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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