On July 18, 1947, doctors at the University of California at San Francisco drew a bull's-eye on Elmer Allen's left calf and injected radioactive plutonium into the center of the circle. Three days later, Allen's leg was amputated and sent for "radiological" study.

Allen, a Pullman porter before he was hobbled by the loss of his leg, was one of 18 people injected with plutonium in government-financed experiments between 1945 and 1947. Manhattan Project doctors authorized the experiments to determine how exposure to plutonium might affect lab workers.



The Plutonium Files
By Eileen Welsome
The Dial Press, 580 pp
List price: $26.95
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That research marked the start of one of the darkest chapters in American medicine, an uncontrolled and irresponsible plunge into radiation physiology that eventually would touch the entire population of the nation.

In The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome unveils the full story behind those chilling experiments and others (including open-air nuclear tests in Nevada) affecting millions of Americans.

Welsome's first reports on the experiments appeared in 1993 in the Albuquerque Tribune. Her series prompted the Clinton administration to establish a presidential investigative committee and declassify a trove of documents.

Drawing on those resources and her own relentless reporting, Welsome exposes a half-century of deceit and abuse of American citizens, carried on in the name of science. In the process, she reveals herself as a deft and able storyteller.

She describes decades of unethical experiments at hospitals and clinics around the country, funded by the government and run by prominent doctors who often shielded the true nature of their work from the public, their colleagues and their patients.

The scope of the shadowy research program is chilling, as is the scientists' disregard for how the experiments would affect their unwitting subjects. (Elmer Allen died of old age in 1991, 44 years after his experiment.)

Cancer patients were exposed to total body irradiation under the guise of treatment.

Pregnant women seeking prenatal care at the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic in Nashville were told to drink fruit juice "cocktails" laced with radioactive iron.

EXCERPT
The oatmeal was scooped out of square metal pans into the boys' bowls. Then the milk, foamy and cold, was poured over the cereal. Sometimes the radioactive isotopes were mixed into the cereal and sometimes they were mixed into the milk. The scientists had impressed upon the attendants how important it was that the boys clean their bowls. "You had to drink the milk. That was the thing," Gordon remembered.
Boys at the Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass., a facility for retarded children and orphans, were inducted into a "Science Club" and encouraged to eat radioactive oatmeal.

The club, Welsome notes, was the brainchild of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who needed subjects for their research. In return, the boys got trips to the beach and ballgames.

Many of the individual stories are heartbreaking.

Consider the plight of Simeon "Simmy" Shaw, a 4-year-old Australian with fatal bone cancer. A U.S. Army mercy flight brought Simmy and his mother to the USA in April 1946 so that doctors at the University of California at San Francisco could treat the boy and perhaps save his life.

Instead, doctors injected him with plutonium.

With consent from Simmy's mother, surgeons then removed bits of bone, muscle and other tissues for lab analysis. Simmy's mother consented because she believed the doctors were genuinely trying to cure her son. They were not. They knew Simmy's cancer was terminal.

Once the doctors had the specimens they needed for their research, Welsome reports, mother and son were abandoned and forgotten.

Then there were massive military exercises built around atomic bomb shots, to determine whether military personnel could function on a "nuclear battlefield."

Thousands more troops were exposed to radiation from bomb blasts at Bikini Atoll. Sailors labored unprotected for weeks, clearing radioactive debris from a ghost fleet anchored at ground zero.

In 1947, as the experiments were unfolding, Nuremberg prosecutors were completing the trial of Nazi doctors who had used concentration camp prisoners in grotesque experiments.

At the trial's end, prosecutor James McHaney summed up: "It is the most fundamental tenet of medical ethics and human decency that the subjects volunteer for the experiment after being informed of its nature and hazards. This is the clear dividing line between the criminal and the non-criminal."

Clinical researchers in the USA routinely ignored the lessons of Nuremberg, doctors would later testify before the Clinton advisory panel on human radiation experiments.

Terminally ill patients were particularly vulnerable, but women, children, unborn fetuses, minorities, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, prisoners, alcoholics, and poor people of all ages and ethnic groups were victimized by unethical experimenters.

By the time the full story emerged, most of the doctors involved had died and were beyond punishment.

The Clinton task force's conclusions, in Welsome's estimation, were "timid," though she praises the president for his forceful apology on behalf of the government.

Welsome has written an important and powerful book. Incredibly, it's all true.