Ch. 7. A Subterranean Channel of Secret-Keeping: the fluoride deception
by Christopher Bryson from archive.org
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.
https://www.blogger.com/null 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 
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