Cold War Human Radiation Experiments | Eileen Welsome

[00:00:03] Those who led the government when these decisions were made are no longer here to take responsibility for what they did. They are not here to apologize to the survivors, the family members of the communities, whose lives were darkened by the shadow of the atom and these choices. So today, on behalf of another generation of American leaders and another generation of American citizens,

[00:00:27] the United States of America offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens who were subjected to these experiments, to their families, and to their communities. When the government does wrong, we have a moral responsibility to admit it. The duty we owe to one another to tell the truth and to protect our fellow citizens from excesses like these is one we can never walk away from.

[00:00:56] Our government failed in that duty, and it offers an apology to the survivors and their families, and to all the American people who must, who must be able to rely upon the United States to keep its word, to tell the truth, and to do the right thing. Welcome to My Nuclear Life. I'm Shelly Lesher.

[00:01:25] I don't often suggest reading material to people, but there are two books I recommend over and over again. These are books I think everyone should read if they are interested in understanding the history of nuclear science and how it impacts society. The first, of course, is Richard Rhodes' Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's a classic, and you can listen to my conversation with him on My Nuclear Life, Episodes 5, 6, and 7.

[00:01:55] The other book is Plutonium Files by Eileen Wilsom. These books show different but important sides of nuclear science. In today's episode, I speak with Eileen Wilsom on her book, which started as a series of articles in a local Albuquerque newspaper and ended with a government panel exposing decades of human radiation experiments. This nuclear history has not been made into a Christopher Nolan film.

[00:02:25] It is not glamorous, and it is not discussed often. In fact, most people in the U.S. would just like to forget it ever happened. Eileen and I didn't ease into the podcast conversation, as I do with many of my other guests, instead starting with the first plutonium accident at Los Alamos, which involved a young chemist named Doug Mastic,

[00:02:53] who developed a very unpleasant expertise as a result of this accident. Doug Mastic was a young chemist from Berkeley, and he was recruited by Oppenheimer when Oppenheimer swung through Berkeley to go to Los Alamos. And so Don Mastic went, and he set up the chemistry, biochemistry lab.

[00:03:23] He was probably the first in the world to work with microscopic quantities of plutonium, and with tiny, tiny test tubes and little tiny microscopes, and they had to make all their own instruments. And anyway, he was working in his lab, and they didn't know all the states and phases that plutonium could enter.

[00:03:50] And so during the night, it had developed an explosive quality, and when he opened it up, it exploded off the wall and into his mouth. Yeah. And he could taste the acid. He had swallowed a large portion of the world's quantity of plutonium, and this was 1944, and this was the precursor to the experiment.

[00:04:19] So his lab partner was Arthur Wall, and he was a co-discoverer of plutonium along with Glenn Seaborg. So what happened that morning was he put the little vial back in the box, a wooden box, and he went to Louis Hempelman's office, and that was in the technical area of Los Alamos, and it was behind the fences, highly classified.

[00:04:49] And so Louis Hempelman, he was 29 years old. He was a medical doctor. He had also been recruited by Oppenheimer in St. Louis. He had done a little work on the cyclotron there, and had gone to New York and Berkeley and did a little postgraduate work. Anyway, here they are. Don Mastic runs over to his office, and Louis Hempelman goes, Oh, my God.

[00:05:19] Oh, my God. Of course, he doesn't say that. And he says, Just a minute. And he leaves the office and calls Stafford Warren. Stafford Warren was the medical director of the Manhattan Project. He was the opposite of all the scientists at Los Alamos. He loved being in the military. He loved wearing a pistol. He was a huge guy.

[00:05:46] I can't really tell you how tall he was, but I'm going to guess maybe 6'4", 6'5". He towered over everybody, and he was good buddies with Leslie Groves. Oh. So he told Louis Hempelman, he said, Pump out his stomach. And so Louis Hempelman pumped out Mastic's stomach. He had a beaker. He ordered Don Mastic to spit into the beaker.

[00:06:16] He rinsed out his mouth. He took all that, put it in the beaker, the stomach contents. Then he gave him a waffle and some, quote, unquote, zippy alkaline powders. And he said, Go, retrieve the plutonium. So Mastic had to go back to his office and open his textbooks and figure how to separate the plutonium from his stomach material.

[00:06:46] Crazy. Ew. Okay. So how much plutonium is this? You said microscopic grams. Like, how much? At that point, you know, they could only estimate how much he had. Boy, that's in my book. That's a good question. I want to say 10 milligrams, but I know that's too much. He was left with one microgram in his body.

[00:07:11] And one microgram at the time was considered the maximum permissible body burden. So what happened was Don Mastic and the chemists at Los Alamos freaked out. Are we going to come down with cancers like the radium dial painters did? How much does Don have in his body?

[00:07:37] And so that led to a meeting in Los Alamos. This is like their heavy workload at the time, building the bomb, testing the bomb, et cetera, et cetera. And that led to a meeting. And at that time, Warren was ill and unable to attend.

[00:08:00] But his assistant, Hymer Friedel, he was number two in charge of the medical district of the Manhattan Project. He went up to Los Alamos and they had a meeting. That was the genesis for the experiment.

[00:08:18] And they said, we need to do tracer studies on rats to figure out how much plutonium is left in the body following an exposure. And if possible, to do tracer experiments with humans. And I can send you that memo. It's dated 1944. But that was a genesis.

[00:08:46] And that brings me back to I interviewed Don Mastic many times before he died. He's dead now. And I was at this point in history where I was able to interview a lot of people who are now deceased. Don's story was he subsequently was assigned to these urine studies where they were taking urinalysis of the workers there.

[00:09:14] And they were drying them in these furnaces. And the odor was going down into Oppenheimer's office. And Mastic couldn't stand the work. And he went in there and he said, I can't stand doing this work anymore. And he said, I want to go to Tinian. And Oppenheimer said, OK, I can't stand the smell either.

[00:09:36] So he went to Tinian and they helped get those two bombs ready for dropping Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So were you able to all these interviews that you had on tape? Were you able you said you were able to get some of them digitized? Are they released anywhere? They're only in my boxes. That's a shame. Like they should be somewhere that people can listen to them.

[00:10:03] I gave all my papers when I moved up from Albuquerque to Denver to Boulder, UC Boulder. They've got all that stuff. And I mean, there were 24 boxes of documents for that book alone that I gave them. So UC Boulder has all this? They don't have my audio tapes.

[00:10:25] And the sad thing to digress again about Boulder is that I gave them everything, including all the medical records of the patients. They took them and secluded them, claiming they violated patient confidentiality. Here's the deal. I got permission from all the families to use those records.

[00:10:54] So I haven't gone back to them and said, you need to put those back in the public domain because I haven't had time to fight that fight yet. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[00:11:07] They took offline Elmer Allen's medical records, which has the document showing who was in the exam room when they injected him and what time they injected him and where they injected him and what happened afterward. But that's important information. Totally. People like to rewrite history, as we know. And those documents hold people accountable.

[00:11:34] I know that's why I'm a little concerned about that because it's not only people, but it's institutions. One of the other patients was a woman named Eda Schultz Charlton. She was one of the Rochester patients. She was 49 years old when they injected her in Rochester. There was nothing wrong with her. She was going through menopause. Going through menopause.

[00:12:02] You mean there was something wrong with her? Yes, there was something wrong with her. Right. Okay. And so she was one of their most fruitful subjects because she was perfectly healthy. And so as far as the Manhattan Project was concerned, that was great because that mimicked a worker's metabolism.

[00:12:25] And that's what they were concerned about was, how is this going to affect all the workers working in our nuclear weapons plants? So they secretly followed her? So they secretly followed her until she died in her 80s. And the records that are up there that are now in seclusion or been taken offline have like her meeting with Dr. Christine Waterhouse like once a month.

[00:12:52] And she'd go, you know, I've got this funny feeling in my teeth. I've got a funny feeling in the top of my head. And, you know, all these symptoms that can be caused by plutonium. And she got a very large dose over the 30 years that it was in her body. I even interviewed Christine Waterhouse, her doctor. She was retired. She lived in Maine.

[00:13:18] And I said, well, Dr. Waterhouse, did you ever tell Hida Schultz-Tarlton that she had been injected with plutonium? And she said, well, I don't remember. And I said, well, why not? And she said, well, it just wasn't important. You know, I didn't see as that it affected her health. And so I can't recall if I told her or I didn't tell her. There was a lot of damning material.

[00:13:46] And I wanted people to be able to read this. I thought, don't take my word for it. Go read and judge. When you were talking about at the very beginning of 1944, it made sense that they were going to do mouse studies. Because that's pretty common in medical research to do animal studies. Was it common at the time to do human studies in this way? You know, I'm not a medical historian.

[00:14:17] I'm not a medical professor. So I can't speak to the whole world of what was common and not common in medicine. I do know that, I mean, there was real urgency. You have to look at what was going on. They scaled up very quickly from, say, Fermi's pile in Chicago to an experimental reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,

[00:14:47] to these huge, huge Queen Mary-type facilities in Hanford where they were trying to get kilogram amounts of plutonium. So that's why, as you probably know, they were approaching the bomb from two directions. One uranium, one plutonium.

[00:15:11] And so they needed to know more about what these fission products. And then they were going to have gazillion fission products after detonation of the bomb. And they had no knowledge. I'm not at all condoning what I did. I'm just trying to place the incident historically. Right. And so the records I have show that they were under Stafford Warren's direction.

[00:15:41] They were going to do these studies with radium, uranium, polonium, plutonium, and one other compound. And they were going to do them in rat studies and human studies. They did do some uranium injections in Rochester.

[00:16:04] I interviewed a woman who was injected with uranium up there without her consent. She was 25 years old, really underweight. She was in their metabolic ward. She had kidney problems all her life as a result of that injection. And the other thing I want to point out is that so they were going to have these large amounts of these materials. Very quickly. And they were also going to have...

[00:16:33] And the Manhattan Project itself was so spread out across the country. And each site sort of had semi-autonomy among the scientists. And so each site was doing a little bit different kind of investigation.

[00:16:52] That's why the experiment itself of 18 people looked so bizarre and so irrational is you had three people who were injected with plutonium in Chicago. Three people who were injected with plutonium in Berkeley, San Francisco. One person in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And the remainder in Rochester.

[00:17:21] Rochester was doing biomedical research only. Animal studies, etc. Chicago, well, they did the early bomb studies. And they were also doing biomedical studies. San Francisco, Berkeley was doing a lot of the early biomedical tracer studies. And Los Alamos, it was just building the bomb. Rushing to preparation of the bomb.

[00:17:50] And the reason for the Oak Ridge, they had a big hospital in Oak Ridge. And the reason for the Oak Ridge injection, which was the very first injection, as best I can see it, is that they wanted to do it right away. And they had a candidate. They had a subject whose name was Ed Cade, who had gotten in an auto accident there in Oak Ridge. He was a cement worker.

[00:18:16] And they were all taken to the Oak Ridge Hospital. Subsequently, this is prior to the dropping of the bomb, a chemist in Los Alamos named Wright Langham prepared a vial of plutonium. It was shipped to Oak Ridge. Joseph Howland, he was injected. He injected Ed Cade under orders. He was a military doctor. He admitted it for the rest of his life.

[00:18:47] The plutonium injections, I mean, the book is kind of named after those. But there were a lot of other human experiments that happened. I mean, at one point, I think you mentioned that there was so much money in human experiments that they couldn't even spend it all. They thought about giving it back. What's the one that was most shocking to you? All of them were shocking.

[00:19:12] There was, I would say the most shocking one to me was the experiment in Cincinnati. That was a military-sponsored experiment in which almost 100 people, mostly African Americans or very poor white people,

[00:19:34] were given partial or total body irradiation at the safety net hospital there. And most of them died soon thereafter. They developed radiation sickness. You know, vomiting, nausea, sickness and death. So there were actual, you could say there were actual murders that occurred there.

[00:19:59] You warned in the book what happens when the military starts funding medical research. Is this one example of that? This is a perfect example of an experiment that may never have been initiated without medical funding or that would have been terminated much sooner.

[00:20:23] And they had data showing, first of all, they were given total body irradiation. They had heart tumors such as breast cancer, cancers that weren't conducive to this kind of total body irradiation. And it's more for something like leukemia or blood disorders. But not for what, you know, usually it's localized for a tumor.

[00:20:51] This was across their entire body. So this is like, this was equivalent to what the Japanese were experiencing in Japan, who were near the center soon after the bomb was dropped, which is acute nausea, vomiting, sepsis, death. And that's what happened to a lot of these people. And what was the military's interest in this? Was it if soldiers were involved in nuclear war?

[00:21:19] After the bomb was dropped, it sort of changed the nature of warfare. People realized that, hey, we're going to have this weapon. And, of course, all the branches of the military wanted a piece of it, wanted to develop expertise in it. So that led to an explosive amount of research.

[00:21:43] So, for example, they began their huge bomb testing in the Pacific soon after the bomb was dropped. And I guess the crossroads tests, which were, I'm trying to think, maybe 1947, 47, that was a huge armada that was led by the Navy.

[00:22:08] But those tests led to huge amounts of contamination and more experimentation. So it was sort of just a self-fulfilling prophecy. So when they started, I mean, one reason they marched soldiers through the Nevada at Nevada and marched them close to Ground Zero was because in Japan,

[00:22:33] they stationed soldiers there within months after the two bombs were dropped. And a lot of these soldiers came home saying, I have like a lot of really weird things happening to my body. The military was determined to show that there was no radiation at Ground Zero in Japan, which there was.

[00:22:58] So they started marching these troops through the dust in Nevada. And then they had them going on ships, chipping the radioactive paint off the holes, and then just taking blood tests of them, exposing thousands more veterans. To all kinds of radiation products. When you think about it, think about this.

[00:23:26] Think about it, that in 1951, the civilian and military authorities would think it was okay to detonate bombs in the middle of the country, in Nevada. That's fine. That's fine. Even though they knew the debris from Trinity reached Indiana within three days,

[00:23:53] they knew how, I mean, they didn't really understand the Gulf Stream, but they knew how far fallout could travel. And it was the same in the Pacific. Only those bombs were enormous. Right. Especially once you get to like Ivy Mike, which was a building, right? Right. So I read this book a long time ago, fairly soon after it came out, because I will say the two things that got me into nuclear physics,

[00:24:22] well, a different side of nuclear physics, was Richard Rhodes making the atomic bomb, and Eileen Welsom, Plutonium Files. So your book is right up there with Richard Rhodes for me. Wow. Yeah. That's a compliment. And what struck me this time, and I will say I'm really grateful that it's been reissued. So this is my old copy. So I'm glad it's been reissued.

[00:24:48] But the experiment stuck out for me the first time that I read it. But this time, when I read it, though, kind of decades later, and looking at it kind of with a different lens, what stuck out to me is how the military and how the doctors really understood what they were doing and why they were doing it. They might not have understood the result,

[00:25:13] but there was a lot of talk about how they were continuously aware of how this would sound to the public if it were to get out that they were experimenting on people. There was continuous talk about how these experiments had to be done so they could cut off any legal issues that soldiers could bring forward. They weren't as naive as I think historically we've given them credit for.

[00:25:42] That's exactly right. What struck me was how attuned they were to public relations and lawsuits. And that's one of my questions that I had really struggled with was, why this sensitivity to lawsuits? In the 40s, in the 40s they cared about lawsuits.

[00:26:11] That was shocking to me. It was shocking. And even Clinton, when he apologized, he gave an apology. A couple years later, he said a lot of this was kept secret for the purpose of public relations and lawsuits. Even he admitted it. But to go back to your question of lawsuits and public relations,

[00:26:37] that goes back to, I think it has to be laid on the doorstep of Leslie Groves and Stafford Warren and these pioneers, these radiation pioneers. And the reason I say that, and it's partially speculative, is the radium dial painters. The women developed grotesque tumors after licking their paintbrushes. And they sued. There were a lot of suits.

[00:27:07] And these doctors that came into the Manhattan Project, these doctor scientists, they would have been young men just starting their careers at the time. And so they would have been very cognizant of the radium dial painters. And that was one thing why the Los Alamos scientists were freaking out. Are we going to develop these grotesque tumors that these women developed?

[00:27:37] I mean, there is a lot of fear. But... But... No, I'm not making excuses for... Right, right, right. No, I know. You know, then if you think about it, I mean, this veil of secrecy, it's still with us, right? It is, yeah. It is. The other thing that struck me was the people who were involved. It wasn't just the doctors.

[00:28:05] It wasn't just the military personnel, but the scientists, the revered scientists, right? Oppenheimer was in the loop. He was in the loop. And I do have documents showing that he was in the loop. And people who attended the meeting told me he came in and out of that seminal moment when they decided to go ahead. So people have differing opinions of him.

[00:28:31] He was a complex man, good and bad, like all of us. I think we have to address the populations that were experimented on in experiments over the decades. Who were targeted? I would say the vulnerable. The poor, the vulnerable, people of color, people that didn't ask questions.

[00:29:00] Medical care. So there was, for example, in the case in Tennessee, this involved 800 pregnant women. And they were at Vanderbilt University and they were given radioactive cocktails. And a percentage of those children died of what a physicist who looked at the documents told me

[00:29:29] was radiation-induced deaths when they were exposed in utero. Vanderbilt was a good school then, but these women that came through the clinic were ordinary women. They were working-class women. They didn't have a lot of money. They revered their doctors. They were thrilled to be going there. It was a two-step experiment, just like plutonium experiment was a two-step,

[00:29:54] with a whole different generation of scientists involved in the follow-ups. The mothers were never told until the publicity hit, of course. It was a tragedy. All right. I have cut a section here when I went on a bit of a tirade about the Vanderbilt radiation study, the secrecy surrounding it, informed consent, and what doctors would and would not have known at the time.

[00:30:21] If you are interested, it will be posted on our Patreon page. With that background, the next part of our conversation about secrecy will make sense. Let me tell you in secrecy gone awry and how it was used. Cecil Kelly, he was working in a plutonium processing facility in Los Alamos, 1958. It went critical.

[00:30:50] The drum was a huge drum of plutonium. It went critical. He was knocked off the bench he was working on, fell to the ground, screamed, I'm burning up, I'm burning up, ran out into the snow, flailing. He got how many zillions of rads? We don't know of radiation. They eventually got him to the local hospital.

[00:31:19] He was still flailing. He had every radiation. The whole radiation syndrome was compressed. So he had projectile vomiting, diarrhea, dropping his blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera. They couldn't even measure his vitals. They got him into a room and sedated him. And long story short, he was dead in 48 hours. And guess what they did?

[00:31:48] They classified this. They made it an experiment of opportunity. And they did dozens of papers on this incident, measuring the radiation in his brain, the radiation in his heart, in his blood, the activation of the buttons on his overalls.

[00:32:11] They did a complete dissection of him, sent him everywhere, parts of his body everywhere. The wife worked as a secretary at Los Alamos. And they told her, we're going to take care of you. Well, they didn't. The family slipped into poverty or hard times.

[00:32:33] And the daughter, who was about my age, had been trying for years to get information on her dad's accident. And they kept saying it's classified. And when I came across it, I filed a Quora. And they decided legally they had to release the records. So they released them to her first and said, hey, this reporter's looking into your dad's case.

[00:33:00] And I was working at the Albuquerque Tribune. And she contacted me. And she said, why are you looking at my dad's records? And I said, because I want to know what happened to him. And she said, it's about time. So what made you start looking into what eventually becomes the book? What strand did you start pulling? I know, you have to think way back.

[00:33:29] I don't know when this all started. It was right after I came to work there. And it started, as all these stories do, it started with a radioactive animal dump in Albuquerque. And I'm sorry, I don't think all stories start with, as it does, a radioactive animal dump. No, okay. It started with, I went to see a gentleman at the Air Force.

[00:33:56] There's a Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque. And we were talking about something. And there was a big blue book sitting on his desk. And I said, what's that? You know, reporters learn to read upside down. And he said, oh, it's just a big report about the waste sites that the Air Force is going to clean up. Hmm, that sounds interesting. And I said, oh, can I take a look at it?

[00:34:23] So I turned it around, flipped to Albuquerque, and I discovered these radioactive animal sites that they were going to decommission or clean up. And I said, why are these sites here? You know, what's going on? What kind of animals do you have buried here? Why are they buried here? And why are they radioactive?

[00:34:47] And so he referred me to a very secretive facility called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Lab. So I called them up, and I said, I'd like some information on these radioactive animal dogs. And they said, okay. And so they got me some documents together. And I went over on a Friday, and I remember it really clearly because, you know, you had to show your badge and go through security and everything.

[00:35:15] And they took me to a basement room with a long table. And there was an old 50s-style walk-in safe with a big, you know, I want to say like a big, big tumbler-style lot. It was about, I would say, maybe a foot thick, the vault. You know, I had to peek in, and I could see lots of documents sitting on these shelves. I was intrigued.

[00:35:41] And so they gave me a stack, and then he left, and I started reading. I didn't get up and look and go into the vault because I thought, well, at the time they didn't have cameras, right? But they probably had some kind of monitoring. So I thought I better just stay seated and not get into trouble. And so I started flipping through these records, and it was horrible.

[00:36:07] I mean, they just did tons and tons of studies where they would take huge amounts of plutonium and, you know, give them to beagle dogs. And then chart their death, their radiation sickness and death. It was terrible. And, you know, and they were developing tumors. And I thought, oh, shit, this is terrible.

[00:36:30] But I just, you know, for a journalist and for a daily journalist, for small afternoon paper, as I was, that wasn't a story. It happened a long time ago, even though it was terrible. And I didn't think, you know, cleaning up these dumps, yes, but not what they did. So I was flipping through the documents, and I fell across a footnote.

[00:36:56] And it talked about humans in connection with plutonium experiment in the back of one of these reports. And that's when I sat up. I went, oh, my God. They did this to humans. And someone forgot to cross that out in the document. Someone forgot to cross it out. So that's what started the search. And I started the very next day at the UNM library.

[00:37:25] I had the name of the scientists on that report. And some of them were still alive. That's how I learned of Cecil Kelly, the initial story behind him. A lot of the bare minimums of this stuff was in, like, health physics. I went to the open literature first and worked back. And then I'd hit a roadblock with this secret stuff.

[00:37:49] And that's when I had to start filing CORAs and Freedom of Information Act requests. But even then, they were trying to keep this out of the public. I remember my CORA, my original CORA request, it got really high in Washington. And they said, we don't have any records. And I said, you must have records. And so I appealed it.

[00:38:16] And I remember this guy that was head of the FOIA office said, if you withdraw your FOIA, I'll send you these records. Well, he reneged on his promise. We had to refile. The problem for me was, how do you find 18 people unknown in a country of 300 million? Yeah. Who may or may not be alive.

[00:38:46] Who may or may not be alive. And once I found the names, then I had to hunt down to see if I could find them. And then if they weren't alive, how do I find the next of kin? So it was a really difficult and really long process. I mean, the book is amazing. It just really is fantastic.

[00:39:14] I know you've done other things, but again, it's one of my favorites. Thank you for saying that. And for your readers, I would recommend, you know, really looking at the footnotes. Because I know they look dense, but they carry the key to everything. A lot of that information is so rare now. It's already buried in the National Archives, if it's there at all. And it's everything.

[00:39:43] It's the soldiers that marched to Ground Zero. It's the pilots that flew through the clouds. It's the women in Vanderbilt. It's the plutonium injectees. It's the Cincinnati. The prisoners. Oh, the prisoners. The prisoners and the orphans. It's, I mean, it's just, it's a lot. It's a lot. Just every page is more and more that you think it can't get any worse than it does.

[00:40:13] It sort of goes to that question you raised earlier of how they were so intent upon keeping this covered up, keeping everything classified. I mean, they did use classification as a weapon. And I think it was because, sure, there was some national security issues, very little in the case of most of these injections. And they were patriots. They came from a really bad, a different era.

[00:40:42] They also were intent upon growing this industry. They didn't have clean hands. They made a lot of money. They either worked in it or they were consultants to it. Unfortunately, this is the beginning of medical physics, that whole field and what we have today. Well, yes, to some extent.

[00:41:06] But even then, they knew that some of this was not going to be useful for cancer treatment. That was one of the criticisms of even some of the later studies when they had to go through medical boards was, is it going to cause harm to the patient or is it going to cause any benefit? And a lot of these experiments even said they're not going to benefit the patient at all. But they were still approved. Right.

[00:41:34] And I think in the book, there's a gentleman that was working. He was working, he was somewhere in the South, and he was working on a non-radiation research. It's in my book. I remember the name of the historian, Susan Lederer. She asked him. He was talking about the ethics of the time. And he talked about a case at Grady Hospital in Atlanta,

[00:41:58] where they were studying potassium on the heart in an emergency room, and the patient died. And the doctor told her of this. And there was a pause. And she said, well, I'm just trying to get a handle on this about the people you chose and why you did it.

[00:42:21] And he said, you know, I'm ashamed to say, but they were people, like I mentioned earlier, who didn't ask questions. And she said, or she even followed that up with, so it wasn't the children of your medical colleagues, in other words. And he said, no. I forgot to mention that earlier. There was a class issue in this as well.

[00:42:46] And I remember, I think it was the same reporter, the same doctor, that said they felt like they could because these patients were receiving care for free. Right. I'm glad you caught that. You know, I stuck so much in that book. You certainly did. But that struck me. It's like they don't ask questions. They're getting their care for free. So this is how they're paying for it. Yes. Yes. It was. It's incredible.

[00:43:16] And I'm like, but they're not consenting. They don't know that's the deal when they get care for free, that you're going to experiment on them and kill them. Right. Right. This is like this committee that Clinton had impaneled and their lukewarm findings were they found no one to blame. But there's lots of people to blame. And they never investigated it. And they said, well, the 95% of these cases didn't cause harm.

[00:43:44] And I said, well, that's just not true. You know, look at the Vanderbilt cases. Look at the Cincinnati cases. I mean, 20 to 25% of the people died within 30 days of exposure in Cincinnati. That's from irradiation sickness. They were working, walking, visiting with their families. And boom, they died. How can you say no harm, no foul? But they did. But it's not just that.

[00:44:12] If you say no one's to blame, then you're actually telling doctors it's okay. That was the most disappointing. I think all the people that were involved in these studies who spoke before that committee came forward with the thought, well, they're really going to uncover this. I go back to the fact that right in the middle of their work, there was a huge political change in Congress.

[00:44:40] And the Republicans took control. And I was told by one of the scientists' doctors that when that happened, there was going to be no way they were going to recommend compensation for any of these people. And the other thing is, this was a huge endeavor. They had like $5 million, $6 million this committee spent.

[00:45:09] Most of it went to their own salaries and travel and keeping their office open and paying their 70-person-plus staff. So I want to ask, how did this all come to light? So you brought it to light in the Albuquerque Tribune. But how did the Clinton panel form? How did they bring it to light? What happened in the government? So what happened is, Hazel O'Leary was Energy Secretary.

[00:45:38] She was in the process of this openness initiative. And she was trying to clean house and change things. This story, our story broke. She decided she was going to reveal a lot of stuff. And the actual number of tests, the stockpiles, et cetera, et cetera. And they initially denied it, too. The DOE headquarters denied this ever occurred.

[00:46:08] And she said when she saw the stories, because I had like a three-part series, she said, and it started to gain traction right away. I mean, not right away, but reporters from Japan called me. They were the first. It was Japan, naturally. And then the AP. And then slowly it began to snowball. But she said, I put this on the list of stuff she was going to make public.

[00:46:36] And so she mentioned this experiment at the end. And it went crazy. I mean, they set up a hotline that was getting thousands of calls a day. They had to do something. And there were congressional hearings being held. There was hearings in Cincinnati, hearings in Oak Ridge, hearings in Tennessee.

[00:47:04] See, I guess I counted, and it's in the back of the book, how many Senate and House hearings were held. But there were a lot, I think over a dozen. Because a lot of these downwinders and the soldiers, a lot of people were still alive and had been clamoring for compensation for a long time. So that was happening. There was a little boy named Simeon Shaw. He was five years old.

[00:47:33] He was from Australia. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. He was a really sad case. And he did have an osteogenic sarcoma. That was a case of where the military had to be involved. And I was not able to get all the records of that case. But they offloaded a group of soldiers coming home from the Pacific. And he flew to the U.S.

[00:47:58] And he was injected with radioactive cerium, radioactive yttrium, and radioactive plutonium. His mother was never told. They alleged this could help. His cancer had already moved into his shoulder. They took a slow boat back to Australia. And he died really in great pain. Bertram Lowe Beer was the doctor.

[00:48:27] And he was also a doctor on Elmer's case. And he was from Australia, as I recall. And his secretary wrote to Simi's mother saying, you know, how's Simi doing? We'd like some information. And she never wrote back. And the only reason why we knew that much about his case was because the family was devastated by this child's death.

[00:48:53] And the father, when he died, kept all the correspondence of this case and passed it to the children. And they kept it. I did not find Simi. That may have been a network in Australia who identified him. What was so heartbreaking about Simi is that the doctors in San Francisco told the family that they could cure him. That's what was so sad, is that false hope.

[00:49:23] And they knew they couldn't. They couldn't. And what was even more, and I'm just going to say revolting about this case, it was just morally repugnant, is that when they went to settle in the late 90s, early 2000s, they,

[00:49:45] being the University of California, still alleged that this was supposed to help Simi. Yeah. Sorry, the listeners cannot see the look on my face. And saying that this was supposed to help that child. And that boy, that family, got one of the lowest settlements of all the plutonium patients because of that statement.

[00:50:15] And if you go back, you can probably find, I've got it in the back of the book, in the cited, but you can probably find UC did their own investigation claiming that these injections, they were looking for legitimate therapy for these people that came into their clinics with bone cancer. This is the august UCSF system.

[00:50:45] Even the committee, the Clinton committee that whitewashed these experiments, they whitewashed them. They said of the San Francisco, one of the, you know, it's all on tape or somewhere. Ruth Macklin said, oh, that's a whitewash. And she was one of the ethicists on the Clinton committee. And she said that of the San Francisco findings. Isn't it incredible?

[00:51:11] It's incredible because it's obvious if the military is funding a human study, they are not looking for a cure for cancer. Right. Right. I mean, the military is not an altruistic institution. They are not funding cancer research. And that's the danger like these, you know, the committee, the Clinton committee. Oh, there's some legitimate dual purpose studies.

[00:51:38] Well, they're usually driven by who's funding who. Look at who's the funder are. You can understand a little more about what's going on. But just as you're asking me these questions, as you ask me these questions, I start to feel my heart rate go up. Oh, I'm sorry. It's making me mad too.

[00:52:01] No, I remember all the injustices, you know, of what happened in modern times. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't that long ago. You know, when I was redoing this book for republication, I hadn't read a lot of this in years. And I thought, oh, okay, this is holding up. And even I was just, you know, it held. You know, there's things I could do differently, ways I would have organized the book differently,

[00:52:31] but the data holds still. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like our listeners to know? Now, what I would suggest, what I would keep in mind for patients, if you have to go see a doctor, I'm not, I think most doctors are well-meaning, but I would say bring a healthy dose of skepticism with you if you agree to be in a trial of some kind, because you don't

[00:53:00] know where the levers are and where the funding is, who ultimately benefits. From the trials. So I would say that as far as patients go. Thank you for listening. Please visit MyNuclearLife.com for a link to the re-released version of the Plutonium Files book, which is available on Kindle at a reasonable price.

[00:53:27] I will also place the memo from Hempelman informing Oppenheimer of the human experimentation studies. Until next time, I'm Shelley Lesher, and this has been My Nuclear Life.