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 important 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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