Reply #23: Dorothy Legarreta [View All]

[Octafish]

I made a most serious mistake, misspelling the name of the woman who lost her life making the above information public.

MODS: There should be no copyright problems as the following is from a document made during a government sponsored conference. Thank you!


Human Radiation Experiments

EXCERPT...

22 Dorothy Legarreta was a graduate
23 student worker who, during the Manhattan Project,
24 smashed contaminated glassware in the laboratory of
25 Joseph Hamilton at the UC/Berkeley Radiation

1 Laboratory. Twenty years later a son died of acute
2 lymphoblastic leukemia, and Dorothy had surgery for a
3 large thyroid tumor.
4 Dorothy founded the National
5 Association of Radiation Survivors, and as the first
6 independent research to examine Hamilton's papers
7 at the Bancroft Library, she discovered the now
8 infamous 1950 memo in which he warned against doing
9 certain whole-body radiation experiments n humans,
10 the very same ones which Eugene Saenger and his team
11 would later conduct, because to do so would, in
12 Hamilton's words, quote, "have a little of the
13 Buchenwald touch," unquote.
14 Dorothy publicized this memo and began
15 to uncover the full extent of the human
16 experimentation program in 1982. Around that time
17 she filed the first the Freedom of Information Act
18 request on human experimentation with the Department
19 of Energy, the response to which I would urge this
20 Committee to obtain, which led more or less directly
21 to the 1986 Markey Report.
22 On November first, 1988, while
23 completing a book about the experimentation program,
24 Dorothy's car mysteriously ran off the road and into
25 a tree just north of here on Highway 101. Her

1 briefcase, though reported found at the scene,
2 disappeared.
3 Dorothy Troxell, whom we all knew as
4 "Dottie," and again Bruce referred to her before,
5 hired on as a worker at the AEC's Kansas City's plant
6 in 1952. She helped build the components of the
7 first hydrogen bomb, and was later assigned to
8 calibrate radiation detection devices for use at the
9 test sites by holding them up to a Cobalt-60 source.
10 In 1957 a careless accident by a
11 co-worker left that source unshielded. Dottie and
12 her co-worker were exposed to lethal levels of gamma
13 radiation, and over the following days and weeks
14 Dottie developed symptoms of Acute Radiation
15 sickness.
16 It was expected that Dottie would die
17 and become the perfect autopsy specimen, so rather
18 than telling Dottie what had happened to her and was
19 happening to her, her employer at Bendix, and AEC,
20 chose to turn her into a scientific experiment. It
21 was the perfect experiment of opportunity, as you
22 call it, because the exposure had been to a
23 calibration source, so the doses to every organ, if
24 not tissue, could be gauged to perhaps an unmatched
25 degree of precision.

1 Dottie was told that her vaginal
2 hemorrhaging was due to a, the hormonal problem so
3 she would not question the administration of
4 estrogens, which were then under investigation as a
5 potential treatment for radiation injury. She was
6 then sent to Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New
7 Mexico, where again under the pretense of treating
8 some idiopathic dysfunctions, she was given a
9 splenectomy, another experimental treatment developed
10 in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
11 bombings, and later was studied at the Argonne
12 National Laboratory and Lovelace.
13 The splenectomy certainly did save
14 Dottie's life, but there was one problem. When
15 Dottie woke up after the surgery she found a scar
16 that ran the length of her torso from her neck to her
17 pubic mound.
18 When she asked what had been done to
19 her, a reasonable question under the circumstances,
20 she was told she could not be told because of, quote,
21 national security, unquote. We never have been able
22 to find out definitely what was done to Dottie at
23 Lovelace.
24 For 30 years Lovelace not only refused
25 to release her medical records, but denied she had

1 ever been a patient there. When I went to Lovelace
2 in 1986 in order to investigate Dottie's case, I was
3 told that not only was there no record of any patient
4 names Dorothea Troxell, but no AEC or contractor
5 employee had ever been treated at Lovelace, period.
6 Only a short time later Lovelace
7 relented and gave Dottie her medical records. These
8 records confirmed the splenectomy, but don't explain
9 the scar.
10 Dottie would joke that she must have
11 had the most enlarged spleen in medical history. But
12 seriously, we both suspected that since Dottie had
13 defiantly escaped the autopsy table, advantage had
14 been taken of her time on the operating table to
15 remove a selection of tissue samples and thereby
16 somehow contribute to this Country's national
17 defense.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet7/trsc07b.txt