New books rekindle debate over radiation exposure

Thursday, Oct. 28, 1999 | 11:19 a.m.

More than 50 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the debate over the moral and ethical consequences from radiation exposure to humans and the environment refuses to go away.

Two books -- one published this month and the other due out next month -- turn the spotlight on formerly top-secret information from the drive to build better nuclear weapons and develop nuclear technology.

In "The Plutonium Files," already in bookstores, Eileen Welsome tells the stories of 18 people who were among hundreds of unwitting subjects of radiation experiments conducted by federal doctors, some at the Nevada Test Site, without the patients' knowledge.

The government took mostly poor and often young patients from the 1940s through the 1960s and injected radiation into their bloodstream, fed them radioactive food and exposed their whole bodies to nuclear elements in experiments designed to test the effects of radiation on human health.

Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for tracking down some of those patients, whose names were cloaked under the veil of top-secret government research, and telling their stories in a series in the Albuquerque Tribune. The book expands those tales.

Dr. John W. Gofman, a University of California, Berkeley, molecular biologist, maintains that modern medical uses of radiation pose as great a danger to health as those early experiments in his book, due out next month, titled "Radiation from Medical Procedures in the Pathogenesis of Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease."

The books add fuel to a fire of protest over nuclear experiments that has been building since the 1950s but in recent years has gained more media attention.

In her 490-page book Welsome put names and faces to subjects of top-secret radiations experiments whose identities were previously only numbers.

To find out the names of the people injected with plutonium, Welsome spent years gathering scraps of information. The face behind CAL-3 became a Texas Pullman porter, Elmer Allen. HP-3 was a quiet housewife in New York state named Eda Schultz Charlton. CAL-1 turned out to be Albert Stevens, a California house painter.

She writes that most of the victims were never told what they ingested or what was injected. Many of the experiments were repetitive or, at worst, poorly done, Welsome discovered.

"Perhaps worst of all the experiments were not just immoral science; they were bad science," Welsome writes.

"These scientists helped to shape the policies that have affected the health of thousands of Americans. Indeed, we are still reaping the consequences."

Her November 1993 series in The Albuquerque Tribune sparked enough public outrage for the Clinton administration to create the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

The committee spent the next two years investigating hundreds of federally sponsored human radiation experiments. Its 925-page final report came out on Oct. 3, 1995, the same day the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial was announced. Clinton apologized to those subjected to the radiation experiments, but his sound bite was drowned on television news by the flashy trial.

Recent news accounts show that the discomforting moral and ethical issues of nuclear development continue. The Las Vegas Sun has documented possible health effects in workers who toiled in the Test Site's tunnels from beryllium, silica and diesel fumes as well as radiation exposures.

The Toledo Blade documented how the U.S. government risked the lives of thousands of workers by knowingly exposing them to unsafe levels of beryllium. The Washington Post reported on workers' allegations of dangerous health, safety and environmental exposures at the DOE's Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Ky.

While the advisory committee's report was supposed to be the final word on the U.S. radiation experiments, the panel recommended that the government compensate a handful of victims, including the 18 identified plutonium cases.

Welsome noted that many experimental subjects and their families were disappointed with the government's response. "The American people, nevertheless, gained a vast amount of knowledge from the documents about the Cold War," she wrote.

"It's as if a submerged continent has risen to the surface," she concludes in the book. "There are peaks and valleys and still lots of shadows, but the contours are better understood.

"Much of the information is disturbing, shocking and will serve as a cautionary tale about the corrupting power of secrecy, the danger of special interest groups, the excesses of science and medicine and the need to monitor closely the activities of civilian and military weapons makers."

However, the danger goes on today and it is as insidious as exposure to medical X-rays, Gofman, physician and physicist, says in his new book, "Radiation from Medical Procedures in the Pathgenesis of Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease."

Almost all U.S. cancer deaths are caused by medical uses of X-rays, Gofman says, as well as the majority of all coronary heart disease.

Gofman does not advocate stopping X-ray procedures such as fluoroscopes used during surgery to place instruments inside the body or mammograms or other procedures to diagnose problems buried deep within organs.

What he does say is that the X-ray procedures can be done at lower doses and with less harm to people.

X-rays used in current medical practice could be cut by 50 percent, Gofman maintains.

"This means since we can cut radiation doses in half or to one-fourth," Gofman said in an interview, "we can remove a good part of the causation of these diseases and we can guarantee reduction in the future cancer and coronary diseases." That can be accomplished without losing the powerful diagnostic effects of X-rays.

"Our slogan is, 'Doses Down Now,'_thinspace" Gofman said, who added that current X-rays are creating the next century's cancer deaths.

As a 1943 graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Gofman earned his doctorate in nuclear and physical chemistry with the discovery of how uranium and other radioactive elements work. His faculty adviser was Glenn Seaborg, who later became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

By 1969 Gofman and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory colleague Arthur Tamplin had concluded that human exposure to radiation was much more serious than scientists had previously thought.

The two spoke out against a program for the peaceful use of atomic explosions known as Plowshare, which planned to explode hundreds or thousands of nuclear bombs under the Rocky Mountains to release radioactive natural gas. They also opposed the licensing of about 1,000 commercial nuclear power plants.

By 1973 the AEC -- now the Department of Energy -- had cut funds to Gofman's research on the effects of radiation on chromosomes, the material in a cell that carries the genes of life.

Gofman never stopped speaking about the dangers of overexposure to radiation.

He became a sharp critic of the federal approach to radiation exposure and testified in the civil trial of the "down winders," people living in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, against the federal government on the path of nuclear fallout from U.S. weapons experiments at the Test Site. While the people won in a Utah District Court, the federal government overturned the judge's ruling on appeal in 1984.