lead an active and normal life for more than two years after the first TBI treatment. He worked long hours, painted his house, and even dabbled in politics. But the ORINS doctors were uneasy about taking such a wait-and-see approach to his disease. On November 17, 1964, Dr. White wrote, “I told him that the time would be coming when we would undoubtedly wish to give him some additional treatment, probably 100 r total-body irradiation … but felt it would be reasonable to defer this for the present.”
⁵

A month later ORINS doctors decided to administer 2,400 rads of local radiation to Litton’s groin and iliac area after they noticed that nodes in those areas had become swollen. Litton tolerated the local radiation well, but six months later he was back in the hospital with a mass the size of a large orange in his upper abdomen. The doctors decided the time had come to give Litton a second round of total-body irradiation in METBI even though they knew from experience that localized radiation would work better.

On June 29, 1965, Litton climbed back into the aluminum bed. This time he was irradiated with 100 roentgens. He tolerated the treatment well, suffering only a transient nausea. A “TBI Work Sheet” described the biochemical changes in his body. A few days before his discharge, some of his bone marrow was removed and carefully examined.

A profound change came over Litton when he returned home. Over
night, it seemed, he developed the look of someone who was chronically ill. His dark complexion turned ashen, his muscular frame withered. For the first time in his life he began to suffer from insomnia and nervousness. He was home for less than a week following the TBI treatment when he developed severe abdominal pain. He returned to the hospital on July 9 and more or less remained there until he died five months later. During the ensuing months, Litton was administered a dizzying assortment of drugs and treatments. He was given another 2,225 rads to his abdomen to relieve his “discomfort and constipation.” He also was given two more radionuclides—400 microcuries of iodine-123 and 97 microcuries of iodine-131. Family members now believe the radioactive iodine was administered to help calibrate ORINS’ new counting chamber.

“I think he knew he was dying,” his son, Gary Litton, recalled.
⁶
“I helped him take a shower one day. He held on to the towel rail and told me, ‘I just wish they would let me alone.’ ” A handwritten note dated October 28, 1965, stated Litton had shown a “poor response” to the total body irradiation and the localized radiation. Despite this observation, the very next day Litton was given 220 rads of another planned round of 2,200 rads of local radiation. His condition grew worse, and a day later he died. “His last 25 days in the hospital,” a physician remarked on his chart, “were pitiable.”
⁷

Five years after Woodrow Wilson Litton died, ORINS scientists published an in-house report describing the results of a ten-year experiment in which patients suffering from lymphoma, leukemia, and polycythemia vera, a blood disorder, were given single doses of 50 roentgens or 100 roentgens of total-body irradiation.
⁸
Litton was one of those patients. The report disclosed that the primary purpose of the experiment was to gain “information that might lead to improved radiation therapy” and to “acquire radiobiologic information”—with nothing said about helping the patient. In fact, the doctors admitted that even before they began the experiment they knew that the TBI would not give “better clinical results” than local applications or fractionated doses of radiation. “At present we feel that some pattern of fractionated exposure … probably offers a preferable approach for total-body radiotherapy.” The physicians also revealed that the information from the irradiated patients was being utilized by NASA.

The medium-exposure facility, or METBI, was constructed in 1959, a year after eight workers were injured in a criticality accident at one of
Oak Ridge’s uranium production plants. ORINS researchers had already begun investigating the effects of total-body irradiation on patients suffering from blood-related diseases, but the accident whetted their desire to learn more. Among other things, accident investigators had learned that film badges worn by workers were “unreliable indicators” of actual exposures.
⁹
Oak Ridge scientists, like the Defense Department, became intensely interested in finding a biological dosimeter that would more accurately reveal the amount of radiation absorbed by employees in the weapons plants.

At about the time that METBI began operating, NASA was also becoming interested in the effects of radiation on humans. Scientific investigations spread out in quirky new directions as the space agency raced to put a man on the moon. How much radiation would the astronauts be exposed to when their space craft hurtled through the Van Allen belts, regions of high-energy charged particles located thousands of miles from Earth’s surface? What would happen to astronauts lumbering over the surface of the moon if a solar flare suddenly erupted from the sun? Would the steady stream of background radiation dull the senses of the highly trained astronauts and prevent them from completing a mission? How would the weightlessness of space combined with low, steady doses of radiation affect the space travelers? The questions were endless, and in the unforgiving environment of space, the answers had to be right.

NASA turned to the Atomic Energy Commission for help. The AEC, which had been groping with related questions for decades, was only too happy to oblige. NASA was everything the embattled commission had once been and was no more: admired by the public and awash in taxpayers’ money. In 1964 an interagency agreement was drawn up between NASA and the AEC to explore a dozen tasks related to the health impacts of space radiation. One of those tasks was a two-part study designed to refine the scientific understanding of man’s sensitivity to radiation.
¹⁰
The first part was a massive “retrospective” study that involved collection and analysis of data on some 3,000 people from over forty institutions who had received total-body irradiation accidentally or for therapeutic purposes. The second and much more controversial part was a “prospective” study that involved the collection of data for NASA from cancer patients undergoing total-body irradiation for their diseases.

ORINS was assigned the two-part study. The principal investigator was Clarence Lushbaugh, a high school classmate of Eugene Saenger’s and the pathologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who had autopsied
Cecil Kelley. Lushbaugh was born in 1916 in Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati. Saenger was the rich boy. “Lush” was the poor boy, the son of a deceased railroad freight handler and a working mother. Lushbaugh and Saenger both attended Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills High School and competed against each other for class president during their senior year. Lushbaugh, who describes himself as a “cantankerous bastard,” won.
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After three years of study at the University of Cincinnati, Lushbaugh transferred to the University of Chicago, where he eventually received a bachelor’s degree in anatomy, a Ph.D. in pathology, and a medical degree. He moved to Los Alamos in March of 1949. “I wanted to go where the action was, so to speak,” he recalled.
¹²

Lushbaugh held three positions in Los Alamos: lab scientist, pathologist at the local AEC-owned hospital, and the assistant district health officer for Los Alamos County, a job akin to county coroner. Between 1949 and 1963 he autopsied nearly everyone who died in Los Alamos. Many of the deaths were suicides, he recalled. “People don’t like being walled in,” he said. “They want to escape and the best way to escape a walled-in situation is to commit suicide.”

From the Los Alamos hospital, Lushbaugh obtained tissue and fluids from patients for laboratory experiments. He also participated in the numerous tracer studies. “I liked working in Los Alamos.
¹³
We used to have high-explosive accidents there, in which trucks carrying various Spanish-Americans from down the hill would get blown up,” the seventy-eight-year-old scientist recalled in an oral history. “We used to find that the best ways to find missing parts in an explosives accident was to go out with a pair of binoculars and watch the birds around radioactive dumps. You’d see the crows come in and take parts of persons that had been blown up into the trees.”

Lushbaugh said he left Los Alamos to go to Oak Ridge because he had recently gotten a divorce and wanted to get away from his ex-wife. At Oak Ridge, he said, he also had the opportunity to do research on living subjects. “In Los Alamos, I only had dead patients.”
¹⁴

Lushbaugh joined ORINS in 1963. The following year Oak Ridge researchers began the arduous task of collecting raw data for NASA from patients irradiated in hospitals and in nuclear accidents. The information was fed into a computer so analyses could be made to determine precisely the relationship between radiation dose and nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss, fever, hair loss, anemia, cellular damage,
resistance to infection, decreased antibody synthesis, accelerated aging, and carcinogenesis. Into the data bank went information from the criticality accident victims and from patients irradiated at M.D. Anderson, Baylor, and the University of Cincinnati. Saenger’s patients, said Lushbaugh, came from the “slums” of Cincinnati:

In 1965 ORINS proposed to the AEC that a new irradiation chamber be constructed that would deliver a uniform dose of radiation to patients at 1.5 roentgens per hour, or one-sixtieth the dose rate of METBI. Doctors theorized the low doses would kill leukemia and lymphoma cells but would not produce the side effects such as nausea and vomiting.
¹⁶
At the same time, ORINS also suggested that NASA could use the information from the new irradiation chamber for its space research. The low-dose chamber, Lushbaugh later told a congressional committee, enabled NASA to observe in “real time” the signs and symptoms of radiation exposure that had been collected from the 3,000 patients during the retrospective study.
¹⁷

The second irradiation chamber came on-line in 1967. It was called LETBI, or the Low Exposure Rate Total Body Irradiator. LETBI was a room within a room. The inner shell, covered with dark paneling, was furnished to look like a Holiday Inn. There was a television, chairs, bed, and an adjoining bathroom. Patients could live for days, or even weeks, in the chamber.

The radiation sources were located in a larger, outer, heavily shielded room. The patients were able to move about freely while they were continuously exposed to a low-level sea of radiation. Attached to the patient’s body were electrodes and an umbilical cord that measured cardiac and respiratory signals. The data were fed into a computer and stored for later analysis by NASA. Occasionally rats were hung in cages between the walls of the two rooms and irradiated simultaneously with the human patients.

LETBI cost $26 million. The AEC picked up the tab for the design and construction of the chamber and NASA contributed $2.2 million, which was used mostly to pay the salaries of Lushbaugh and a technician, and to buy some monitoring equipment.
¹⁸

A third high-dose irradiation facility was constructed at the animal research laboratory run by the University of Tennessee’s School of Agriculture. Referred to in some documents as HETBI, an acronym which apparently stood for the High Exposure Rate Total Body Irradiator, the chamber delivered massive doses of radiation within minutes to plants, seeds, and large animals such as cows and horses. It became operational in 1970 and was used by ORINS researchers to irradiate four patients undergoing bone marrow transplants.
¹⁹
One worker who was irradiating seeds accidentally received a large dose of radiation in the high-exposure facility and developed acute leukemia ten years later.
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The exposures in LETBI mimicked the low, chronic radiation doses that astronauts were likely to encounter when they traveled through space. The information, wrote the Oak Ridge scientists, was “increasingly more relevant to the occupational medical needs of deep space exploration where exposures are expected to be small, multiple and randomly timed.”
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The HETBI data would be useful in the event of a serious accident “like that which could occur during extra-vehicular activities in space from the unexpected occurrence of a large solar flare or in an accident resulting from the use of nuclear energy propulsion systems.”
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