The Plutonium Files (59 page)

Records also reveal that the Army was funding a study on the irradiated patients to find out how single, repeated, or protracted doses affected the intestinal bacteria of exposed patients. NASA was also provided this data “without additional costs.” Thus the data from patients irradiated in METBI and LETBI were used in multiple investigations: Oak Ridge scientists used the information in their search for a biological dosimeter and to better learn how to treat accident victims; NASA used the data in its space missions; and the Army used the findings to better predict soldiers’ reactions on the nuclear battlefield.
²³

There were many similarities between Oak Ridge’s TBI experiment and the TBI experiment in Cincinnati. NASA, like the Defense Nuclear Agency, said it was merely interested in the data and did not attempt to influence the selection of patients, treatment, or doses administered to the subjects.
²⁴
Although nearly 200 patients were irradiated in the two chambers over almost fifteen years, no scientific report comparing total-body irradiation to other cancer treatments was ever published in any
recognized journal. “We never considered them to be of enough scientific quality,” Lushbaugh is quoted as saying in an article published in 1981 in
Mother Jones.
²⁵

Similarities aside, there was one critical difference between the Cincinnati and Oak Ridge experiments: The Oak Ridge patients had
radiosensitive
cancers such as leukemia or lymphoma and other blood diseases. TBI was considered an experimental but medically plausible way to treat such patients at that time. In fact, ORINS doctors said in 1966 that it would be “unethical” to treat patients with radioresistant tumors with TBI:

After Saenger’s experiment became public in the early 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission sent a group of six outside consultants, including Shields Warren, to Oak Ridge to review its TBI program. The committee members found no ethical problems with the Oak Ridge experiments:

Lushbaugh said the patients exposed in the low-dose chamber actually felt better afterward. “The person who was going to be irradiated would usually have arthritis or difficulty untying his shoes, or taking off his pants or getting out of bed,” he said.
²⁸
“After he had been irradiated for a couple of weeks, and I do mean a couple of weeks, he would now be able to walk.”

The AEC in 1974 decided to close the Oak Ridge hospital after a highly critical report of the research program was completed. Government reviewers found the clinical facilities “substandard,” the animal facilities “strikingly inadequate,” and the staffers intellectually isolated.
²⁹
“The METBI and LETBI programs were viewed as evolving without adequate planning, criticism, or objectives, and have achieved less in substantial productivity than merits continued support.” Lushbaugh and other scientists maintain the real reason the AEC shut down the hospital was because of budget problems. The AEC’s cancer research hospitals at Chicago and Brookhaven were also closed about the same time.

The convicts always knew when Carl Heller, the doctor in charge of the medical experiments, was inside the Salem penitentiary.
¹
They could tell by the footsteps, the brisk tap-tap of his wingtips as he came and went from the prison hospital at all hours of the day and night. Decades later a few still remembered his rich-man look; the expensive suits, the silk shirts and cuff links, the pipe clenched between his teeth. He had thinning brown hair, soft pale cheeks, and lived in a beautiful home, all glass and steel, on a rainy spit of land in northwestern Washington. From his living room, he could watch the clouds sweep across the Olympic Mountains. Surrounding him were abstract paintings, sculpture, and artifacts from Indians who once lived on the fog-shrouded coast. Not far from the house was an aviary flooded with the milky light of the Pacific Northwest and filled with the flashing wings of exotic birds—Venezuelan screamers, Peking robins, spoonbills, blue-cheeked borbets. At symposiums in Mexico City, London, Berlin, and Sao Paulo, Heller shared the breakthroughs he was making in unraveling the secrets of male fertility and the complex process of spermatogenesis, the origin and development of sperm cells in the human male. The raw material for his studies was provided by convicts at the maximum security facility in Salem, Oregon. Carl Heller had discovered that Robert Stone was right about prisoners: They did make ideal test subjects.
²
The penitentiary, Heller once wrote, was “our most unique and prized facility.”
³

Every few weeks Heller made the 422-mile round trip to the penitentiary where he conducted his hormone experiments. Built in 1886,
the prison was surrounded by high walls topped with dense coils of concertina wire. Armed guards prowled the towers overlooking the yard. Visitors, including Heller, had to pass through as many as seven gates to reach the area where the male prisoners lived. Some of the convicts liked Heller; others said he gave them the creeps.

In exchange for participating in his experiments, the inmates got cash payments that were equal to hundreds of times what they would have earned in daily prison wages. With the money, they bought cigarettes, coffee, toothpaste, shampoo, tools for the hobby shop. When they underwent a vasectomy or a testicular biopsy, they sometimes got high on Nembutal and Demerol. Many viewed Heller as a ticket to heaven, a fleeting ride that lasted a month or a day. But over the following years, the following decades, there was hell to pay. And pay. And pay.

Educated at the University of Wisconsin, where he obtained a medical degree and two Ph.D.’s, Carl Heller was one of the world’s leading endocrinologists when he began his hormone experiments at the Salem prison in the late 1950s. (His brother was Walter Heller, President John F. Kennedy’s economic advisor.) Married four times and the father of three children, Heller was in search of a male birth control pill because he thought “the woman’s involvement was emotional, whereas the man’s was rational.”
⁴
His research agenda broadened in September of 1962 when he attended a three-day conference in Fort Collins, Colorado, on the effects of radiation on the reproductive system. Sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, the conference occurred about a year after the AEC and NASA had begun developing a cooperative research program to study the biological impact of space radiation on astronauts. C. Alvin Paulsen, one of Heller’s former proteges, was also at the conference. Paulsen had helped Heller with some of the hormone experiments at the Salem penitentiary, but after completing his residency, Paulsen had struck out on his own and had already begun to develop a reputation as a talented endocrinologist in his own right.

Heller and Paulsen were experts on the human reproductive system but had only recently become acquainted with radiation. Heller got his introduction when he began injecting radioactive thymidine, also called tritiated thymidine, into the testicles of prisoners in an effort to better understand the complex process by which male sperm developed. A newsletter published by the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation, the
Seattle research laboratory where Heller worked (today known as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), described the radioactive material as “highly dangerous.”
⁵
Paulsen had received his introduction to radiation when he was called in as a consultant after three men were accidentally irradiated in an accident in April of 1962 at the Hanford Reservation.

Scientists from all over the world who were investigating the effects of radiation on the reproductive systems of animals attended the Fort Collins symposium. “The whole conference,” Heller recalled in a deposition taken in 1976:

Paul Henshaw was not a “medical graduate” but an old hand at the AEC who ended up serving as the liaison between Carl Heller and C. Alvin Paulsen and the commission during the early years of the prisoner experiments. Henshaw was also director of research from 1952 to 1954 for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the organization that donated some of the seed money to the research effort to find a birth control pill. Meta Heller, who worked closely with her husband, described Henshaw as a distinguished-looking man in his fifties: tall, well proportioned, with dark graying hair.
⁷

Henshaw had worked as a biologist at the Met Lab during the Manhattan Project. A year and a half after the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, he and another Met Lab colleague, Austin Brues, were sent to Japan in order to advise the Secretary of War and the National Academy of Sciences about the feasibility of setting up a long-term study of the survivors. In a breezily cheerful account of their mission before the Chicago Literary Club, Brues later recalled: “Happily enough, nobody higher
up had got interested enough in our business to dignify it with some title such as Operation Meathead.
⁸
‘Somewhere along the line, while standing on a windy corner waiting for transportation, Paul got the idea that we should have a name and suggested the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission’ because it would be called ABCC. We put that in a couple of reports and ever since then that has been the designation of the entire project whose feasibility we were to consider.” (The project is still ongoing and is today called the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.)

One of the long-term effects the ABCC would attempt to track was the impact of the bombings on the reproductive system. Stafford Warren and Joseph Howland had detected severe testicular atrophy and sterility in men exposed to radiation from the two bombs immediately after they arrived in Japan with the Manhattan Project survey team. “As early as the fourth day definite changes were noted in the testes,” they wrote.
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Even more disturbing, the two doctors also discovered changes among Japanese men who were not in the immediate vicinity of the blast area. “A definite decrease in the sperm count of patients in areas adjacent to the bomb explosion was found to be apparently a result of exposure to low dosages.” Most worrisome to the A-bomb doctors were the mutations that Nobel laureate Herman Muller had warned might take 1,000 years to become manifest. Such concerns had not diminished with time. In his closing address to the Fort Collins participants, Henshaw himself noted that 50 to 100 rads doubled the number of mutations in some species.

Inspired by what he had heard at the Fort Collins conference, Heller returned to his laboratory and began drafting a proposal. By February 1963, less than six months later, the AEC had a neatly typed package from him describing a new series of experiments he hoped to perform at the Oregon State Prison: “We propose to apply known amounts of ionizing radiation directly to the testes of normal men,” the first page began.
¹⁰
Among other things, Heller’s team planned to determine the minimum amount of radiation that would cause “permanent damage” of sperm cells and how testicular changes caused by radiation affected the secretion of various hormones. “Dr. Heller,” the proposal continued, “has spent enough time behind bars to complete a one-year sentence (with time off for good behavior!). Considered neither a ‘cop’ nor a ‘con,’ he has the kind of rapport so necessary for investigations with a convict population.”

At about the same time that Heller sent his proposal to the AEC, Paulsen, who was on friendly but competitive terms with Heller, submitted his own plan for a prison study to be performed at the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla. Paulsen had begun developing his proposal
several months
before
the Fort Collins conference. “And how shall I put it?
¹¹
He (Heller) became aware of what I was doing and he initiated his study of effects of radiation,” a still-competitive Paulsen told advisory committee staffers in 1994.

In his research proposal Paulsen explained that he had discovered the paucity of data on the effects of radiation on the human testes when he was called to evaluate the “gonadal consequences” for the three men injured in the Hanford accident. With space travel and the construction of nuclear power plants under way, Paulsen said he felt it was essential to acquire more information. “In our atomic age society, there is always present the possibility of radiation accidents resulting in significant radiation dose to one or more people,” he wrote.
¹²
“The ultimate accident would be a nuclear war involving multitudes of people.”