Names Given In Cold War Tests 1960s Radiation Experiments On Inmates Prompt Lawsuits
Another Cold War secret is out.
The names of 63 Washington state prisoners whose testicles were bombarded with X-rays in a series of human experiments in the 1960s have been disclosed in a federal lawsuit.
It’s the first time the roster, obtained from one of the prisoners, has been made public.
According to the list, 22 of the inmates who volunteered for the experiments at the state prison in Walla Walla are dead. One escaped from prison and disappeared.
Thirty-six are free. Most of those men are in their late 50s and 60s, with 25 living in Washington. Four are behind bars, including two at the Airway Heights Corrections Center.
The status of one - identified only as Prisoner No. 64 - is “unknown at this time.”
A team of lawyers who sued last December on behalf of former inmate Robert E. White of Seattle got the names through the legal discovery process. They want the case declared a class action so they can represent all the men.
The lead attorneys are from the Berger and Montague firm of Philadelphia, known for its high-profile cases, including the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the massive Hanford downwinders case.
They are suing Dr. C. Alvin Paulsen, the University of Washington fertility expert who conducted the experiments; UW, which administered the $505,000 in federal money that paid for them; state prison officials; two Hanford contractors; and officials from the Atomic Energy Commission, a Cold War weapons agency that authorized the experiments.
The lawyers are asking for unspecified damages and a medical monitoring fund to track the prisoners’ health problems.
Two Airway Heights inmates who volunteered for the experiments say they’re happy the names of most of the participants finally are known.
“As soon as I saw this list, the past flashed back,” said Don Byers, 61.
“We hung out together. But some of these men died really young,” Byers said in an interview last week.
Since there’s been no follow-up, nobody knows whether there’s a connection between the prisoners’ deaths and the experiments.
Byers said his genitals were zapped with 300 rads of radiation - equivalent to about 300 chest X-rays - once in 1967. He developed a painful discharge after leaving prison the following year, but could not reach Paulsen for advice despite the doctor’s promise to always be available to the men.
“We were used, abused and discarded,” Byers said.
Byers has been in and out of prison since and is serving an armed robbery sentence at Airway Heights. He filed suit against Paulsen in 1995.
Melvin “Mike” Briggs, 57, another volunteer, is serving a life sentence for murder. He got 100 rads to his genitals in December 1968. It says the test lasted five minutes, 22 seconds.
Briggs said lesions developed later on his body, and that a cyst on his penis was surgically removed in 1982.
Briggs sued in January 1996. His attorney, William Edelblute of Spokane, recently reached a confidential cash settlement with Paulsen - a first among Washington state prisoners. As part of the settlement, neither Paulsen nor UW admitted wrongdoing.
Briggs “plans to seek independent medical exams and pay for them on his own,” Edelblute said Thursday.
Briggs still is suing Hanford contractor Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, which advised Paulsen on radiation doses and examined changes to some of the men’s sperm after the X-ray experiments.
Paulsen’s attorney, David Martin of Seattle, declined to comment on the settlement. Martin’s secretary said Friday he’s “under instructions” not to talk about the case.
In a 1994 interview with The Spokesman-Review, Paulsen said he wanted to find the radiation dose that would make men temporarily sterile.
He used prisoners as human guinea pigs “because they weren’t going anywhere,” he said.
The AEC paid for his work. The agency was interested in radiation’s effect on the fertility of nuclear workers, astronauts and soldiers.
His experiments ended in 1971 after criticism of their ethics and legality by Audrey Holliday, a prison psychologist. She clashed with her boss, Prisons Director William Conte, who was inclined to let the experiments continue, documents show.
In a 1994 series, The Spokesman-Review identified four of Paulsen’s subjects: Briggs, Byers, James Bailey of Seattle and Martin Smith of Colorado. Another, Don Kreitz of Post Falls, stepped forward later.
Paulsen said Smith was a “control” who got no radiation, but did receive a testicular biopsy in 1966.
It is not known how many inmates were used as controls. But in similar experiments among Oregon inmates, 366 men volunteered and 67 men were irradiated.
The newspaper’s efforts to identify the rest of the men were rebuffed by Paulsen, the UW, the Washington Department of Corrections and the AEC’s successor, the U.S. Department of Energy.
Paulsen said he wouldn’t release the names without a court order.
“When an investigator conducts any human experimentation there is an agreement that the volunteer shall remain anonymous unless he gives the investigator permission to divulge his name,” Paulsen said in 1994.
He also said the prisoners told him when the experiments ended they didn’t want to be tracked for follow-up because they wanted privacy.
Several of the men challenged that assertion.
“We never told him that, and nobody ever asked us,” Byers said.
Paulsen was elusive when inmates had health concerns, Byers said.
“Paulsen and his aides had said, ‘Call us, we’ll take care of you,’ but you couldn’t get to any of them,” Byers said.
“You couldn’t talk to that man,” said Kreitz, who left prison for good in 1972. He said he tried in vain to reach Paulsen about pain in his genital area.
The lack of follow-up in Washington is in marked contrast to Oregon, where Paulsen’s mentor, Dr. Carl Heller of Seattle, ran similar experiments.
In a memo, Heller suggested the men get yearly chest X-rays for 20 to 25 years, “since any tumor forming in the testis is likely to (spread) to lung tissue.” He suggested including Paulsen’s subjects as well, “because the numbers, at best, are going to be small for drawing any general conclusions.”
But Heller had a severe stroke in 1972, and nothing happened. In 1988, the Oregon Legislature ordered a follow-up. Dr. Jim Ruttenber of the University of Colorado Medical School was hired to design a follow-up for the Oregon inmates.
But Washington state officials told Ruttenber they weren’t interested in a similar follow-up.
Paulsen “went off the wall” when Ruttenber approached him in 1988 to suggest compiling a computer database to notify the men and offer medical exams. “He almost threw me out of his office,” Ruttenber said.
“I don’t remember being hostile with him, but I may have been,” Paulsen said.
The AEC also originally intended long-term medical care for the prisoners, but never followed through. By the mid-‘70s, the agency fought disclosure when Congress sought details of the experiments.
In 1975, Paulsen told federal officials no medical follow-up was necessary and his malpractice insurance would cover any lawsuits resulting from the experiments, according to a federal memo.
Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary renewed interest in the subject in 1993 when she condemned the use of humans in government radiation experiments.
In October 1995, a White House advisory committee concluded the prison experiments were unethical because the inmates were a captive population incapable of true consent.
Last December, the Berger and Montague firm filed separate federal lawsuits in Oregon and Washington on behalf of the prisoners.
The two sides are fighting over where the Washington case should be heard: Seattle or Spokane.
Lawyers for the prisoners want it heard in Seattle, home of Paulsen and the UW, said Stanley Siegel, lead counsel at Berger and Montague.
The defendants favor Spokane because the experiments took place in Eastern Washington, said Mike Madden, senior torts counsel in the attorney general’s office.
He’s representing Robert Rhay, former Washington State Penitentiary warden, and Conte, the former state prisons director, who are named as defendants.
U.S. District Judge Frem Nielsen of Spokane has asked U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly of Seattle to rule on the venue issue.
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