Atomic Doctors by James L. Nolan

Author:James L. Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Plutonium Injections

Efforts by the doctors to understand the long-term consequences of radiation exposure took a rather dark turn following one of the earliest accidents in Los Alamos. This accident occurred on August 1, 1944, in Building D of the main Los Alamos lab, almost a year before the first critical assembly accident in the Pajarito Canyon. At the time, only very miniscule amounts of plutonium had been delivered to Site Y. So valuable were the microscopic plutonium samples that a special group was assigned for the sole purpose of recovering any plutonium that had been somehow misplaced, whether absorbed into rags or dropped on the floor, even to the point that “they were prepared to tear up the floor and extract the plutonium, if necessary.” According to Hempelmann, the “Recovery Group” would even “dissolve a bicycle.… They went to great extremes to recover everything.”79

On the morning of August 1, Don Mastick, a twenty-three-year-old chemist from Berkeley who had been recruited by Oppenheimer to join the secret project on the mesa, was working in Building D with a small glass vial containing ten milligrams of plutonium. When the neck of the vial accidentally snapped off, the liquid spilled out, some of which ricocheted off the wall in front of Mastick and splattered back into his mouth. Mastick carefully returned the broken vial to its wooden holder and then made his way to Hempelmann’s office to report the accident. After numerous mouth rinsings, using concoctions recommended by Stafford Warren, Hempelmann then pumped Mastick’s stomach. Demonstrating just how valuable were these small samples of plutonium at the time, after pumping Mastick’s stomach, Hempelmann handed to the young chemist the four-liter container of his vomit and instructed him to chemically extract the plutonium from it.80

The accident, as well as the toxic effects of plutonium in the lab more generally, caused considerable anxiety among the workers. Two weeks after the accident, Hempelmann sent a memo to Oppenheimer describing these worries and urging him to initiate research that would deepen understandings of the effects of radioactive materials on the human body.81 Hempelmann and the Health Group doctors simply didn’t know how Mastick’s body would handle the plutonium to which it had been inadvertently exposed. How much of the plutonium, for example, would be excreted from his body, and how quickly? How much would remain in his system, and what harm, if any, might it cause? Scientists had conducted some tests on rats in the Berkeley lab in an effort to answer these questions, but the extrapolation of their findings to humans remained uncertain.

In response to Hempelmann’s memo, Oppenheimer authorized “the development of methods of detection of plutonium in the excreta,” recognizing that these methods might involve “even human experimentation.”82 Two weeks later, Hempelmann confirmed plans to pursue, among other tests, “tracer experiments on humans to determine the percentage of plutonium excreted daily.”83 Oppenheimer fully supported and signed off on the program, though, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he wanted the tests conducted at sites other than Los Alamos.

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