Given the scanty data, Robert Stone turned to human experimentation to get the information he needed. His first experiments were aimed at better understanding the effects of small doses of external radiation on humans. By 1943, a year after he took over the Met Lab, he was supervising three experiments at hospitals in San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. Most subjects used in these experiments were cancer patients who were undergoing radiation treatment for their diseases but had relatively normal blood counts. Stone explained the problem this way in the introduction to the California study: The Health Division of the Metallurgical Project was faced with the problem of what changes would occur in individuals exposed to more than the tolerance dose of 0.1 roentgen on one or more days.32 It was thought that the blood picture of such individuals would show a rapid and radical change. The literature, however, contained very little information on the effect of X-ray exposure on persons with relatively normal hematological pictures, and such investigations as were reported were rather confusing because of the objectives of the studies. Hence it was considered necessary to study the effects of total-body irradiation with X-rays of varying energy on hematologically normal individuals.
In each of the three Met Laba"sponsored experiments, the patients were subjected to radiation administered over their entire bodies in a procedure called total body irradiation, or TBI. Stone maintained that total body irradiation was a bona fide procedure aimed at benefiting the patients. The Manhattan Project, he a.s.serted, was merely taking advantage of the treatments to do blood studies. But statements made by researchers at the time suggest exactly the reverse was true: The blood studies seemed to be the primary focus of the exposures and little, if any benefit accrued to the patients.
Not surprisingly, the first experiment was conducted at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco. The study began in October of 1942, shortly after Stone joined the Met Lab, and continued through June of 1946. Bertram Vojtech Adelbert Low-Beer, a mild-looking scientist with a round face and a dark fringe of neatly trimmed hair, ran the experiment while Stone was in Chicago.
Low-Beer had fled Czechoslovakia in 1939. At the urging of Mark Oliphant, an Australian physicist who had strongly encouraged the Americans to pursue the atomic bomb, Low-Beer had joined the University of Birmingham. He had just begun his radioisotope research when war broke out in England. John Lawrence invited him to the Rad Lab in Berkeley in 1941, and with a recommendation from Robert Stone, he was appointed to the medical faculty at UCSF two years later. He was a pleasant man, even jovial at times, but was known to get aextremely worked upa over sloppy or careless work, according to Stone.33 Like Robert Stone and Joseph Hamilton, Low-Beer had close ties to both the San Francisco hospital and the Rad Lab. He was an expert in the physics, chemistry, and biology of how radioactive substances behaved in human tissue.
Over the four-year period, twenty-nine patients, ranging in age from twenty to seventy-five, were irradiated at UCSF. The exposures per sitting varied from 5 to 20 roentgens and the total dosages ranged from 27 to 394 roentgens. (To put this in perspective, scientists believe 350 roentgens, delivered at one time and without counteractive measures, such as antibiotics, fluids, and bone marrow transplants, will kill 50 percent of those exposed.) The physical effects of the irradiation on the patients are unknown because the scientific paper written by Stone and Low-Beer addresses only the blood changes. Many blood samples were drawn before the radiation was administered, during the treatment itself, and for a number of weeks afterward. The two experimenters found that radiation exposure did reduce the number of blood cells, particularly white cells, circulating in the body.34 A second TBI experiment was conducted from December of 1942 until August of 1944 at Memorial Hospital in New Yorka"the hospital where Hymer Friedell and Louis Hempelmann had worked before the war. The lead experimenter was Lloyd F. Craver, a doctor who had just co-auth.o.r.ed a paper stating that TBI was a adiscouraginga treatment for patients suffering from generalized cancer. Despite his negative results, Craver conducted an experiment in which eight patients were to be irradiated with a total of 300 roentgens. The planned doses ranged from 10 to 15 roentgens per sitting. The selection of patients was the amost difficult part of the project,a Craver wrote, because the subjects had to be in good enough condition to survive athe combined effects of their disease and the irradiation for at least six months in order that some conclusions might be drawn as to later effects of the irradiation.a35 The experiment didnat work out the way Craver had hoped. Three patients died within two months of the treatment. The others continued to live for a while but did poorly. Craver blamed the deaths and deterioration to the patientsa diseases and not the radiation, concluding that asuch doses of radiation should be well tolerated by healthy persons.a36 A third TBI experiment was conducted at the Chicago Tumor Clinic beginning in March of 1943 and continuing through November of 1944. The lead investigator was J. J. Nickson, a young doctor who was only three years out of medical school.37 The fourteen subjects used in the experiment were divided into three groups. The first consisted of eight cancer patients who had aneoplasms that could not be cured but still were not extensive enough to influence general health.a The second group consisted of three patients who had illnesses that were ageneralized and chronica (one of the three was a twenty-five-year-old woman who had a history of apain and stiffness of the jointsa). The third group was composed of three healthy young white men who volunteered to be irradiated with seven roentgens a day over a three-day period. That group was of aparticular interest,a Nickson wrote, because the men most closely resembled the Met Lab workers themselves.38 Nickson found no changes in the blood counts of the three men.
Except for these three men, the TBI experiments involved sick people. Although they provided the Met Lab doctors with needed information, many questions about radiation remained: What are the first changes produced by exposures just above the tolerance level? Is the peripheral blood picture as reliable an indicator of over-exposure as radiologists have considered it to be? Are there any other changes produced that can be detected by known or newly developed clinical tests? Can a person ever recover completely and entirely from any dose of radiation big enough to produce detectable effects? Are there any methods of treatment that will aid in recovery? How much radiation is necessary to kill a man?
That was Stone, writing in 1947, when answers to those questions were still not known.39
5.
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT IS LAUNCHED.
At about the same time that the Met Labas Health Division was formed, government officials and scientists involved in the bomb-building effort decided it was time to bring in someone aggressive to oversee the entire project. The Armyas Corps of Engineers had been chosen to build the production facilities. But Colonel James C. Marshall, who was supervising the bomb project, was inclined to move cautiously. With the growing wartime demand for recruits and raw materials, the whole effort was in danger of foundering.
On September 17, 1942, Leslie Groves, a tall, pear-shaped Army general who had overseen the construction of the new Pentagon building in Washington, was appointed to head the project. Groves, a West Point graduate, had been desperately hoping for an overseas a.s.signment and was bitterly disappointed by the appointment. But the general, like Arthur Compton, was a ministeras son who had been schooled in the importance of duty. He swallowed his disappointment and got to work the next day.
Groves was a brilliant administrator who was accustomed to working long hours and handling huge budgets. He had the ability to quickly grasp situations and was willing to make decisions based on incomplete information. Unfortunately, he also had an enormous ego, an abrasive and tactless personality, and a predilection for humiliating people. Although he developed a fairly good working relationship with the company engineers and scientists who were brought into the project from Du Pont, Union Carbide, and Eastman Kodak, his relationship with the Met Lab scientists deteriorated quickly. He considered them aprima donnasa and acrackpots.a To Groves, Leo Szilarda"a man who wouldnat flush his own toilet because he considered it maidas worka"was one of the worst offenders.1 Groves often used one of his aides, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, as a go-between with Arthur Compton and the Chicago scientists. He told an interviewer in 1967, aI suspected that Compton liked Colonel Nichols more than he did me.2 Primarily because Colonel Nichols had a Ph.D. and looked very scholarly and still does, everything done with Compton was generally done through Colonel Nichols; that is, anything that was difficult. That didnat mean that I didnat see a lot of Compton. But if there was anything that was particularly touchy, I always had Nichols do it.a Groves said in his memoirs that soon after he was a.s.signed to the project he realized that he would need a scientist to coordinate the actual design, construction, and testing of the weapon. Because the other scientists who might be suitable candidates for the job were already engaged in other facets of the bomb project, he selected J. Robert Oppenheimer. aIt must have been a bitter blow to Compton to have his project pulled away from him, especially after the major success of the chain reaction at Chicago,a Leona Marshall Libby, the young scientist at the Met Lab, speculated.3 aOne should remember, in dealing with the Department of Defense, that they are trained to be killers. Especially in wartime, it is almost their duty to leave a trail of bodies behind. In a sense, Compton was a body along Grovesa trail.a Groves also decided to establish a new laboratory to design and construct the bomb in New Mexico. An isolated state, it was nevertheless accessible by train, plane, and automobile. The choice could not have pleased Oppenheimer more. He had spent summers as a youth in the Sangre de Cristos, one of the southernmost ranges of the Rocky Mountains, and had grown to love the blues and grays of the desert. Although the two labs would physically look very different, their functions were actually quite similar: The Met Labas job was to achieve a controlled chain reaction; Los Alamosas mission would be to produce an uncontrolled chain reaction.
In November of 1942, General Groves, Major John Dudley, a Manhattan District officer, Oppenheimer, and Edwin McMillan, who was helping to organize the new lab, arrived in Albuquerque and began driving in a northwesterly direction toward Jemez Springs, one of the proposed sites. Although Jemez Springs was lovely and had plenty of water, it was hemmed in by tall canyon walls. Oppenheimer felt it might have a adepressing effecta on laboratory workers; Groves gave it a thumbs-down because there was no room to expand.4 Oppenheimer then suggested that they drive over the mountains and take a look at the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private school for boys. When they arrived, it was snowing lightly and the surrounding mountains were vague as clouds. The general immediately endorsed the site for numerous reasons, including its remoteness. aThe geographically enforced isolation of the people working there lessened the ever-present danger of their inadvertently diffusing secret information among social or professional friends outside.a5 Oppenheimer was also satisfied. aMy two great loves are physics and desert country,a he once confided to a friend.6 As soon as the owners agreed to sell the boysa school, the Manhattan Project began making plans for the new lab. It would be located on a high plateau near the lip of the Jemez caldera, a huge, collapsed volcano. To the west were the Jemez Mountains; to the east, the blue, slumping line of the Sangre de Cristos; below, the muddy curl of the Rio Grande. Dominating everything was a 360-degree sky and the desert light, harsh as a camera flash at noontime, luminous in the gathering dusk.
Oppenheimer quickly began a.s.sembling his team. As in Chicago, the physicists and chemists were recruited first. Then came the medical doctors. Oppenheimer wanted John Lawrence, Ernest Lawrenceas brother, to oversee the health and safety aspects of Los Alamos, but Lawrence was already working on high-alt.i.tude studies for the Air Force.7 He suggested that Oppy look up Louis Hempelmann in St. Louis. Oppenheimer went to St. Louis and talked with Hempelmann. Impressed by the young physicianas quiet intelligence, he offered him a job.
Ever the pragmatist, Hempelmann decided to do some sleuthing around before he committed himself. He went to Chicago and talked to Robert Stone and his colleagues. They a.s.sured Hempelmann his duties would be rather simple; his main task would probably consist of taking blood counts from fifty to sixty people who might be at risk.8 Hempelmann then took a westbound train to New Mexico to have a closer look. Oppenheimer, who had arrived in Los Alamos with a few staff members on March 15, 1943, picked Hempelmann up in Santa Fe. Up the canyon they went, following a primitive road that the Corps of Engineers was trying to make pa.s.sable for the heavy trucks that would soon be arriving with cyclotrons, accelerators, tons of steel, and miles of piping. Until enough housing could be built, the scientists lived at nearby ranches and dined on box lunches brought in from Santa Fe.9 Often they were forced to go hungry because the automobiles carrying the food broke down or had flats on the rough roads.
The lab was little more than a military post. The crude living conditions and barbed-wire fences may have given Hempelmann some pause, but he nevertheless agreed to take the job. He returned to St. Louis and packed up his belongings. He and his wife, Elinor, arrived in Los Alamos in April of 1943.
While Hempelmann was setting up his small office, Allied forces were winning key victories in the Pacific and in Eastern Europe.10 During the first week of April, more than one hundred bombers had swarmed over an outlying area of Paris, France, raining destruction on a n.a.z.i-controlled Renault factory. General Douglas MacArthur reported another devastating a.s.sault on the j.a.panese fleet near New Guinea. And a furious air battle had raged in Tunisia between n.a.z.i dive-bombers and American Spitfires as General George Pattonas troops hurried toward a rendezvous with the British Army.
Louis Hempelmannas first year at Los Alamos was uneventful and unhurried. He split the work with another doctor named James Nolan, a gynecologist who was an old friend and cla.s.smate. Nolan oversaw the small post hospital. Hempelmann was in charge of protecting the workers from the radiation hazards. As in Chicago, that meant establishing asafe tolerance levelsa for exposure to radiation, monitoring workers, and carrying out blood tests.
Hempelmann had a small staffa"himself, four to five blood technicians, and a part-time secretary. One of his employees was Laura Fermi, the beautiful wife of Enrico Fermi. The Fermis, like other scientists, moved to Los Alamos as work at the Met Lab slowed down and the pace in New Mexico increased. Laura Fermi was struck by Hempelmannas shyness. In a memoir, she remembered, aHe was my first paying boss a and we both acted shy.11 His embarra.s.sment showed in his easy blushing, which made him look little older than a schoolboy.a Behind Hempelmannas boyish demeanor, however, was the mind of a shrewd administrator who quickly recognized that radioactive contamination drifting off site might provoke possible lawsuits and create public relations problems down the road for Los Alamos. He fumed when his advice wasnat taken and chafed under the yoke of the plodding bureaucracy.
That first year was so leisurely that Hempelmann undoubtedly had time to explore the remote country that lay outside the laboratoryas fences. Many of the Manhattan Project scientists, particularly those raised and educated in Europe, were stunned when they got off the train at the little station near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The intoxicating light, the buoyant air, and the high elevation combined to produce a momentary vertigo. The vast distances glittered like the bottom of an ancient sea and blue mountains floated on the edges of the horizon. Here the skin of the world felt so thin it seemed that a bigger reality was about to break through. As they looked out upon the vastness, the thoughtful among them no doubt contemplated their own mortality and the fearsome weapon they had come to build.
In the winter the scientists and their wives organized ski trips across snow so light and powdery it seemed artificial. During those cold winter months, when the earth lay barren and the planet was tilted farthest from the sun, the New Mexico skies grew soft, filled with feathery clouds the color of mangos and tangerines. As the sun dipped below the horizon, the mountains east of the lab turned a luminous rose color. It was that extraordinary color which had prompted the Spanish settlers to name them the Sangre de Cristos, or blood of Christ.
In the summer the scientists hiked into the mountains or picked their way on horseback through forests and canyons filled with fantastic stone shapes. This was wild country, intimidating and lonely, country one had to acquire a taste for. an.o.body could think straight in a place like that,a the urbane Leo Szilard predicted.12 aEverybody who goes there will go crazy.a But once the brilliant landscape had permanently imprinted itself on their minds, some scientists yearned ever after to stand on ground that seemed to offer a vision of the four corners of the earth. Many never left. Others, such as Louis Hempelmann, bought second homes in New Mexico.
Hymer Friedell, a reserve officer for several years, was still working for Robert Stone in California when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Day after day he waited to be called up for active duty, but the orders never materialized. Friedell soon learned he had been put on an aessential lista by the dean of the medical school. Just thirty-one and feeling obligated to enlist in the military, Friedell told UCSF officials he must be removed from the list or he would resign. Sometime in the late summer of 1942, he got what he later described as arather odd orders.a He was inducted into the Army at the Presideo in San Francisco and then instructed to don civilian clothes and report to a Captain Craftan at 5125 University Avenue in Chicago.13 The address was the Met Lab, where his boss, Robert Stone, had begun to visit periodically. Friedell was immediately told to continue on to the Manhattan Engineer District offices in New York City. When he arrived, he learned that the Army had plans to create its own medical program.
Friedell was the first Army doctor a.s.signed to the Manhattan Project. After his trip to New York, he returned to the Met Lab, where he served as a liaison between the Army and the laboratory and helped out with medical tasks. One of his patients was Edward Teller. aHe thinks Iam the worldas greatest doctora"because I can recognize a hernia the size of my fist,a he once said.
Friedell was eventually transferred to Oak Ridge, which in mid-1943 became the new headquarters of the Manhattan Engineer District, or MED, as it was often referred to in doc.u.ments. Soon after that, Colonel Nichols named him the executive officer of the Manhattan Projectas newly established Medical Section.14 General Groves liked Friedell but felt he was too inexperienced to head the section. aYouare too young for this racket,a Friedell quoted the general as saying.15 Groves had first wanted Robert Stone for the job. During a train trip to Chicago in early 1943, the general spent several hours trying to convince Stone to enlist in the Army so that he could supervise all of the Manhattan Projectas medical programs. But Stone wasnat interested. In a letter to Arthur Compton, he explained, aGeneral Groves was not entirely satisfied but agreed with me that he would not push the Army appointment, especially since this would mean a very great financial sacrifice on my part with no greater ability to serve the country.a16 General Grovesas next choice to head up the Medical Section was Stafford Warren, who was then a professor of radiology at the University of Rochester medical school. Warren was a manas man, garrulous and full of bravado, just the kind of doctor Groves was looking for. He had a handsome, square face that was just beginning to loosen, a small brushy mustache, and a large, well-shaped nose. He was an extraordinary blend of contradictions: flamboyant and cautious, amiable and shrewd, a storyteller who kept secrets.
After some negotiation, Warren agreed to serve as a consultant to the project, but said he would not join officially unless he was given the rank of colonel. With Hymer Friedell as his guide, over the spring and summer of 1943 he gradually learned more about the bomb-building effort. At that time, Los Alamos still resembled a crude military encampment; Oak Ridge was little more than a muddy construction site filled with lumber and bulldozers; and Hanford, struggling with labor shortages and sandstorms, had yet to drive a stake for its first nuclear reactor.
On November 3, 1943, Warren received his commission as a colonel in the Army, at which time he moved his family to Oak Ridge and became a full-time member of the project. According to one written account, he showed up for work on his first day wearing combat boots and a .45 revolver strapped to his waist.17 Like the crackpots and prima donnas at Los Alamos, Warren was also a scientist, but he clearly saw himself as a military officer whose loyalty belonged to General Groves.
Although Stafford Warren was living in Rochester when Groves recruited him, he was actually another member of the ever-increasing tribe of Berkeley-trained scientists working on the bomb project. His California roots were deep, dating back to his adventurous grandfather, for whom he was named, who had lit out with his brother from Wellsville, New York, to join the California gold rush. The two brothers made about sixty-five dollars panning for gold before they turned their attention to more practical ways to earn a living: burning charcoal and tanning hides. Eventually they purchased a small ranch in Hayward, a little town near Oakland, California, and planted cherry, apricot, and pear trees. Warren grew up on that ranch, digging stumps, milking the family cow, and listening to his grandfatheras storiesa"tall and uncomplicated tales of the frontier. Later he breezed through the University of California at Berkeley and just as effortlessly sailed through four years of medical school at the University of California at San Francisco. After obtaining his medical degree in 1922, he spent three years doing postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins and Harvard. Then he was offered an a.s.sistant professorship in radiology at the new medical school being built at the University of Rochester. Before settling into Rochester, where he remained from 1925 to 1943, he toured the famous radiation laboratories in Europe with his wife, Viola.
In Paris, he met Madame Marie Curie, the recipient of two n.o.bel Prizes. The first, awarded in 1903, was a joint prize given to Curie, her husband, Pierre, and Henri Becquerel, for the discovery of radioactivity. The second, awarded in 1911, was for the isolation of pure radium. Marie Curie died of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934. By the time Warren met her, aShe was very anemic and yellowish looking,a he recalled.18 aShe had some burns on her hands and her skin was very rough.a The memory of her appearance would haunt him during his Manhattan Project days.
At the Rochester medical school, Stafford Warren had pursued several lines of experimentation, including afever therapya to treat gonorrhea. In a 1937 paper, he reported that fever therapy had shown some promise but warned that it should be undertaken only in a hospital setting and under close medical supervision.19 When the gonorrhea sufferers checked into the hospital for treatment, they were given lots of water, salt, and a sedative. Then they were taken to a aradiant energy cabinet,a where they were put into restraints and a thermometer was inserted in their r.e.c.t.u.ms. The subjects were periodically examined by nurses and given additional water and salt when it was needed. When the sedatives wore off, they were given whiskey.
By increasing the patientsa body heat, the doctors hoped they could kill the infection. But some patients died first. Warren reported that a twenty-two-year-old boxer (anormal except for the presence on the right temple of an unhealed wound produced by a blow received during a recent boxing matcha) was comatose after spending twenty-four hours in the radiant heat closet.20 Twenty-two hours later he died.
When the Army surgeon general learned that Warren was to be in charge of the MEDas health and safety programs, he asked Colonel Nichols, aWhy do you want that clap doctor?a Nichols, unwilling to explain why they wanted a radiologist, responded stiffly that they had chosen Warren afor good and sufficient reasons.a21 Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell were in charge of all matters relating to health and safety for the Manhattan Project. In Oak Ridge itself, a town of some 70,000 people that sprang up overnight, that meant overseeing everything from fly control to toxicology studies. Warren was particularly dismayed by the diet of the acolored peoplea who worked in Oak Ridge. Many drank Coca-Cola and ate potato chips and chocolate bars for breakfast, a menu so intolerable to Warren that he sent some of his men out to lecture on the advantages of drinking milk. On the subject of their diet, he recalled: Of course, the colored people wanted chitlins.22 It took us about a month to figure out what achitlinsa were. Finally the cafeteria manager ordered a barrel of entrails of chicken from the Chicago chicken cleaning place. It just stunk like the devil when it was opened; but by this time they had a colored person there, too, to supervise it. This was just deep-fried. The stench going downwind was fantastic, but they thought it was wonderful. And after that we had peace.
General Groves enforced a policy of strict compartmentalization in order to protect the secrecy of the project: aMy rule was simple and not capable of misinterpretationa"each man should know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else.23 Adherence to this rule not only provided an adequate measure of security, but it greatly improved overall efficiency by making our people stick to their knitting.a But Warren and Friedell were not required to adhere as rigidly to their aknittinga and actually knew more of what was going on than many senior scientists. Recalled Friedell, aWhen the general decided that the Army would keep its finger on everything, we really didnat have operational authority, but we had, if you will, informational authority.24 That is, we found out everything that was going on, and we became aware of it, and every once in a while he would ask us what was going on.a Groves seemed to have a soft spot for the doctors, Friedell added. aHe thought we had some special secret, the laying on of hands or whatever.a25 But the doctors often fell to squabbling among themselves. Louis Hempelmann didnat get along with Joseph Hamilton. And Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell were forced to handle Robert Stone with kid gloves. Aware of Stoneas p.r.i.c.kly and stubborn nature, they attempted to guide his research program by gentle suggestions rather than outright orders. aWe wouldnat go and say, aHey, donat do work on these ratsa"do this.a26 We wouldnat do it that way. We would really have to go and say, aWe think there is more need to do this, or our basic problems are as follows aa a Friedell once told a colleague.
Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell traveled freely to the Met Lab, to Berkeley, and to Hanford. But they had to get permission to go to Los Alamos. aThe rest of the places really were at our discretion,a Friedell recalled, abut if you wanted to go to Los Alamos that was not easily done.a27 In Los Alamos, Stafford Warren occasionally stopped in to say h.e.l.lo or drink a cup of coffee with Oppenheimer. But most of the time he simply checked in with Oppenheimeras secretary and then went off with Louis Hempelmann or James Nolan. Oppenheimer, who could be as cruel and condescending as General Groves, didnat share the generalas soft spot for doctors; in fact, he didnat like having a hospital on the laboratory grounds and didnat even like to acknowledge that disease existed. His distrust extended to the most basic medical precautions. Oppenheimer refused to have his dog vaccinated for rabies, even though it was official policy and all the other dogs had been inoculated. Recalled Warren: aWe didnat know what to do; so finally I made a special trip out there.28 Oppie told Hempelmann he just wouldnat do it. He didnat believe in it. He didnat want to risk his dog, and it wasnat necessary. So we decided the best thing to do under the circ.u.mstances was to ignore this one dog. We didnat want to have Oppie upset by this emotional ha.s.sle, since it was only this one dog aa Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell also went frequently to Rochester, New York, to confer with scientists at a top-secret biomedical research facility called the aManhattan Departmenta or aManhattan Annex.a Located at the University of Rochester medical school and formally established in April of 1943 by the Manhattan Project, this laboratory had a large experimental animal colony. Many of the scientists who worked there were Warrenas former students or colleagues. Scientists at the Manhattan Annex in Rochester focused some of their first experiments on the toxicological effects of uranium. This effort was no doubt spurred by the vast uranium plants in Oak Ridge that were about to begin operating. Other radioactive isotopes, including plutonium, were also investigated. Unlike the other sites, the Rochester facility was not involved in the design or production of the bomb. Its concerns were strictly health-related.
6.
PLUTONIUM RISING.
All the medical doctors knew that plutonium would be extremely hazardous, but it really didnat pose much of a problem throughout most of 1943 because there was so little of it. In the beginning, most of the cyclotron-produced material was going to Chicago. Los Alamos scientists were forced to use astand-ina isotopes, such as uranium, for their chemical studies while they waited for the graphite reactor in Oak Ridge to come on line.1 Tired of waiting, Oppenheimer finally took a trip to Berkeley in the fall of 1943 and demanded that the chemists make him half a milligram of plutonium on the cyclotron. John Gofman, then a young Berkeley scientist, asked Oppenheimer why he needed it. aYouare going to have grams of it in a half-year to a year from Oak Ridge,a he argued.2 aYes, I know,a he quoted Oppenheimer as saying. aBut right now we need half a milligram and thereas only a twentieth of a milligram in existence.a During September and October of 1943, scientists at Berkeley bombarded a ton of a uranium compound in the cyclotron. When they were finished, they had produced about 1.2 milligrams of plutoniuma"little more than one-tenth of the amount Don Mastick had in his vial a year later. Remembered Gofman, aAfter about three weeks of around-the-clock work, we had it down to about a quarter of a teaspoon of liquid.a3 Oppenheimer took one milligram back to Los Alamos and left the Berkeley group with the remaining two-tenths to use in their chemistry experiments.
At about the same time the Berkeley group was bombarding the uranium compound, Robley Evans published a follow-up study on the radium dial painters in the September 1943 issue of the Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology.4 The paper sent a ripple of fear through the bomb complex. Evans had included in his article a horrifying photograph of a female radium dial painter who had developed a grapefruit-size tumor in her chin from only 1.5 micrograms and died soon thereafter. He compared the alpha particles emitted by radium to the afirst bullet of a repeating gun,a warning that so-called bullets could strike the human body not only through ingestion but also through inhalation.5 Evans a.s.sured his readers that not all radium dial painters were condemned to such a fate. With proper precautions, such as spotlessly clean rooms and elaborate ventilation systems, radium could be handled safely.6 The Manhattan Project doctors, who had yet to conduct their first animal experiment with plutonium, knew from its chemical makeup that it might pose the same dangers as radium. Like radium, plutonium was a heavy metal with a long half-life and was expected to deposit in human bone. Most important, it emitted alpha particlesa"the same kind of atomic bullets that radium emitted. Once an alpha emitter such as plutonium lodges in human tissue or bone, three or four cells in the immediate area get an enormous blast of energy for a very long time. Whether an alpha particle produces cancer is a chance event. It may be the first or the millionth particle that produces the crucial mutation that leads to cancer; or such a mutation may never occur.
Glenn Seaborg became aware of Robley Evansas paper soon after it was published. He said it was aquite likelya that Joseph Hamilton brought it to his attention.7 aIam pretty sure that even without that article I would have realized the danger of working with alpha particles of plutonium. I had been working with radioactivity ever since 1934 and wasnat a neophyte.a There were probably no more than two milligrams of plutonium in existence by the end of 1943. But Seaborg knew that that situation was about to change.8 As he looked around the Chicago laboratory, he recognized the grave hazards his discovery would soon pose to workers. aIt was only when the plutonium appeared, and I could see it, or see solutions, you know, where people are stirring the solution and beginning to work with it, that it shook me like a thunderclap,a Seaborg recalled many years later.9 As 1943 gave way to 1944, a year that would lay the groundwork for the final Allied victories in Europe and in the Pacific, Glenn Seaborg wrote a brief note to Robert Stone. aIt has occurred to me,a he began in the January 5, 1944, memo: that the physiological hazards of working with plutonium and its compounds may be very great.10 Due to its alpha radiation and long life it may be that the permanent location in the body of even very small amounts, say one milligram or less, may be very harmful. The ingestion of such extraordinary small amounts as some few tens of micrograms might be unpleasant, if it locates itself in a permanent position. In the handling of the relatively large amounts soon to begin here and at Site Y, there are many conceivable methods by which amounts of this order might be taken in unless the greatest care is exercised. In addition to helping to set up safety measures in handling so as to prevent the occurrence of such accidents, I would like to suggest that a program to trace the course of plutonium in the body be initiated as soon as possible. In my opinion, such a program should have the very highest priority.
When Seaborg was asked decades later whether he had meant human experiments, he exclaimed, aOh, G.o.d, no.a The memo, he said, referred to experiments with animals.11 Seaborg added in a subsequent interview that he knew nothing about the human experiments. aWe were working in a compartmentalized atmosphere.12 We werenat told anything other than those things that related directly to what we were doing.a Robert Stone, by then known by his Manhattan Project moniker of Dr. Rock, responded to Seaborgas memo a few days later, saying that the Health Division had been planning to do experiments with plutonium. aThe question of tracer studies to find its distribution in the body have long been planned as part of Dr. Hamiltonas program, although it has never been mentioned in official descriptions of the program.a13 Hamilton, he added, didnat see any point in doing tracer studies until several milligrams of plutonium could be made available to him.
As Seaborg and Stone were exchanging memos, the first milligram amounts of plutonium were being produced in the X-10 reactor in Oak Ridge.14 At a high-level meeting in Oak Ridge on January 19, Robert Stone emphasized the apoisonous nature of product.a He noted that one to two micrograms of radium had proved fatal in the dial painters.15 Fortunately, Stone believed, plutonium was less hazardous by a factor of fifty. On the negative side, he pointed out, radium could be measured through the breath or with Geiger counters placed outside the body. But plutonium, which did not decay to radon or emit gamma rays, would be difficult to detect.
Arthur Compton advised during that same meeting that the project leaders should consider plutonium apotentially extremely poisonous.a Using Stoneas rough estimate as a guideline, they then established the so-called tolerance dose for plutonium at five microgramsa"an amount that was exactly fifty times higher than the tolerance dose for radium established by Robley Evansas committee three years earlier.16 On February 10 Joseph Hamilton received eleven milligrams of plutonium for animal experiments from the Manhattan Engineer District.17 The allocation, approved by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Arthur Compton, represented a significant portion of the plutonium in existence at the time and reflected not only the bomb makersa concern about plutoniumas toxicity but Hamiltonas high ranking within the inner circle.18 He was the first scientist to receive plutonium for studies unrelated to the actual task of constructing the bomb.
Over the next few weeks, Hamilton and his colleagues in Berkeley diluted the plutonium, divided it into batches, and used it in dozens of animal experiments. The material was injected into the jugular veins, tails, and hind legs of rats. Fine aerosols containing plutonium were concocted, and the animals were forced to breathe in the deadly mist. The rodents were killed at intervals and their organs a.n.a.lyzed to find out where the plutonium went. Most of the injected material gravitated to the skeleton. The plutonium from the aerosols settled in the alveoli, the tiny blood-rich sacs in the lungs, where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged.
The same month Hamilton received his first allocation of plutonium, Hempelmann and several scientists from the Met Lab and Oak Ridge visited the Luminous Paint Company in Boston.19 Their escort was none other than Robley Evans. Evans had a good hunch why the Manhattan Project officials were there, but the word aplutoniuma was never mentioned. aWe were always very careful in talking with each other,a Evans once told an interviewer.20 aWe gave the other fellow enough information so that intelligent responses could be given, and that was it. Really, the less we knew the better.a Evans no doubt pointed out the Luminous Paint Companyas fastidious housekeeping procedures. The floors and walls of the plant were scrubbed regularly; the young women wore kerchiefs and caps to keep their hair from touching the paint; eating and smoking in the work area was forbidden; and special ventilation hoods were installed above each desk to suck out dust particles and gases.21 Although Evans understood the hazards of radium better than any other scientist in the world, he nevertheless sent a proposal later that year to Joseph Howland, a young Manhattan Project physician who worked with Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell in Oak Ridge. Evans wanted to administer one microgram of radium to aconscientious objectors or other volunteer human subjectsa in order to better understand the effects of a small dose.22 The amount would be perfectly harmless, he wrote in a letter decla.s.sified in 1994, abecause we can be absolutely sure that the subject will excrete more than 90 percent of this material, and will be left with a perfectly harmless amount of radium in his system.a There is no evidence that the Manhattan Project took Evans up on his offer. But Evans was an ardent believer in the poet Alexander Popeas maxim that the aproper study of mankind is man,a and he would have ample opportunity to gratify his penchant for human experiments in the postwar years.
The month after Hempelmann and his colleagues returned from Boston, the first whole gram of plutonium, a small ampoule of green-colored liquid, arrived at Los Alamos from Oak Ridge. Before the vial was shipped, Arthur Compton, General Groves, Colonel Nichols, and a few others went down to the plant to have a look at it.23 Compton removed the vial from under its ventilation hood and placed it in the colonelas hands. Then, wrote Colonel Nichols, Martin Whitaker, one of the project leaders, ahurriedly picked up a stainless steel pan and held it under my hand, saying, aFor G.o.das sake, donat drop it on the floor.a As Groves reached for it [the vial], Whitaker grabbed it and replaced it safely under the hood.a Although the other Manhattan Project sites would also be confronted with plutonium contamination, the problem would prove particularly serious in Los Alamos, which was responsible not only for designing and putting the bomb together but for the final purification and shaping of plutonium metal. Acutely aware of the tragedy that befell the radium dial painters, Louis Hempelmann and his Los Alamos colleagues did what they could to prepare for the plutonium. They held lectures and pa.s.sed out safety pamphlets, instructed employees to don coveralls, booties, and surgical caps, ordered plate-gla.s.s covers for the desks of people working with plutonium, installed swinging doors to eliminate contamination from ahota doork.n.o.bs, and imported monitoring devices, air dust samplers, and respirators from other sites. Although these and other safety regulations were put into place, they were hard to enforcea"especially among the scientists. Hempelmann said years later that many of the scientists were aindividualistsa24 who didnat like to follow rules. aUnfortunately, the more scholarly and inquisitive the person, the greater the tendency to ignore the recommended procedures.25 The janitors, I am sure, always did what we told them to do.a Sometimes the plutonium that spilled onto floors was so hard to retrieve that maintenance crews simply enameled over the contaminated area. Some of the material was carried offsite by employees who were leaving the tech area with avery high counts on their street clothing.a26 (A acounta reflects the detection of an energy particle or a photon emitted from an unstable radioactive atom.) Spotty and crude though it was, oiled paper, in the form of swipes, was one of the only ways to detect the presence of plutonium. The paper was swept over contaminated surfaces and placed under counters for measurements. Similarly, the nostrils of employees were swabbed twice a day with paper glued around the ends of sticks. The paper was then spread out and placed under detection devices. Decades later Thomas Shipman, the head of Los Alamosas health division, could still recall in vivid detail the woman who performed the nose swipes: aShe was well endowed with the more important female s.e.x characteristics and she saw to it that they were properly exhibited.27 When she would appear in a laboratory and shout out aNose Swipes,a strong men could be trampled in the rush.a The counts registered on the paper were sometimes shockingly high: 1,578 in a workeras nose, 1,000 on a laboratory floor; 40,000 on a desk; ainfinitea in some rooms.2829 Evidence of contamination was even found inside workersa respirators. The readings taken from the nose werenat considered significant, Hempelmann said, unless they were more than fifty counts per minute.30 The monitoring, decontamination, and record keeping were not just humanitarian measures implemented to protect the workers.31 Hempelmann and his colleagues also wanted to protect themselves and the Manhattan Project from possible lawsuits. In a seventeen-page account of the history of the Los Alamos health group from March 1943 to November 1945, Hempelmann observed three times that inaccurate, incomplete records could entangle the lab in lawsuits. aThe lack of records of non-exposure of persons not working with radiation or radioactive materials means that we do not have important legal evidence in case of future claims against this project,a he wrote.32 Stafford Warren also worried about lawsuits, as did J. Robert Oppenheimer. The lab director kept a tight rein on information that might reveal health problems or suggest that Los Alamos was contaminating his beloved desert. After Oppenheimer left Los Alamos, employee J. F. Mullaney asked Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimeras successor, for guidance on the handling of health reports. aMr. Oppenheimer, I believe, directed that all reports on health problems be separately cla.s.sified and issued only at his request.33 I do not know the reason for this special treatment, but I believe it is to give added security protection to safeguard the project against people claiming to have been damaged.a The Manhattan Project officials had reason to worry. The results of Joseph Hamiltonas initial rat studies contained some disconcerting news. As the medical doctors expected, plutonium, like radium, did lodge in the skeleton. But it was excreted much more slowly, which meant that plutonium would stay in the body longer and cause more radiation damage. Hamilton advised in May of 1944 that wounds contaminated with plutonium be treated like snake bites. aI realize that a.n.a.logies are frequently dangerous for the purposes of comparison, but the superficial similarities of the parenteral introduction of product [a code word for plutonium] into the body to snake bite come to mind.a34 By the end of August 1944, the month that Don Mastickas accident occurred, Los Alamos had received fifty-one grams of plutonium from the Oak Ridge reactor.35 In metal form, that amount would not have filled a spoon, but it had been divided up and used in 2,500 separate experiments.
Mastickas accident was the most alarming the medical personnel at Los Alamos had faced, but there had been other terrifying moments. One of the first occurred on May 26, 1944, when a metallurgist and his technician began trying to reduce a plutonium solution into metal. The experiment succeeded but the metallurgist was exposed to large amounts of plutonium dust.36 Two other minor accidents occurred the same month as the Mastick explosion. On the afternoon of August 19, a small amount of plutonium in powder form spilled on the floor of Room D-101. An open beaker containing ten milligrams of plutonium cracked the night of August 28 in Room D-117, just two doors down from Mastickas laboratory.3738 In a monthly health report for August, Hempelmann noted the rising levels of contamination in D and H buildings. D Building was the elaborately ventilated plant where Mastick worked.39 It had five miles of piping and a complex ventilation system designed to remove dust particles from the air. Despite the efforts to maintain a clean environment, the building grew hopelessly contaminated and had to be torn down after the war. H building contained other laboratories and offices. aAs has been antic.i.p.ated the amount of contamination throughout both of these buildings is much greater now that larger amounts of material are being used,a Hempelmann wrote.40 After Mastickas accident, Louis Hempelmann had a near mutiny on his hands. In an August 16, 1944, memo, he advised Oppenheimer that Mastickas colleagues were deeply alarmed: A great deal of concern has been expressed during the past two weeks by members of the Chemistry Division about the inability of the Medical Group to detect dangerous amounts of plutonium in the body.41 This concern was occasioned by the accidental explosion of 10 milligrams of plutonium in Don Mastickas face with the subsequent ingestion of an unknown amount of this material. The questions which have been raised by the chemists are: 1) how much plutonium was absorbed by the gastro-intestinal tract in this case, 2) what fraction of a serious dose does the absorbed plutonium represent and 3) is it safe for Mastick to go back to work in Building D at his old job?
Hempelmann had several discussions with Mastick and other chemists, including Joseph Kennedy and Arthur Wahl. Then he recommended to Oppenheimer that the biological research program be expanded. The program initially called for more animal experiments and the development of a chemical method to detect plutonium in urine, stools, and lungs. aIt would not seem out of place to raise this question now as accidents similar to [Mastickas] are bound to happen again despite the most elaborate precautions.a42 Oppenheimer, who had little use for medical doctors, immediately agreed. He made it clear, though, that he didnat want the work done at Los Alamos. aAs for the biological sides of the work, which may involve animal or even human experimentation, I feel that it is desirable if these can in any way be handled elsewhere not to undertake them here,a he wrote Hempelmann.43 Practical considerations, rather than moral or ethical questions, undoubtedly dictated Oppenheimeras decision. In a telegram written several months earlier to the Met Labas Arthur Compton, Oppenheimer noted that the Los Alamos lab was anot equipped for biological experiments.a With its clutter of houses, barracks, trailers, and huts, Los Alamos was bursting at the seams.44 In January 1943 the population was 1,500. By the end of 1944 it had nearly quadrupled to 5,675. (By 1945 it would be 8,200.)45 Louis Hempelmann, Stafford Warren, Joseph Kennedy, and J. Robert Oppenheimer met on August 25, 1944, to further discuss the medical research program on plutonium. At Warrenas suggestion, Hempelmann summarized the program in an August 29 memo to Oppenheimer. The project was to have three parts: the development of chemical methods to determine the amount of plutonium in urine, feces, tissues, and lungs; animal experiments to cross-check the chemical methods; and atracer experiments on humans to determine the percentage of plutonium excreted daily.a46 After Los Alamos had developed asatisfactory a.n.a.lytical methods,a Hempelmann added, further metabolic studies would be turned over to another medical group, presumably the Manhattan Annex at Rochester.
Los Alamos scientists plunged into the project and, by January of 1945, had completed the first stepa"the development of a chemical process that could detect one ten-thousandth of a microgram of plutonium in urine and stool samples. The detection method was a long, tedious process that involved drying the sample and converting it to ash before dissolving it in acid. Although several people were involved in the effort, Wright Langham, a young chemist from Oklahoma, received the credit for developing the process. Scientists in Chicago and Berkeley also developed their own detection methods.
The Los Alamos group could not try out their approach until a contamination-free laboratory was ready in February.47 The test was first used on Los Alamos employees in March of 1945, and the initial results shocked Hempelmann. aThey were just frightfully high. My G.o.d, we were just terrified because they suggesteda"I mean, if they were truea"if that much plutonium was being excreted, the workers would have G.o.d knows how much plutonium.aa48 The lab began sending employees home for two days. Then the workers reported back to the hospital, where they showered and washed their hair, changed into hospital garments, and provided urine specimens for the next twenty-four hours. With those procedures in place, the plutonium detected in the urine dropped dramatically, suggesting the contamination was coming from the workersa hands and clothes.
Still, the Langham test was inconclusive. With the process, the Manhattan Project doctors could measure the level of plutonium in urine or stools. But what fraction of the total body burden did the excreted amount represent? To answer that question, they needed a human being in whom they could inject a known amount of plutonium and measure the rate at which the material was excreted. If scientists knew the excretion rate, they would then be able to extrapolate from urine and stool samples how much plutonium remained in the body of a worker who had suffered an accidental exposure.
The time had come to take the inevitable next stepa"a step that would cast its shadow over the Manhattan District and its successor agencies for the next five decades. Only a human experiment would confirm the usefulness of Langhamas test. aIt was not until the first human tracer experiment had been performed in April 1945 (with the help of the medical section of the Manhattan District) that the above tests could be evaluated with any degree of certainty,a Hempelmann later wrote.49
7.
PLANNING THE EXPERIMENT.
In late March of 1945, Louis Hempelmann checked out a sedan from the motor pool and drove down to Santa Fe to pick up Hymer Friedell. The trip down the canyon was harrowing even for those scientists who didnat have Hempelmannas delicate const.i.tution: thirty-five miles of dust and curves and one swooping bridge, ten feet wide and two hundred fifty feet long, to cross.
Friedell, clad in a brown Army uniform, had come from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Warren had come to rely heavily on Friedell: aI used him for my acrying wall,a you might say,a Warren remembered years later.1 aI tried my ideas out on him and if he thought they were good, fine; if he didnat then Iad look for the problem.a Hempelmann and Friedell rumbled past the Indians hawking their wares on the Santa Fe Plaza and then headed in a northwesterly direction back toward Los Alamos. Despite the Corps of Engineersa efforts to smooth the road, it was so narrow and b.u.mpy from rainstorms and heavy traffic that the sedans often had to be sent to the motor pool for repairs following the punishing trips. The two doctors stopped once to fix a flat tire somewhere between the bosque, the lush cottonwood forest that outlines the Rio Grande, and the bone-colored cliffs that mark the last dusty miles into Los Alamos.2 Above them, hawks rode the spring thermals, their eyes probing the powdery red vistas for prey. The air was dry enough to cause nosebleeds.
As the dark sedan inched up the switchbacks, climbing higher and higher into the sky, now a vast blue, the two doctors may have talked of the upcoming meeting. Or they may have judged the matter too sensitive and stuck to chitchat about the war. The nationas attention had been riveted on Iwo Jima, a small island in the Pacific, where one of the bloodiest battles of the war was winding down. The Fourth and Fifth Marine divisions had gone from hole to hole and from cave to cave trying to wrest the small island from the j.a.panese. They had succeeded, but at a heavy price: 5,885 Marines had been killed and 17,272 wounded. Using Iwo Jima as a forward air base, Major General Curtis LeMayas B-29s began their devastating, nightly firebomb raids on Tokyo and other major j.a.panese cities. Although j.a.pan soon realized it was doomed to be defeated militarily, its troops fought on ferociously, determined to take as many Americans to the grave with them as they could.
In Europe, the war was drawing to a close. The Allies were ma.s.sing at the Rhine River, Germanyas traditional western frontier. Staring defeat in the face, Hitler vowed to continue the war and ordered that anything which might be of use to the enemies of Germany be destroyed. Fortunately, Albert Speer, his minister of armaments and war, and a handful of Army officers were able to convince industrialists and politicians to ignore Hitleras scorched-earth instructions.
In Los Alamos, the atomic bomb project was moving forward at a relentless pace. Beginning on February 2, 1945, the first kilogram amounts of plutonium had begun arriving from Hanford.3 The bomb material, which was in the form of a thick, jellylike mixture, was placed into shielded, wooden boxes and transported by Army ambulances. Ambulances were chosen because they were seen all over the country and raised no suspicions.4 As an added precaution, the drivers, who did not know what they were transporting, were instructed to take different routes and avoid stopping at the same places to eat. Occasionally Colonel Franklin Matthias, the military officer in charge of Hanford, would have counterintelligence officers tail the ambulances to make sure the drivers werenat developing habits that might endanger their precious cargoes. At Fort Douglas, Utah, the ambulance drivers would deposit their boxes with a military officer and drive back to Hanford. Los Alamos drivers then would pick up the boxes and take them on to the lab. There were usually two trips per week.
The deliveries, Hempelmann admitted in a sworn deposition taken in 1979 on behalf of a former worker who was suing the lab, were about ten times what the laboratory could handle safely. The contamination grew so severe, he added, that aif it had not been that we had to get the bomb made as soon as possible, all work would have stopped.a5 The plutonium quickly spread beyond the confines of the technical area. The wind, always an unpredictable companion in the desert, undoubtedly picked up a few stray atoms and scattered them beyond the fences. But most of the plutonium that slipped beyond the site came from the labas waste water, which initially was dumped into the streams and canyons that angled down from the mesa. Los Alamos and Pueblo creeks were crackling with radioactivity.6 It was highest where the water from the contaminated laundry drained into Los Alamos Creek. Along the laundry ditch, plutonium measured 144,000 disintegrations per minute per liter, about 325 times the allowable amount of plutonium that can be released into sewers today.7 Hempelmann warned that the contaminated canyons, while not a health hazard, presented the lab with serious legal problems: Itas quite possible that future illnesses or diseases contracted by a person who has blundered into a contaminated area may be connected by this person with his contact with radioactive materials.8 Unless we can state categorically that all contaminated areas have been completely enclosed by child-proof and dog-proof fences, it will be extremely difficult to convince a jury that the project was not at fault. The cost of good fencing, although considerable, would undoubtedly be less than that of one or two successful lawsuits against the project. In addition to the monetary aspects of such court proceedings, the bad public relations which would result would cause the project inestimable harm.
At a laboratory meeting more than two decades later, Thomas Ship-man said, aEverybody had his own contaminated dump.9 Today we think we know where all of these were, but I wouldnat want to guarantee it.a The contamination drifted down the canyons, swept along in the raging waters that materialized suddenly when storms lashed the mesa. Scientists detected plutonium in the Rio Grande, one of the great rivers of the West, only four years after the material had been discovered by Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues in Berkeley.10 Friedell had made the long, arduous trip to Los Alamos to discuss the human plutonium experiment the laboratory had been moving toward even before the vial had exploded in Don Mastickas face. Friedell, like the Los Alamos scientists, knew that human guinea pigs would be needed to learn more about how plutonium was metabolized and excreted in the body. In a memorandum written two months before the meeting, which was not decla.s.sified until 1994, Friedell stated: aIn conjunction with the experiments conducted on animals, it is expected that on selected human subjects tracer studies with product [plutonium] would be made.a11 On Friday, March 23, 1945, Friedell sat down with Louis Hempelmann and other Los Alamos doctors and scientists to hash out details of the proposed experiment.12 Oppenheimer, who had grown so anxious over the bomb project that he sometimes was forced to take sleeping pills, aoccasionallya dropped in, recalled Friedell, who was one of the only people still alive in the 1990s who attended the meeting and had firsthand knowledge of the experiment.13 The animosity between Los Alamos and Manhattan Project headquarters in Oak Ridge had been increasing steadily, and the meeting undoubtedly was tense. Both Hempelmann and Oppenheimer felt the Manhattan Project had not come through with the help they had been promised. Originally Los Alamos had planned to leave the biological studies to other sites, but the lab was not getting the answers it needed quickly enough and had begun its own research program.14 Friedell told DOE interviewers in 1995 that he wasnat aterribly enthusiastica about the experiment but felt it needed to be done.15 aNow my own recollection is that Dr. Hempelmann was in favor of the program, but he wasnat wildly enthusiastic.16 I would say that the one that was more enthusiastic, was pushing this more, was Wright Langham.a Until the war intervened, Langhamas future had looked like an unbroken stream of quiet days on the plains, studying the swirling patterns of sun-parched soil and conferring with ranchers on improving the yield of their cattle herds. Born in Winsburro, Texas, in 1911, Langham graduated in 1934 from Oklahoma Panhandle A&M College in Goodwell and received a masteras in chemistry from Oklahoma A&M College in Still-water a year later.17 His aingenious studies of patterns of soil drifting in the dust bowl,a wrote Louis Hempelmann, so impressed the head of the University of Coloradoas biochemistry department that Langham was invited to enroll as a Ph.D. candidate.18 After obtaining his doctoral degree in organic chemistry, Langham worked for a year as a research chemist at the Met Lab in Chicago and then transferred to Los Alamos in March of 1944 where he helped to develop the detection technique for plutonium. Over the next decades, he became one of the worldas leading experts in the toxicology of plutonium, earning him the nickname Mr. Plutonium from his colleagues.
Langham was extremely bright but unsuited for the delicate tasks of the laboratory. His hands trembled so much that once he accidentally p.r.i.c.ked himself with a needle filled with plutonium while trying to inject a rat, Louis Hempelmann recalled. aHe came over to see me, and he was the most embarra.s.sed person I think I have seen in my life.a19 Langham was hard driving, immensely ambitious, and often impatient. But beneath the exterior, Hempelmann observed, was an aunderlying gentleness and good will.a20 By the time Langham reached Los Alamos, the Oklahoma Panhandle, with its stench of feed lots and sound of bawling cattle, was a distant memory. Langham was a pipe-smoking scientist, all tweeds and bowties, with a thin mustache stenciled across his upper lip.
Now here he was taking part in a discussion about a human experiment. In the preceding months, at laboratories in Rochester, Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Alamos, dogs, rats, mice, and even rabbits had been injected with plutonium or forced to breathe in large amounts of plutonium-contaminated air. Then their bodies or organs were reduced to ashes in ovens and dissolved in acid, and the plutonium was extracted and measured. As expected, the animals who received the largest amounts suffered severe damage and death. Hemorrhages appeared on internal organs. Spleens, thymus glands, and adrenals shrunk dramatically. Livers turned yellow and necrotic. Lymphomas and bone sarcomas were induced. Precancerous conditions appeared at injection sites, and rats that breathed in the vapors developed acute pneumonia.
Although the scientists initially believed that plutonium was fifty times less hazardous than radium, by the spring of 1945 they had begun to realize that plutonium in larger amounts could actually be thirty times more hazardous than radium.21 From their animal studies, they had discovered that plutonium gravitated to more vulnerable parts of the body than radium. Radium deposited itself in mineralized bone, which is generally