THE RADIATION STORY NO ONE WOULD TOUCH

[Guest guest]

http://www.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp

 

THE RADIATION STORY

NO ONE WOULD TOUCH

 

by Geoffrey Sea

Sea is an Oakland-based writer, radiological health physicist, and international

activist on radiation issues. He is the founder and director of In Vivo:

Radiation Response and the Atomic Reclamation and Conversation Project of the

Tides Foundation, and a co-founder of IRIS: International Radiation Injury

Survivors.

Suddenly, at the close of 1993, the public was bombarded with " news " about the

feeding of radioactive substances to pregnant women and mentally retarded

students, about the unethical irradiation of workers, soldiers, medical

patients, and prison inmates, and about the government's own internal fears that

these experiments had " a little of the Buchenwald touch. " But the story that

appeared in The Albuquerque Tribune (circulation: 35,000) on November 15-17, and

was then projected into the national headlines by the forthright admissions and

initiatives of Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary, was hardly new.

 

By 1984, activists and researchers across the country were systematically

investigating the human experimentation program and attempting to bring it to

public attention. By 1986, documentation of the program was massive, solid, and

publicly available.

 

I am among those who persistently tried to get national media coverage of this

outrageous example of government wrongdoing. To say that the media were

reluctant to listen would be an understatement. The fact is that, for more than

a decade, documentation was ignored and facts were misreported.

 

What follows is a chronology of significant events in the strange history of

this important story -- one that began to receive adequate coverage only after

almost all the victims were dead and most of the perpetrators retired:

 

1971: The Washington Post reveals that a research team at the University of

Cincinnati, under the leadership of Eugene Saenger, has been irradiating

" mentally enfeebled " patients -- all of them poor and most of them black -- at

dose rates known to have harmful effects. The aim of the research, funded by the

Department of Defense: to discover whether and under what conditions soldiers on

an atomic battlefield would be cognitively imparied.

 

A review panel is established at the University of Cincinnati. However, the

ethical issues are subordinated to the relatively technical question of the

mechanism for obtaining consent. The experiments continue. No one seems to

consider the obvious ethical problem involved in extracting " informed consent "

from patients selected because of their " low-educational level . . .

low-functioning intelligence quotient . . . and strong evidence of cerebral

organic deficit. " The researchers claim that the patients " benefit " from the

radiation exposure, despite the fact that the radiation far exceeds recommended

therapeutic doses, that the treatments are not intended to have a therapeutic

effect, and that, in Saenger's own estimation, eight patient deaths could

possibly be attributed to the " treatments. "

 

1972: The researchers quietly end their experiments when evidence of harmful

effects begins to mount. After a cursory review by the American College of

Radiology, no one bothers to reopen the case for public scrutiny. No attempt is

made to monitor the health of the surviving experimental subjects.

 

1975: Following revelations of army-sponsored LSD experiments, Senator Edward

Kennedy chairs hearings on human experimentation funded by the Department of

Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. Radiation experiments, however, are

not mentioned either in the hearings or in media coverage.

 

1976: Science Trends, a newsletter published in the National Press Building in

Washington, D.C., reveals an experiment carried out in San Francisco, Chicago,

and Rochester, New York, as part of the Manhattan Project, that " involved the

injection of relatively massive quantities of bomb-grade plutonium into the

veins of 18 men, women, and children. " The article implies that the experiment

was an isolated historical case, and concludes: " Whether injecting the key

ingredient of the atomic bomb into unsuspecting patients can be equated with

Nazi wartime experiments is a matter which is today considered moot. "

 

1981: The case of Dwayne Sexton, irradiated as a child as part of NASA-sponsored

research aimed at discovering the potential effects of radiation exposure on

astronauts, gains fleeting attention when the mother of the child links the

death of her son to the experiments. Mother Jones runs a cover story on the

Sexton case. Albert Gore, then a young congressman from Tennessee, where the

experiments had taken lace, follows up with hearings on the Oak Ridge Total Body

Irradiation Program. Neither the article nor the hearings links the Sexton case

with the Saenger experiments or with the broader program of human

experimentation with radiation.

 

Early-1980s: A network of activist-researchers starts to compile the full and

extensive record of U.S. radiation experiments on humans.

 

* In Cincinnati, Ohio, Dr. David Egilman of the Greater Cincinnati Occupational

Health Center and I are investigating experiments conducted on nuclear workers

and following the trail of the Saenger experiments. At the time, I am employed

as a health consultant by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union and the

Fernald Atomic Trades and Labor Council. The unions are concerned about the

intentional radioactive contamination of workers' skin as a means of testing

external cleansing agents and about the continuing use of workers as

experimental subjects in the development of chelation drugs to treat internal

exposure to radioactive heavy metals.

 

In the course of pressing claims for worker's compensation, we discover that the

AEC/DOE has secretly contracted with local hospitals and coroners for the

collection of fluid and tissue samples, surgically removed organs, and autopsy

specimens -- in some cases, whole cadavers of atomic workers. Some of these

specimens are being taken and destroyed by the government, often without the

knowledge or against the expressed wishes of the workers and/or their survivors.

 

We suspect that this " body-snatching " program serves a dual purpose: it helps

the government accumulate data for military purposes, while at the same time it

results in the destruction of physical evidence that could support compensation

claims. Finally, we are concerned that Dr. Saenger has become the chief

consultant and expert witness for the government in defending itself and its

contractors against liability suits.

 

* In California, Dorothy Legarreta, who had worked on the Manhattan Project as a

laboratory technician, organizes the National Association of Radiation Survivors

(NARS) and starts to write a book about human experimentation. In 1982, while

examining the papers of Joseph Hamilton -- the scientist in charge of radiation

experiments at the University of California -- at the library of the University

of California at Berkeley, she comes across a 1950 memo written to Shields

Warren, then director of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of biology and

medicine. The memo advised that large primates -- chimpanzees, for example -- be

substituted for humans in the planned studies on radiation's cognitive effects

(the very same program of experimentation that Dr. Saenger was to execute). The

use of humans, Hamilton wrote, might leave the AEC open " to considerable

criticism, " since the experiments as proposed had " a little of the Buchenwald

touch. "

 

After Legarreta finds the so-called Buchenwald memo, Hamilton's papers are

removed from public access by University of California administrators. Soon

after this, Legarreta files a Freedom of Information Act request with the

Department of Energy, asking for all documents concerning experiments in which

humans were intentionally exposed to radioactive materials through injection or

ingestion. Later that year, NARS receives a two-foot-high carton of documents in

response -- documents that, for the first time, expose the widespread human

experimentation program of the U.S. government.

 

* In Missouri, Dotte Troxell is trying to document her own horrific experience

and to demonstrate the bonds that unite all experiment survivors. In 1957, while

working at the AEC's Kansas City plant, run by Bendix, she had been involved in

a serious radiation accidnet. When the symptoms of acute radiation syndrome

began appearing (hair loss, nausea, purpura, and hemorrhaging), she was sent to

the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, a clinic established by the AEC for

developing treatments for radiation injury. Because Troxell was thought to be

near death, and presumably because she had been exposed to a Cobalt-60

calibration source that allowed the dose to her organs to be precisely

determined, the doctors at Lovelace did exploratory surgery on her, probably to

obtain tissue biopsies from her internal organs. When she awoke from surgery and

asked what had been done to her, the doctors said they could not tell her for

" national security " reasons. After suffering radiogenic cataracts in both eyes

and giving birth to a son with congenital diabetes, Troxell founds VOTE: Victms

and Veterans Opposed to Technological Experimenation.

 

* In Knoxville, Tennessee, Clifford T. Honicker and Jacqueline Kittrell are

investigating the human experimentation program at the DOE's nuclear complex at

Oak Ridge. They locate and begin to analyze the papers of Stafford Warren, who

had been medical director of the Manhattan Project and who subsequently directed

the Oak Ridge medical program. Those of Warren's papers that are obtained,

including classified documents and medico-legal files, provide a clear picture

of the origins of the government's human experimentation program, as well as of

the government's policy of denying compensation to radiation survivors. Honicker

and Kittrell found the Radiation Research Project, which later becomes the

American Environmental Health Studies Project.

 

Mid-1980s: Our network has accumulated enough documentation on the human

experimentation program to go public. We do so at press conferences held in

Cincinnati (November 1984), Knoxville (May 1985), Kansas City (May 1986), and

Berkeley (July 1986). At each of the last three conferences, Hamilton's

Buchenwald memo is released to the press, but no mainstream paper mentions it.

 

1985-86: In contract talks, the labor council representing workers at the DOE's

Fernald, Ohio, uranium plant demands disclosure of all human studies involving

uranium and plutonium, as well as information about toxic releases to the

environment, use of atomic workers as experimental subjects, and the

body-snatching program. Rather than release this information to the labor

council, DOE officials contact the AFL-CIO leadership and threaten to close the

plant if labor will not honor its " national security obligations. " Frank

Martino, president of the International Chemical workers Union, writes to Paul

Burnsky, president of the AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department, calling for an end to

" continued efforts to represent the community " -- a reference to the council's

attempt to obtain information from the DOE through collective bargaining. The

unions back off on their demand for information and abruptly terminate my

employment. Dr. Egilman is instructed to stop all radiation-related work. He

chooses instead to resign.

 

Dr. Egilman and I decide that now is the time to take everything we have and

give it to The New York Times. Dr. Egilman gives the Buchenwald memo to Times

reporter Matthew Wald, a college acquaintance. But no article appears in 1985,

and there is no word from the Times. I contact Times reporter Stuart Diamond,

describe the outlines of the story, arrange a meeting, assemble a stack of

documents, and fly to New York. Diamond and I meet at a restaurant at La Guardia

Airport. After reviewing the documents, including the Buchenwald memo, he says

he will come to Ohio and look into the story.

 

On January 28, 1986, the date of Diamond's intended arrival, I am working at my

desk with the television turned on but the sound off, as I often do. I am

distracted at one point by a striking picture on the TV screen: a beautiful

white plume of smoke unfurling against the azure sky. It is the explosion of the

space shuttle Challenger. Within the hour Diamond calls to say that he will be

investigating the Challenger disaster -- and thus won't becoming to Ohio any

time soon. He tells me to wait until he's done with the Challenger story. I wait

for three months.

 

On April 26, the number three unit at the Chernobyl nuclear energy station

explodes, and melts down. Diamond leaves to cover the accident. I leave

Cincinnati and head for Kansas City, where, on May 5, Dotte Troxell and I hold a

press conference. We say that U.S. criticism of Soviet secrecy on Chernobyl is

hypocritical and call on the U.S. government to release all data on human

experimentation. In our press release we attack the credibility of Dr. Saenger

-- who has quickly been hired to advise the U.S. government on Chernobyl's

impact on U.S. personnel stationed in Europe and has become the media's

authority on Chernobyl's health effects. Our press release also details the U.S.

human experimentation program " that has, at various times, included the exposure

of prisoners, mental patients, terminal cancer patients, and paid volunteers to

'non-therapeutic' radiation doses . . . " Again, we show the Buchenwald memo to

the press. The press responds with silence. A number of us start working our

congressional contacts. Cliff Honicker, Dorothy Legarreta, and I all had a close

working relationship with the House Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and

Power when it had been under the chairmanship of Representative Richard Ottinger

of New York. Near the end of his tenure, Ottinger had authorized a full-scale

staff investigation into the DOE's human experimentation program.

 

By 1986 chairmanship of the subcommittee has passed to Edward Markey of

Massachusetts. Eager to see some result of the investigation, we press the

subcommittee to go public inhearings and a report. No hearings are held -- a

curious fact given the magnitude of the issue -- but in October the staff issues

its report. " American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation

Experiments on U.S. Citizens. " Markey simultaneously issues a press release that

states: " The purpose of several experiments was actually to cause injury to the

subjects . . . American citizens thus became nuclear calibration devices for

experimenters run amok. "

 

The Markey report, which contains all the relevant facts that would be treated

as major revelations seven years later, results in minor and often misleading

news stories in several papers. The New York Times's Matthew Wald extracts a

single strand from the ninety-five-page report -- news that some of the releases

of radioactive iodine from the Hanford, Washington, nuclear facility had been

intentional -- and turns it into a story that runs on page A-20. The other

ninety-plus pages of the report, which deal with unethical clinical experiments,

are downplayed in a small, unbylined piece headed VOLUNTEERS AROUND U.S.

SUBMITTED TO RADIATION. Contrary to the Markey report and to fact, the headline

and article imply that all subjects had volunteered for the experiments and that

they knew they were subjected to radiation. Neither article mentions the

Buchenwald memo.

 

Of all the papers that come to our attention, only The Daily Californian, the

student newspaper at the University of California at Berkeley, points up the

Buchenwald memo. In a piece titled " At Buchenwald and Berkeley, " editor-in-chief

Howard Levine quotes from the November 28, 1950, memo by Dr. Hamilton and

incisively criticizes reporting on the Markey report by the San Francisco

Chronicle and The New York Times. Both papers, he writes, " minimized the gross

inhumanity of these tests by downplaying their scope and ignoring the fact that

most of the experiments were conducted without the 'informed consent' demanded

by the Nuremburg protocols of 1946-47. "

 

1987: Welsome of The Albuquerque Tribune starts looking into the

plutonium-injection experiment, after coming across a footnote about it in a

report on animal experimentation at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland

Air Force Base in New Mexico.

 

1988: Dorothy Legarreta is killed in a mysterious car crash, reminiscent of the

death of Karen Silkwood. Legarreta's briefcase -- listed on the accident report

as being found -- is missing. The tow-truck driver says that the solid aluminum

case was discarded because it was badly damaged,, though such an action would be

against the law. I was working with Legarreta just prior to herdeath and know

that her briefcase contained a file titled " hot docs " -- formerly secret

documents that she and I had culed from government papers obtained through a

class action lawsuit by veterans who had been intentinoally exposed to atomic

blasts and radiation while in the service.

 

1989: On November 19, The New York Times Magazine publishes an article by Cliff

Honicker titled " The Hidden Files. " The subtitle reads: " In 1946, a Nuclear

Accident Killed One Scientist and Injured Several Others. The Government

Response to That Tragedy Established a Pattern of Secrecy That Still Exists. "

Based in large part on the files Honicker had discovered five years earlier, the

closely focused article does not deal with the government's years-long human

experimentation program and its origins.

 

1991: 60 Minutes airs a segment on the government's body-snatching program. In

his introduction to the January13 segment, Harry Reasoner says: " In the case of

the men and women who have worked in this country's nuclear-weapons industry,

the government is apparently wiling to go to any lengths to defeat workers'

claims that they were injured or killed by exposure to radiation -- any lengths,

including falsifying records, concealing evidence, even trying to steal human

remains . . . " Oddly, according to the segment's producer, one of the most

powerful interviews -- with a courier who arranges for the shipment of body

parts to Los Alamos and who was present at a secret autopsy at which body parts

were removed without the knowledge or consent of the family --winds up on the

cutting room floor.

 

Meanhwile, Jackie Kittrell and Cliff Honicker have been combing the hills of

Tennessee, trying to track down women who, while pregnant, had been unwitting

subjects in radioisotope ingestion studies decades earlier. Since some of the

initial recruitment for the experiments had been through classified ads placed

in newspapers in remote Appalachian towns, Jackie and Cliff try, repeatedly, to

get the same papers to run articles describing the experiments and asking the

women to come forward on a confidential basis. They try to persuade the

Nashville Tennessean to run such articles because one of the largest

experiments, involving more than 800 pregnant women, took place at Vanderbilt

University, in Nashville. At least one reporter -- Carolyn Shoulders at The

Tennessean -- proposes articles about the experimentation program to her

editors, but no proposal meets with approval.

 

1992: In May, frustrated by the feeling that we are shouting in the wind, Dotte

Troxell announces that she will begin a hunger strike in July, which she says

she will continue until death unless the government releases all data on the

experiments and provides care for all survivors. She says she prefers death " on

her own terms " to a slow, quiet death preceded by the intensifying pains of her

radiation injuries and she wants to use the hunger strike to help establish a

union called IRIS: International Radiation Injury Survivors. But, fatigued and

under the influence of pain-killing drugs, she dies in a tractor accident in

late-May. She leaves behind the text of an intended final speech in which she

asks to be cremated so that " the perpetrators of cruel and barbaric

experimentation " will be denied " the knowledge they seek. " She also for gives

all those in the government, the public interest community, and the media who

continue to " ignore our plight, for they know not -- they were not on shipboard

in the nuclear Pacific tests or in the trenches in Nevada, nor are they with the

veterans in VA hospitals . . . "

 

1993: In mid-November, The Albuquerque Tribune publishes Welsome's

three-part series, " The Plutonium Experiment. " In late-December, a decade after

Kittrell and Honicker alerted the paper to the story -- The Tennessean finally

publishes an article about the Vanderbilt experiment and its medical follow-up

study.

 

Emma Craft, who had never known that she had been fed radioactive iron in the

1940s, reads a detailed description of the 1958 death by cancer of an unnamed

eleven-year-old girl whom she recognizes as her daughter.

 

1994: Craft, along with a handful of other women who have learned through The

Tennessean that they had been experimental subjects, files a class action

lawsuit against a long list of defendants, led by Vanderbilt University. (I sign

on as a radiation expert with the law firm representing the women and surviving

children.)

 

Acting as if the recent " revelations " are news to him, John Herrington,

Secretary of Energy in the Reagan administration and now vice-chairman of the

California republican party, tells The Associated Press that during his tenure

" there had not been enough work done to establish that there was a problem. "

This is reported without comment or correction.

 

 

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