Traced: Patients Injected With Plutonium -- 18 In All Were Subjects Of Government Experiments

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Elmer Allen was declared paranoid after he claimed that he received a plutonium injection during a secret experiment. Now, a newspaper says, it turns out he was telling the truth.

The Albuquerque Tribune last week named Allen and four others who were part of a group of 18 people injected with plutonium in a secret government project in the 1940s. All are deceased.

The experiments have been reported. But no patients had been identified until the Tribune, through Freedom of Information Act and other sources, learned the names of five of the 18 injectees. The paper began its search six years ago.

Plutonium was injected at hospitals in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Rochester, N.Y.; Chicago and San Francisco for the Army's Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb. Scientists wanted to set safety standards for nuclear workers, the Tribune reported.

The recipients of the injections all supposedly were terminally ill, the paper said, but in fact some lived for decades afterward.

A 1986 House Energy and Commerce subcommittee report said the government experimented on hundreds of people to test the effects of radioactivity.

For Allen, a former railroad porter, it all began in September 1946 when his left knee was injured in an accident. The knee never healed, and on July 14, 1947, hospital pathologists concluded Allen had bone cancer.

Allen was injected in the left calf on July 18. The leg was amputated three days later. Tissue samples from the severed limb were studied for plutonium, the paper said.

The Tribune found a consent form for Allen, which did not give details of what he was told, and his family doubts he understood what was happening.

"I think it's very unfortunate that the government would do things like this to people who don't know any better," said his daughter, Elmerine Whitfield of Dallas.

She said her father often said he was used as a "guinea pig," but she learned only from the newspaper that plutonium had been used.

Family doctor David Williams of Waxahachie, Texas, said he diagnosed Allen as paranoid schizophrenic. Williams treated Allen from about 1970 until his death at age 80 in 1991.

He said the problem might have been present all Allen's life, but it "was certainly helped and did center around his feeling that he had been utilized as a younger man with this exposure to plutonium."

"It was difficult to tell whether to believe him or not," Williams told the newspaper.

He said he never saw effects attributable to plutonium, which can cause cancer. Elmerine Whitfield said her father's death certificate cites pneumonia resulting from emphysema. He had been a smoker most of his life, she said.

Thomas Stevens of Michigan, who asked that his hometown not be revealed, said he learned from the Tribune that his father, Albert, was injected with plutonium in 1945 in a San Francisco hospital.

"It's inconceivable that anything like this could have occurred. You think of something like this happening in other countries," he said.

Albert Stevens, a house painter from Healdsburg, Calif., was misdiagnosed with stomach cancer and lived for more than 20 years after he was injected. The newspaper quoted an unidentified scientist as saying that Stevens had received "many times the so-called lethal textbook dose" of plutonium.

The newspaper identified the other plutonium subjects as town supervisor Fred C. Sours from Gates, N.Y.; John Mousso, a laborer from East Rochester, N.Y.; and Eda Schultz Charlton, a Canandaigua, N.Y., homemaker.

The report said some were willing, but there is no record of informed consent for others. Some received doses 98 times the federal limit on internal radiation for nuclear workers at the time.

The subcommittee called on the Department of Energy to find and compensate those used in the experiments.