June 4, 2000

THE PLUTONIUM WARS

Elmer Allen's tombstone in Italy, Texas, marks his divided life. From Jan. 26, 1911, to July 18, 1947 he was Elmer, husband of Fredna and father to Elmerine and William. From July 18, 1947, until June 30, 1991, he was CAL-3, one of 18 people injected with plutonium in a secret government research project that began in the closing days of World War II.

Eileen Welsome, then a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune, began investigating the plutonium story in 1987, when she came across a reference to it in a footnote to an article in an obscure journal. But the subjects were identified only by their code numbers. Over time, Welsome pieced together details of their lives and their medical histories. Without their names, though, a 40-year-old story was hardly news. "We hired you to be the neighborhood reporter," Welsome's editor told her.

Finally in July 1992 she noticed a passing reference to the small town of Italy and realized she would be able to find CAL-3. She called Italy City Hall and described the man she wanted to locate; an African American, about 80 years old, who had had his left leg amputated.

"You're looking for Elmer Allen," she was told, "but he died a year ago. Do you want his wife's number?" The story had come to life.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Welsome was gradually able to pry additional information out of the Department of Energy, which has inherited responsibility for the nation's nuclear research. By the time the Tribune published the story, some 16 months later, Welsome had identified five of the 18 subjects.

Making a virtue of necessity, the then-Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary, called a big-deal press conference Dec. 7, 1993, to announce a new policy of "openness," and publicly released voluminous records of radiation research on human subjects, including material that the Tribune had been seeking for months.

"Of course O'Leary would want to release it to the most powerful media," Welsome said recently in Denver, "but I was getting beat on my own story."

After the press conference, O'Leary spent weeks giving interviews, but Welsome was "way down the list."

Welsome, who now works for Denver's alternative weekly, Westword, won the 1994 Pulitzer prize for national reporting. In a new book, The Plutonium Files, she's told the story of the plutonium experiment and set it in the larger context of America's Cold War research. As she sums it up, "Thousands of Americans were used as laboratory animals in radiation experiments funded by the federal government.

"Many of the subjects were not asked for their consent or given accurate information about the nature of these experiments Some didn't learn they or their loved ones had been used as guinea pigs until 1994 or 1995. Some still don't know, and never will." Even in the 1940s most researchers should have known that conducting human experiments without the subjects' informed consent was wrong. When an advisory committee established after O'Leary's disclosures submitted its final report in October 1995, President Clinton said some of the tests "were unethical, not only by today's standards, but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted. They failed both the test of our national values and the test of humanity."

But even much later, researchers took great pains to ensure that the subjects wouldn't find out what had happened to them. In 1967, there was an accident at Rocky Flats, a weapons plant outside Denver that manufactured the triggers for thermonuclear weapons. An official from the Atomic Energy Commission called Patricia Durbin, a biophysicist at Berkeley who had worked in one of the laboratories studying radiation. She was able to find that several of the plutonium patients were still alive.

At the time they were chosen for the experiment, she explained in a 1969 letter to a hospital administrator, they were not expected to live long anyway. But some were misdiagnosed, Durbin wrote. "As a result, the human data thus obtained was classified 'Secret,' and so it remained for some years."

Durbin passed along her information to Robert Rowland, director for the Center for Human Radiobiology at Argonne National Laboratory, and the center began follow-up studies.

"Please note that outside of CHR we will (underline)never(end underline) use the word (underline)plutonium(end underline) in regard to these cases. 'These individuals are of interest to us because they may have received a radioactive material at some time' is the kind of statement to be made, if we need to say anything at all."

Elmer Allen agreed to participate in the follow-up study in 1973. With the government paying all the expenses, he and his wife took a train to Chicago, where tests were done on him at Argonne, and then went on to Rochester, N.Y., to Strong Memorial Hospital, where many of the injections had been done. "My mother thought this was big stuff coming from Italy, Texas," recalled Elmer's daughter, Elmerine. "She thought she was the queen of England. It wasn't like they said, 'We're testing you guys because we injected you with plutonium.' " Eventually 17 of the 18 plutonium patients were identified. "They were vulnerable, humble people, not likely to ask questions," Welsome said.

Fortunately, Welsome asked the questions, and she kept asking until she got the answers.

(853 words (missing from clips))