The Plutonium Files (62 page)

The convicts were irradiated in a specially designed room in the basement of the Washington State Penitentiary, the maximum-security facility in the eastern part of the state. White said the room looked like any ordinary X-ray facility. There was a long flat table, an overhead machine, and a lead-lined wall behind which the technician operated the equipment. Once the men were lying on their backs, their penises were taped to their bellies. Then a bag of sugar, four to five inches wide and about a foot long, was placed over the penis and the lower abdomen area. A “bolus” of sugar in a plastic container also was placed beneath their testicles. (The sugar apparently was used because it scattered the X rays back into the exposed tissue.) The technician lowered the cone-shaped apparatus to within a few inches of the testicles, then stepped behind the wall and turned on the switch.

White, who was twenty-two years old and serving a sentence for assault, was irradiated with 400 rads to the testicles, the highest dose
administered to any of the Washington prisoners. It took twenty minutes and six seconds. Several hours later, he said, he became nauseous and the skin in his groin area turned red. His thighs, abdomen, and buttocks began peeling a few days later.

While Paulsen was irradiating prisoners with X rays, scientists at what was then called the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Hanford were doing dosimetry studies with a neutron generator that was to be used on the convicts during the final phase of the experiment. Preliminary studies with mannequins had revealed that the eye, base of the sternum, urethra, bladder, anus, and rectum also would get some radiation.
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No documents have surfaced indicating that the neutron generator was actually used on the prisoners. But Don Byers, known as RV No. 71, is certain that he was irradiated with neutrons. In a telephone interview from the Airway Heights Correctional Center, he said, “I was told at the time I was getting 300 or 400 rads of neutrons.”
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However, Byers’s medical records state only that he received 100 rads of X-ray radiation.

Byers’s recollection of the irradiation procedure also differed from White’s. Byers said he was taken to a room in the basement of the hospital building and placed on a tilted table. His legs were spread, his knees were drawn up, and sandbags were stacked against him to hold him in place. “My first impression of the room was the
extreme
thickness of the walls—probably a foot thick at least; and an extremely heavy door,” he wrote.
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“When the door was closed, it was exactly like a tomb—and the room was the most absolutely
SILENT
place I have ever been. There was an aperture in the wall across from me that looked like an arrow slit in the wall of a medieval castle. I had been cautioned to remain perfectly still until the door was opened—and that it would be approximately 30 minutes for the procedure to be run.”

Documents released in 1994 show that scientists working at Pacific Northwest Laboratory, a research lab at the Hanford site where the dosimetry studies with the neutron generator were performed, sought to insulate themselves from any direct involvement with the medical aspects of the experiment. The reason for their action is unclear, but records suggest they were concerned about the possible legal liability. In 1967 a group of officials from the lab, including a scientist named Carlos Newton, attended the AEC’s review of the Heller-Paulsen experiments in Seattle. In a trip report, Newton stressed that the scientists deliberately attempted to avoid any discussion of the medical effects of the experiments. “Our position of furnishing technical information in the
physical sciences seemed to be well established.
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No medical information was either asked of or volunteered by us.” Newton concluded his trip report with a “strictly private item” to his supervisor: “In private discussions it appears that the personnel from the AEC were interested in completing the project as it now stands, but dead set against any expansion of the program. A fair statement would be that they feel ‘let’s finish this up and get out.’ A good BNW [Battelle Northwest] position also!”

Paulsen had hoped to begin bombarding the testicles of the Washington prisoners with neutrons by mid-1964, but it was not until 1968 that he sought approval from several University of Washington review committees to actually begin the procedure. Neutrons, which have no electric charge, deposit much larger amounts of radiation in living tissue and are on average ten times more damaging than X rays.

In October 1968 the University of Washington’s Radiation Safety Committee approved the study provided the following conditions were observed: The maximum neutron dose be limited to fifteen rads; no more than twenty subjects be irradiated; and Paulsen’s consent forms be modified to include the possibility that the procedure carried a very small risk of testicular cancer.
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The proposal was then forwarded to the University Hospital Clinical Investigation Committee, which had approved Paulsen’s X-ray studies in 1963 and 1966. The committee chose to reject the neutron experiment in 1969 on the grounds that the subject selection was inappropriate and that the potential hazards to the subjects exceeded the potential benefits to society.
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The chairman of the committee noted that Paulsen’s experiment had begun before federal regulations governing human experiments were issued and questioned whether the study had ever been thoroughly reviewed by an institutional review board.
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Paulsen then appealed the decision to two additional committees, both of which also rejected the neutron study on the same grounds. Discouraged but not yet defeated, Paulsen then abandoned the neutron study and substituted a new proposal to irradiate another twenty-four prisoners with thirty rads of X rays. Twelve of those men were to be given testosterone prior to radiation in order to determine whether the male hormone was effective in reducing radiation injury.
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The revised plan was approved. But from within the prison system came a new opponent: Audrey Holliday, a blunt-speaking administrator and the first woman to head the research division of the Department of Institutions. At a great personal price, Holliday was ultimately successful in halting an experiment that numerous academic committees couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bring to an end. Leonard Schroeter, a Seattle lawyer, remembered
Holliday as a fearless woman who hated injustice. “I just loved her.
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She was a small, slim, Jean Arthurish person with a husky voice and a burning intensity.”

Holliday learned of the experiment around July of 1969 from a doctor who had sat on one of the University of Washington review committees. She immediately wrote to Paulsen and demanded that all work stop until the Department of Institutions’ Research Review Committee had a chance to analyze the study. Holliday was appalled by several “rather disturbing elements” of the Paulsen experiment, including the fact that many of the men who were irradiated and given vasectomies were relatively young.
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“To be utterly frank with you,” she told George Farwell, the University of Washington’s vice president for research, “we never would have approved this research, regardless of the action of the university committees, if it had come to the attention of the Department of Institutions Research Review Committee, which was, of course, not in existence at the time Dr. Paulsen accomplished the major portion of his work.” In a letter to her boss, William Conte, who was in favor of letting Paulsen complete his studies, Holliday wrote:

Several months later the department’s Research Review Committee unanimously rejected Paulsen’s proposal. “The Committee felt strongly
that the Paulsen project is inconsistent with general professional standards obtaining for the protection of the individual as research subject.
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For example, it seems clearly inconsistent with the standards laid down by the Nuremberg Code.”

The committee’s findings finally persuaded Holliday’s boss, William Conte, to halt the experiment permanently. Paulsen said that he quarreled with Conte when he was told to end the experiment. “Needless to say I was distressed because I wanted to follow some of them longer,” he recalled in 1994.
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Paulsen also got a call from Shields Warren while he was attending a meeting in New “York. Look,” Paulsen remembered Warren saying, “your questions have been answered.”
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Warren informed Paulsen that he would be receiving official notice shortly from the AEC that the program was canceled. Although Warren had nothing to do with the experiment, he probably had gotten involved in the controversy because he was still a consultant to the commission and was considered one of the world’s leading experts in radiation effects.

Despite the cease-and-desist orders, Paulsen apparently was still doing “some kind of unauthorized research” at the penitentiary a year later, according to a confidential memo from Robert Sharpley, an official with the state of Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services.
⁷⁴
Sharpley then met with George Farwell, the University of Washington’s vice president for research. The two agreed that further research by Paulsen would have to be cleared through Farwell’s office and that no experiments could be undertaken without review and approval by both the university and the Department of Social and Health Services.

Sharpley then met with Paulsen for two hours. According to Sharpley’s memo, he “left no doubt” that neither the university or the Department of Social and Health Services would tolerate further “unauthorized research or any attempts to bypass” the review requirements of the two institutions. “It is probably true,” Sharpley wrote, “to say that the Paulsen Case more than any other single research undertaking in the former Department of Institutions had a pronounced effect on general departmental research policy, research rules and regulations, and on formal review procedures.” As for Holliday, her efforts had provoked so much hostility from her boss that she began looking for another job. “I decided what the hell and left as soon as I could find a suitable position,” she is quoted as saying in a 1976 letter to Dan Evans, then the governor of Washington.
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While Paulsen slugged it out with various committees, Carl Heller’s testicular irradiation study in Salem, Oregon, was also drawing to a close. The last inmate in Oregon had been irradiated on May 6, 1971, and Heller and his assistants had been analyzing samples and performing testicular biopsies since that time. Heller suffered a debilitating stroke in December 1972 that paralyzed the left side of his body. Soon afterward Amos Reed, the administrator for Oregon’s Corrections Division, ordered the shutdown of all medical experiments at the penitentiary. The announcement took Heller’s research team by surprise, and several weeks later Mavis Rowley, C. Alvin Paulsen, and Daniel DiIaconi, the physician who performed the testicular biopsies, met with the administrator. Rowley hoped that Oregon prison officials would allow Paulsen to supervise the medical follow-up of Heller’s test subjects.
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On top of Reed’s desk was a copy of an
Atlantic Monthly
article by investigative journalist Jessica Mitford describing several experiments that were going on in the nation’s prisons at the time. “He pulled that article out and said that he wanted nothing like that to happen in terms of publicity nor in terms of future legal hassles, and therefore, that was it,” Rowley recalled. In a memo summarizing the meeting, Reed later wrote that the “experimenters” were very concerned about the termination of the project and strongly urged him to reconsider his decision.
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“I asked if Dr. Paulsen, his family or his professional associates were undergoing radiation experimentation and was told ‘no.’
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I opined that if the project was so worthwhile and so safe it would be encouraging to others if they became personally involved.” Reed also said he believed the inmates could not really give informed consent. “I saw these projects as exploitation of disadvantaged people.”

Heller’s stroke had occurred while he was trying to work out the details of a long-term medical monitoring program for the former subjects with the Atomic Energy Commission. Locating convicts who had been released from prison posed some difficult issues, particularly regarding privacy rights, but both Heller and the AEC agreed the prisoners should be followed for at least twenty to twenty-five years. In one letter Heller noted that the men should be given routine chest X rays because any tumor found in the testis was most likely to metastasize to, and often was revealed first, in lung tissue.
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Heller’s stroke, combined with Reed’s decision to halt the experiments, put an end to any medical follow-up efforts. It was the first of many failed attempts to come to terms with the experiment and provide proper care for former subjects.