A Subterranean Channel of
Secret-Keeping
AFTER THE WAR Harold Hodge became the leading figure promoting
water fluoridation in the United States and around the world, while the
University of Rochester served as a kind of queen bee for cold war-era
dentistry, hatching a generation of dental-school researchers who were
unanimous in support of a central role for fluoride in their profession.
If you look at the credentials of the people who have been impor tant in
academic dentistry, you will find that Hodge s interests here at Rochester
were responsible for many of those people getting their expertise, noted
the toxicologist Paul Morrow, who worked alongside Hodge for almost
twenty years. The fluoridation of public water supplies was the crowning
glory of Harold Hodges career. He pioneered [fluoridation] very
adamantly," Morrow pointed out. "That was one of the most difficult
things he did. There was an extraordinary resistance to the use of rat
poison in public water supplies.
Today, however, revelations that Hodge concealed wartime infor
mation about fluoride's central nervous system effects in atomic workers,
secretly studied the health of the subjects of the water fluoridation
experiment at Newburgh, New York, on behalf of the Manhattan Project,
and gave information on fluoride safety to the U.S. Congress that later
proved inaccurate (see chapter ii), all call into question Hodge s agenda as
the grand architect of Americas great postwar fluoride experiment.
Even during his lifetime, researchers had begun to examine his career
more closely. In 1979 a journalist, John Marks, reported that
92
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hodge had helped the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its search
for a mind-control drug. In his book, The Search for the Manchurian
Candidate, Marks described how the CIA had given the hallucinogenic
drug LSD to unsuspecting Americans. He wrote that Hodge and his
Rochester research team had been pathfinders in that research program,
figuring out a way to radioactively tag LSD.'
I knew he had something to do with the CIA, but that is all, recalls the
scientist and historian J. Newell Stannard, who worked alongside Hodge at
Rochester in '947
Marks may have only scratched the surface of Dr. Hodge s work for the
CIA. The journalist filed Freedom of Information Act requests and
received scores of heavily redacted files. Although the names of people and
institutions have mostly been blacked out, Marks identified several of the
files as referring to CIA contract work at the University of Rochester. The
letters, reports, and accounting statements make chilling reading. They are
the bureaucratic account of a laboratory and its scientists eagerly hunting
for chemicals to selectively affect the central nervous system and to
produce symptoms even more bizarre than LSD.
The CIA studied fluoride as a potential mind-controlling substance. A
March 16, 1966, memo from the TSD (most likely Technical Services
Division) titled Behavioral Control Materials and Advanced Research
reports on the disabling effects of dinitro-fluoride derivatives of acetic
acid that are currently undergoing clinical tests.'"
For many, Harold Hodge s image of respectability collapsed completely
in the late 1990s. The reporter Eileen Welsome found a once-classified
memo that implicated Hodge in perhaps the most diabolical human
experiments ever conducted in the United States. On September 5, 1945, he
attended a University of Rochester planning meeting with several other
scientists. Their purpose: to discuss the research "protocol" for injecting
plutonium into unsuspecting and uninformed patients at the University of
Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital.' A second AEC document,
reporting on the experiments, thanks Harold Hodge ... [who] participated
in the early planning of the work and frequently made general and specific
suggestions which contributed much to the success of the program. ' In the
1990s the federal government settled a lawsuit with
A SUBTERRANEAN CHANNEL OF SECRET-KEEPING
93
family members of those plutonium experiment victims, paying
approximately $400,000 to each family.'
Hodge oversaw additional injections in Rochester hospital patients
during the late 19405, to find out how much uranium would produce
"injury.' In the fall and winter of that year seven people would be injected
with uranium in the Metabolic Unit at Rochester s Strong Memorial
Hospital. A tunnel connecting the Army Annex to the Hospital permitted
the uranium and plutonium to be transported to the ward in secrecy.
On October I, 1946, "a young white, unmarried female, aged 24 was
"injected with 584 micrograms of uranium." She was "essentially normal
except for chronic undernutrition which probably resulted from emotional
maladjustments, the report stated. In early 1947 a sixty-one-year-old white
male alcoholic was admitted to the hospital with a suspected gastric lesion.
Although the patient did not appear ill, the scientists noted, as he had no
home, he willingly agreed to enter the Metabolic Unit. Like the other
patients, the man did not know he was the subject of an experiment. Nor
was there any attempt to argue that the uranium would have any therapeutic
effect on his condition. Injections were explicitly given to find the dose
of ... uranium which will produce minimal injury to the human kidney, a
summary noted. The Rochester scientists believed that a human subject
should tolerate 70 micrograms of uranium per kilogram of body weight.
Accordingly, on January to, the same cooperative ... short, gray-haired
man was injected with 71 micrograms of uranium per kilogram.'
In the 1950s Dr. Hodge was a key figure in the Boston Project. In this
series of experiments, Hodge arranged for Dr. William Sweet of the
Massachusetts General Hospital to inject the highest possible dose" of
various uranium compounds into patients hospitalized with brain cancer.
The researchers wanted to learn the quantity of uranium to which atomic
workers could safely be exposed.'
In 1995 a former senior government physicist, Karl Z. Morgan,
described Hodge during these cold war years as a particular enthu siast of
human experiments. Morgan had visited Hodges laboratory and years later
told government investigators that Dr. Hodge had been one of the
Rochester scientists itching, you might say, to get closer to Homo
Sapiens. 9
94
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Trapezius Squeeze
TWO FORMER ROCHESTER students, Judith and James Mac-Gregor,
were able to get a close look at the unique influence Hodge exerted over the
U.S. medical establishment. The pair had followed Hodge to San Francisco
in 1969, when the sixty-five-year-old became professor emeritus at the
University of San Francisco Medical School. His office door was
frequently open, and they listened in awe as the old man clutched the
telephone, reaching across the country, making decisions on faculty
appointments at medical schools, on the composition of scientific boards
and panels, and on the various national committees that set standards for
chemical exposure in the
workplace. 10
"He would be talking to leaders all over the country. Herb Stok-inger
[the former head of occupational medicine at PHS], people that chaired
public health committees for the government would be asking for
comments or recommendations on appointments on senior committees,
and things like that, stated Judith MacGregor. He was just incredible at
getting things done, she added.
A great persuader, noted J. Newell Stannard, who worked with Hodge
in the 1940s at the University of Rochester. He had people that would be
grateful to do most anything if Harold asked them to do it.
While Hodge wielded the cold steel of political power in the medical
world, he generally did so by staving behind the scenes. According to
colleagues, his influence was subtle and covert. "He was supremely apt at
getting difficult decisions made in the way that he thought they should be
without ever raising his voice or appearing to be confrontational,"
remarked James MacGregor, now a senior official at the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration. "He was perhaps the world's master at that," he
added.
He could leave the fewest ripples on the water, said Judith
Mac-Gregor. More than a decade after his death, she can still feel the old
man s fingers slipping around her shoulder and neck, her resolve buckling.
She called this Hodges trapezius squeeze — his signature greeting, which
involved taking hold of the shoulder muscle called the trapezius and
slowly tightening his fingers, all the while looking into your eyes.
MacGregor called Hodge Grandpapa behind his back — but she was
powerless at the old mans touch. He would
A SUBTERRANEAN CHANNEL OF SECRET- KEEPING
95
kind of squeeze your muscle a little, she remembered. It was like a
handshake. You knew that when he gave you the trapezius squeeze he
was going to ask for something. And you knew that you were going to do
it. You couldnt refuse the guy.
Dr. Harold Hodge, it now seems, performed a trapezius squeeze on us
all.
"A Whole Song and Dance"
PROBING HODGES SECRET fluoride work at the University of
Rochester is difficult. Hodge died in 1990. His archive remains closed.
And even the multimillion dollar resources of a U.S. Presidential
Committee in the 1990S could not breach Rochester s cold war defenses,
according to the attorney Dan Guttman, a top investigator in that effort.
Guttman has a quick sense of humor and a sharp mind. He needed both
in 1994 for his new job as executive director of President Bill Clintons
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE, also
known as the Clinton Radiation Commission). The attorney had gone to
law school with Hillary Clinton. He was tapped by the president to
investigate the hundreds of radiation experiments that scientists had
performed on unsuspecting U.S. citizens during the cold war — including
some on pregnant women, retarded children, and prisoners."
Perhaps the most notorious were the experiments described above with
plutonium and uranium that Hodge had helped to plan at the University of
Rochester. Guttman therefore wanted access to the University's cold
war-era files. He had attended the school as an undergraduate in the 1960s
but was "stunned" to learn that his alma mater had been "the Grand
Central Station of bio-medical research" for the Manhattan Project.' The
former student approached Rochester's President Thomas A. Jackson at an
alumni gathering. On President Clintons behalf he asked for Jackson s c
ooperation in obtaining documents from the university archives. Jackson
seemed completely uninterested, Guttman recalled. I was very disturbed
by the University s reaction which was, for practical Purposes, obstructing
fact finding."
It was not just the University of Rochester who stiffed the U.S.
Presidents Human Radiation Commission. Guttman found himself
96
CHAPTER SEVEN
sitting at a table with Pentagon bureaucrats and lawyers, demanding secret
military documents about medical experiments performed on U.S. citizens.
At first the Defense Department seemed helpful, Guttman explained; but
when the Commission stumbled upon the existence of an inner-sanctum
military organization — which appeared to have been in charge of cold
war-era human experiments by both military and civilian agencies — the
Pentagon suddenly froze. Guttman remembers a specific meeting with top
military officials. He asked for all existing records of the Joint Panel on the
Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare, as the secret group had been known.
The Joint Panel had included representatives of the CIA, the military, the
PHS, the NIH, and the AEC.
The reaction of the Defense people was, We are not supposed to give
you that," Guttman recalled. We said Excuse us? This was the whole
point [of the Clinton Radiation Commission]! Guttman asked for the
documents nicely. He asked in writing. He asked for six months. He was
stiffed. It was stunning, he said. All the documents were allegedly
destroyed, shredded, he says he was finally told. We went through a
whole song and dance.
Guttman hoped that the Joint Panel documents would shed light on
so-called cut-out or work for others arrangements, in which the true
sponsor of a medical research project is concealed. For example, Guttman
explained, is the CIA having its work done by some innocuous entity that
is then funded by some other agency? We were hoping that some of the
work for others might have become more apparent through the documents
of this interagency group. ( Dr. Harold Hodges work for the CIA at
Rochester had been done using precisely such a cut-out arrangement,
according to the journalist John Marks. The Geschickter Fund for Medical
Research — a Washington, DC, foundation sympathetic to the CIA — had
nominally provided Hodge funds, although money secretly came from the
government intelligence agency.)
The shredding of public documents about human experiments and
military involvement with civilian health agencies during the cold war left
Guttman scratching his head. You ask as a citizen, what was that about?
he said. But the Clinton Radiation Commission was able to make a historic
discovery. Guttman s team learned that documents had been classified
during the cold war, not just to
A SUBTERRANEAN CHANNEL OF SECRET-KEEPING
97
protect secrets from the Russians, but also to hide medical information
from U.S. families. When the Radiation Commission got started,
Guttman explained, people thought that [the government] kept too
many secrets but that was for national security reasons. What we
discovered was that there was a subterranean channel of
secret-keeping, where those on the inside knew that this was not
national security, and could not be kept secret for national security
reasons, and they had a whole other category, embarrassment to the
government, resulting damage to the programs, or liability to the
government and its contractors.
Censorship of the health claims of injured atomic workers, and of
medical reports produced by bomb program scientists, was performed
by the Insurance Branch and by the Public Relations section of the
AEC and the Manhattan Project." Guttman s team found explicit
instructions to medical censors, written by the AEC s medical advisor
at Oak Ridge. They are worth citing at length:
There are a large number of papers which do not violate
security, but do cause considerable concern to the
Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch and may
well compromise the public prestige and best interests of
the Commission. Papers referring to levels of soil and
water contamination surrounding Atomic Energy
Commission installations, idle speculation on the future
genetic effects of radiation and papers dealing with
potential process hazards to employees are definitely
prejudicial to the best interests of the government. Every
such release is reflected in an increase in insurance
claims, increased difficulty in labor relations and
adverse public sentiment. Following consultation with
the Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch, the
following declassification criteria appears desirable. If
specific locations or activities of the Atomic Energy
Commission and/or its contractors are closely associated
with statements and information which would invite or
tend to encourage claims against the Atomic Energy
Commission or its contractor such portions of articles to
be published should be reworded or deleted.
98
CHAPTER SEVEN
The effective establishment of this policy necessitates review
by the Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch, as well
as by the Medical Division, prior to declassification."
Guttman was baffled by what he discovered. Harold Hodge and his
Rochester team had been given the job of monitoring workers' health
across the entire bomb-program complex — collecting and measuring
fluoride, uranium, and other toxic chemicals in the workers' urine — and
acting as a repository for their complete medical records." It had been a
massive undertaking. Tens of thousands of men and women were
employed in the factories making the atomic bomb. Rochester and DuPont
each acquired a new IBM punch-card tabulating machine, a forerunner of
the computer, to tabulate and analyze the data. Dan Guttman discovered
"boxes" of this raw information. But something was missing. The big
unanswered question" about the Rochester data, Guttman explained, was
the absence of any epidemiological analysis of worker health.
What was happening with all that worker safety data that was going to
Rochester, and what were they doing with it?" wondered Guttman. "I was
really hoping we would find more than just lots of charts, [that] we would
find somebody analyzing this stuff. Rochester was an arm of the
government, so there should have been some summary, something [like a
letter to the AEC stating]: Dear Head of the Division of Biology and
Medicine, this is what we are finding.' Where is all that stuff?" Guttman
asked. "Rochester was extremely uncooperative."
Guttman's committee was asked to uncover information about
human-radiation experiments. It had not asked questions about fluoride,
however. Was it possible the team had missed other human experiments
performed by the Manhattan Project and the AEC?
"Sure," Guttman told me. "On fluorine I would not be surprised if there
were missing experiments. I would be surprised if there were missing
radiation experiments, but fluorine, I wouldn't be surprised."
The University of Rochester did perform human experiments using
fluoride. We may never know exactly how many experiments,
A SUBTERRANEAN CHANNEL OF SECRET- KEEPING 99
nor the souls experimented upon. Nevertheless, a paper trail of
now-yellowing documents once again leads back to the "Manhattan
Annex" and the passageway to the Strong Memorial Hospital. Rochester
scientists gave fluoride to "patients having kidney diseases'" to determine
how much fluoride their damaged kidneys could excrete.' And in a single,
cryptic fragment of a declassified Rochester document, a chemical
compound, "boron trifluoride," is listed as being "inhaled" for thirty days.
Scientists took measurements, including dental studies and weight
response. One measure ment — item "H" — reads simply: "Human excretion
ofF.'"
Postscript: The New World
AMONIH AFTER the Hiroshima bombing, in September 1945 the Danish
health expert Kaj Roholm made his first trip to the United States. He
wanted to meet America's fluoride researchers and to study wartime
advances in American medicine.' Top doctors regarded him highly. The
Rockefeller Foundation offered financial support and arranged
introductions. Roholm traveled widely along the East Coast, visiting
hospitals and the medical schools at Yale, Harvard, and John's Hopkins.
After the horror and deprivation of wartime Europe, the Dane found the
country "inspiring and hospitable, though he did note that the absence of
public -health care made him think that it would be a catastrophe to get sick
in the United States." 20
At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Roholm met
with the senior dental officials Frank J. McClure and H. Trendley Dean.
There they discussed the fluoride problem." Before the war the American
Medical Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture had warned
of the health risk from small amounts of fluorides, and the American
Dental Association had editorialized against the idea of water
fluoridation. 21 But in his meetings Roholm discovered that the years of
conflict had wrought a profound change in Washington's views. "In the
United States it is common to associate fluoride as a less toxic element than
previously known," he reported. 2 '-
In 1944 for example, the Department of Agriculture had increased its
maximum accepted contaminant level for fluoride pesticides from 1.43
milligrams of fluoride per kilogram, to 7 mgs F per kgm.
100
CHAPTER SEVEN
And in the water-fluoridation experiments involving thousands of U.S.
citizens, fluoride was being added to public- water supplies in Newburgh,
New York, and Grand Rapids, Michigan."
Roholm saw the danger. He examined X-rays the PHS had taken from a
region of the United States where there were high levels of natural fluoride
in the water. The black-and-white images looked familiar. As he had
observed in the men and women poisoned by fluoride in the Copenhagen
cryolite factory, Roholm detected numerous cases of typical
osteosclerosis in the X-rays. The promise of better teeth appeared to be
worth a great deal to U.S. officials, the Dane mused with dry
understatement.
While the therapeutic concentration for this outcome [better teeth] is
close to the toxic limit," Roholm stated, "this, however, has not prevented
the Americans from performing several studies.
The mood was that of great optimism in Bethesda, he wrote. It will be
very interesting to see the results within the next five to ten years. '
Roholm returned to Denmark. Although he did not know it, his days
were numbered. He was appointed professor of public hygiene at the
University of Copenhagen on January I, 1948. In February he gave his
inauguration lecture to students on the history of Danish public-health
measures. Although his pithy style made the material come alive,
observers noted that the professor looked pale.' Roholms first lecture as a
professor would be his last; stomach cancer had begun its deadly march.
One month later Roholm entered the hospital.
The disease tore through his strong body like a wildfire. Each day his
best friend, Georg Brun, visited him in the Copenhagen hospital.
Throughout that grim March of 1948, as the scientist lay close to death at
the age of forty-six, he seemed unable to accept that his life was almost
over. Both men avoided the truth. I tried to say to him that he would be all
right," Brun said. "He wouldn't accept anything else. Roholm died of
cancer of the large intestine on March 29, 1948. He left a wife and two
young children.
Kaj Eli Roholm's death was a tragedy for his family and friends and for
the twentieth century — for all who rely on scientists to tell them the truth
about the chemicals they handle in the workplace and the risk from
industrial pollution.
8
Robert Kehoe and the
Kettering Laboratory
No comments:
Post a Comment