“Although these experiments did provide information on the retention and absorption of radioactive material by the human body, the experiments are nonetheless repugnant because human subjects were essentially used as guinea pigs and calibration devices.” – “American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens,” Congressional Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, 1986

This is a new series of articles where I explain various terms, catchphrases, and other confusing topics, as well as many secret government projects and agencies. If there are any subjects you’re interested in learning about, please include them in the comment section.

Unknown Risks

Manhattan Project personnel faced many issues working with recently discovered elements whose health effects were unknown. Scientists at the time had little understanding of the biochemical effects of plutonium or uranium, even as they and others attempted to build a bomb with these very elements.

Manhattan Project leaders understood the urgency of measuring the impact of radiation on workers and established a Health Division in 1942. The concern was due to both the nature and the scale of the Project. Dr. Robert Stone, the health director at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory during the war, wrote in 1943, “Never before has so large a collection of individuals been exposed to so much radiation.” Faced with the unknown dangers of radioactive materials, General Leslie Groves hired Dr. Stafford Warren, a radiologist from the University of Rochester, as the Chief Medical Officer of the Manhattan Engineer District in 1942. The health division had three main objectives: to protect the health of Project workers, protect the public from any risks arising from the operation of the Project, and study radiation hazards in order to establish tolerance doses and devise methods of treatment. The Division was split into four sections: a Medical section, a Health Physics section, a Biological Research section, and a Military section.

At laboratories around the country, scientists began working against the clock to understand the dangers facing Manhattan Project workers and how to protect them. Data was taken from instruments, blood and urine samples, and physical exams. Radiation experiments were performed on animals at laboratories in Chicago, Berkeley, and Rochester. However, medical experts agreed that this information was not sufficient to determine radiation guidelines for workers. As a report from Los Alamos Laboratory scientists published in 1962 stated, “It seemed imperative, therefore, to determine retention and excretion of plutonium in a limited number of terminal patients.”

A New Protocol is Developed

By 1944 the medical team of the Manhattan Project, headed by Stafford Warren, concluded that a controlled experiment on humans was necessary. They came up with a plan to inject radioactive elements, including polonium, plutonium, and uranium, into civilian patients around the country. Between April 1945 and July 1947, eighteen subjects were injected with plutonium, six with uranium, five with polonium, and at least one with americium. The experiments were performed at Manhattan Project-affiliated hospitals in Rochester, New York; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Chicago, Illinois; and San Francisco, California.

The materials were employed for different experimental purposes. The plutonium tests were intended to determine how excreta could be used to estimate the amount of plutonium remaining in an exposed subject. Scientists wanted to ascertain a method of determining how much radioactive material stayed in the body and for how long. These plutonium injections were given between 1945-1947 at the Manhattan District Hospital at Oak Ridge, the University of California San Francisco, the University of Chicago, and Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester. The patient samples were then analyzed in affiliated labs nearby or shipped back to Los Alamos to be examined by a biomedical research team led by Dr. Wright Langham. The chemical process of determining the amount of plutonium in a sample was complex, requiring a contamination-free laboratory. The sample was dried, converted to ash, and finally dissolved in acid.

In Rochester, a Manhattan Annex was established in 1943 at the Strong Memorial Hospital to study the toxicity of radioactive isotopes including plutonium, uranium, and polonium. Between 1946-1947, physicians injected six patients with uranium with the research goal of discerning the minimum dose that would produce detectable kidney damage. This was an experimental protocol intended to produce a harmful reaction in the subjects.

Scientists at the time agreed that these experiments furthered the field of nuclear physics and provided practical insight into the quantitative limits of these elements in humans. The model relating body burden to short-term excretion rate is known as the “Langham” model after Wright Langham and is still used today. Nonetheless, questions have since been raised about the effectiveness of human experimentation during this period. The subjects chosen varied, and often the follow-up research was not thorough. Samples were contaminated or destroyed in transport on multiple occasions. Furthermore, the ethical issues involved were not given due attention.

Secrecy

From the beginning, these experiments were conducted under a high level of secrecy.  As the Cold War began, Americans were frightened of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and so the military and the scientists involved continued to operate with a wartime mentality. Additionally, the nature of the experiments was highly controversial, even among Manhattan Project scientists.

The secrecy started at the highest levels of the Manhattan Project. Plutonium and uranium were classified elements, referred to by code name only. Los Alamos Laboratory Director J. Robert Oppenheimer was informed of the nature of the experiments, but expressed in a 1944 letter to Louis Hempelmann, Director of the Health Group at Los Alamos, that he did not want the experiments carried out at the New Mexico facility. There is also evidence that Oppenheimer approved shipments of plutonium and uranium to be used for medical research. Reports show that many of the physicians themselves were unaware of the exact substance they were injecting into patients. The overall compartmentalization of the Project makes it difficult to trace the chain of command concerning these experiments. However, there is significant documentation that the medical and health directors at all sites were somehow invested in this research.

Hymer Friedell was the first army doctor assigned to the Manhattan Project and was placed at the Oak Ridge site as the Deputy Health Director under Stafford Warren. Friedell and Warren were charged with the health and safety of the Project as a whole. Friedell himself oversaw the first human injection of plutonium at Oak Ridge. In a letter to Hempelmann, Friedell wrote, “I think that we will have access to considerable clinical material here, and we hope to do a number of subjects.”

Hempelmann met with Warren to approve a research program on human and animal subjects early in 1944. By the end of August of that same year, Hempelmann, Warren, and Oppenheimer decided to move forward with a medical research program on plutonium that would involve human subjects. Hempelmann received reports of the human injections through 1947, including the ongoing analysis of samples at Los Alamos Laboratory.

Wright Langham was stationed first at the Chicago Met Lab and later at Los Alamos as an analytical chemist. Along with his team, he examined the samples shipped to him from Rochester and Oak Ridge. Correspondence between Langham and doctors in these two locations show that he played a major role in deciding the amount of doses, number of patients, and choice of subjects.

At the University of California, Joseph Hamilton oversaw the injection of three subjects. Hamilton had already performed tracer studies to determine plutonium toxicity in rats and discovered that contamination of the bloodstream was the most dangerous. Robert Stone held a parallel position at the University of Chicago Met Lab during the war, where three additional patients were given plutonium treatments.

The toxicity of radioactive elements was the main research concern at the University of Rochester Manhattan Annex. There, Dr. Samuel Bassett was the primary physician-investigator in the “Special Problems Division.” Rochester was the site of the most injections during this period. Bassett oversaw a two-bed ward, divided from the Strong Memorial Hospital.

 A memorandum from the Atomic Energy Commission dated April 1947 recommended that human experimentation not be made public because, “It might have an adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits.” Out of this fear, the results of this research were largely kept hidden. When the AEC replaced the Manhattan District in 1947, the protocol was in fact reformed to require documentation of patient consent and “reasonable hope” that the substance would be of medical benefit to the patient. These guidelines came too late, and doctors continued to study samples from the original thirty patients without informing them why.

The Subjects

It is most likely that the 30 experimental subjects were not made aware of the nature of the injections they received. In fact, records show that only one of the plutonium patients signed a consent form, which did not fully explain the medical procedure or risks. There is no documentation of consent for any other test subjects.

Furthermore, it is difficult to say how the specific patients involved in these controlled human experiments were chosen. The injections were performed in hospitals around the country; the ages and backgrounds of each varied. Some had family and others were alone. Regardless, the records show that they were all civilians and were not themselves Manhattan Project workers. In order to understand the troubling nature of this research, it is important to highlight the stories of some of these test subjects.

Ebb Cade was the first test subject. Cade was a 53-year-old African American male who worked for an Oak Ridge construction company as a cement mixer. On March 24, 1945, he was involved in an auto accident, which caused fractures in his arm and leg. Documents from the time show that he was otherwise healthy. Over the next two weeks, he was given the codename HP-12, with HP standing for Human Product.  Dr. Friedell wrote to Dr. Hempelmann at Los Alamos that he had found a primary subject for the plutonium experiment. 

On April 10, 1945, Dr.  Joseph Howland administered a plutonium dose of 4.7 micrograms to Cade, who was awaiting a procedure to set his bones. From 1943-1945, the maximum possible body burden (MPBB) for plutonium had been 5 micrograms, based on limits adopted for radium. Based on animal experimentation, Langham and Friedell had recently concluded that because plutonium remained in the bone for longer than radium, the MPBB should actually be set at 1 microgram. Cade’s dose was nearly five times that limit.

Cade was not treated for his arm and leg injuries until April 15, five days after the injection, so that the doctors would be able to biopsy his bone samples. This included extracting 15 of his teeth, which were subsequently shipped to Wright Langham at Los Alamos. It is unclear if Cade suffered from legitimate tooth decay. Shortly after his bones had been set, Cade suddenly discharged himself from the hospital. He moved out of Tennessee and died of heart failure on April 13, 1953, 8 years after the Oak Ridge injection.

CAL-1 was the codename given to Albert Stevens, the first patient to receive a plutonium dose in California. He was a 58-year-old house painter who was misdiagnosed with terminal stomach cancer when he checked into the hospital at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The doctors at UCSF initially gave him six months to live. Doctors in Joseph Hamilton’s research group at Berkeley prepared plutonium-238, an isotope that is 276 times more radioactive than the plutonium-239 and therefore easier for instruments to measure (Welsome, 91).

On May 14, 1945, one month after the Oak Ridge injection, Albert Stevens unknowingly received a dose of plutonium that was considered “carcinogenic” by a scientist in Hamilton’s lab. He was taken to surgery a few days later for doctors to remove parts of his internal organs. A biopsy shortly after revealed that the ulcer doctors had initially diagnosed as cancer was in fact benign. Doctors continued to monitor Stevens after he left the UCSF hospital without providing any explanation. Stevens and his family were never informed that he did not have cancer. He died in 1966 of heart failure, 21 years after entering the UCSF hospital.

Eda Schultz Charlton, a 49-year-old woman known in reports as HP-3, was admitted to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester on November 2, 1945 for unusual swelling. She was transferred to E-3 ward which was led by Dr. Samuel Bassett. Three weeks later she received a plutonium injection of 4.9 micrograms. There is no mention of this procedure in her hospital records, only in Manhattan Project reports. The decision to separate experimentation notes from medical charts was made by Stafford Warren himself, as mentioned in a 1946 letter from Wright Langham to Samuel Bassett.

Charlton was discharged on December 20, 1945; however, doctors continued to collect X-Rays and tissue samples for studies. Charlton was regularly hospitalized until her death by cardiac arrest in 1983, almost forty years after the injection. Her case is puzzling because she was never diagnosed as terminally ill. Reports mention that there was an error in her diagnosis, but it is unclear why she was ever moved to Bassett’s ward in the first place. Her regular metabolism, however, provided an ideal case study for research into how healthy people excrete plutonium. 

Another questionable case was CAL-2, a four-year old boy named Simeon Shaw suffering from terminal bone cancer. He was flown with his mother to the UCSF hospital in a US military plane from Australia, apparently under the advisement of a physician in Australia. He arrived in California in April 1946 and was admitted to the hospital. For some time, he was separated for his mother, who was only allowed visits periodically. Simeon received a plutonium injection at UCSF under the oversight of Joseph Hamilton and was discharged from the hospital within a month. The Shaws returned to Australia and no follow-ups were ever conducted. Simeon died eight months later.

The physicians involved knew that the procedures had no therapeutic benefits and would be detrimental in the long run if the patients lived. Human experimentation was justified by the claim that the patients were terminally ill; however, this was not true in all cases. Repeated errors in diagnosis, procedure, documentation, and research were made, ultimately calling into question the efficacy of the experiments themselves.

Cold War Human Experiments

Human experimentation continued throughout the Cold War. There is evidence of several large-scale projects across the country that also failed to inform patients of the health hazards of these experiments. At the Fernald School in Massachusetts, a school for disabled and special needs children, students were exposed to radioactive iron and calcium in the late 1940s and 1950s in a federally sponsored study. Their parents were not informed of the full nature of these experiments.

Between 1953-1957, Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducted uranium injection experiments on eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital as part of their continued Health Physics research. Scientists discovered that uranium localized in human kidneys at a much higher rate than previously thought, and therefore that maximum permissible levels were too high. Despite the efforts of this experiment, however, occupational standards for uranium did not change at any national laboratories.

Other large scale, federally sponsored research was performed on prisoners in Washington and Oregon state prisons and on pregnant women at Vanderbilt University. Like human injections from 1945-1947, these experiments took advantage of vulnerable populations who were not given sufficient details to give informed consent. You can read more about the continuation of human experiments here.

Legacy and Ethics

In the early 1990s, the Albuquerque Tribune uncovered the nature of these human experiments and the identity of the patients. In response, President Bill Clinton set up an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The Department of Energy, under the leadership of Secretary Hazel R. O’Leary, undertook an extensive investigation into all aspects of these experiments since the start of the atomic age.

Thousands of documents were declassified and several hearings were held. In 1995, the DOE released a report which detailed the experiments, made ethical judgments, and gave recommendations to Congress on how to proceed. At this time, the subjects of the 1945-1947 tests had passed away. Families of the victims received payments from the federal government. By 1997, laws were adopted to prohibit secret scientific testing on humans. New legislation required patients to give informed consent and to be notified if experiments were classified. Additionally, the government stipulated that thorough documentation was to be kept and externally reviewed.

In November 1986, the Congressional Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power released a report called American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on US Citizens, which included details about human experiments during the Manhattan Project. However, until the Department of Energy investigation in 1994, most of the American public was unaware of these experiments.

According to the 1995 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments report, “In no case was there any expectation that these patient-subjects would benefit medically from the injections.” In most cases, rather, the injections had a significantly greater adverse effect than originally hypothesized. For example, scientists originally thought that 90% of the material would be excreted by subjects. However, a 1946 study coauthored by Edwin Russell and James Nickson titled “Distribution and Excretion of Plutonium” disclosed that excretion studies showed that nearly 90% of the plutonium entering the body is retained for years in the bone.

Furthermore, the doctors misdiagnosed many of their patients as terminal when they in fact were not. The physicians involved violated the medical responsibility to “First, do no harm” by hiding the nature of the injections from their patients. The DOE report concludes that the experiments were unethical: “The egregiousness of the disrespectful way in which the subjects of the injection experiments and their families were treated is heightened by the fact that the subjects were hospitalized patients. Their being ill and institutionalized left them vulnerable to exploitation.” The stories of men and women like Ebb Cade, Albert Stevens, Eda Charlton, and Simeon Shaw are a reminder of the weighty costs associated with medical and scientific progress.

When the documentation concerning human experimentation came to light in the mid-1990s, one journalist wrote that this information “will force historians to rewrite part of the history of the dawn of the atomic age.” It is important to critically consider the role of human experimentation in the legacy of the Manhattan Project. 

What happens when you turn a psychopath into a therapist?

Dr. Elliott T. Barker was a newly minted psychiatrist in the mid-1960s when he came up with a novel treatment for curing psychopaths: Patients would treat patients. New information uncovered by The Fifth Estate reveals that others took that ill-conceived idea one step further, having convicted sex offenders serve as therapists to women with mental illness. What could possibly go wrong?

It was supposed to be “easy time.”

Back in 1978, Margaret was a teenaged troublemaker living in southwestern Ontario who had been charged with general mischief and stealing a car. After her arrest, her lawyer laid out her options.

“‘You can go to jail for two years — or do easy time at the psychiatric hospital in St. Thomas,’ which was closer to my family,” she said.

Margaret picked the “easy time.”

• Stream “Treatment or torture” on The Fifth Estate on CBC Gem.

And so began the nine months she remembers as the hardest of her life. She found herself locked up with women who were mentally ill, treated not by therapists but by men who were mentally ill and who’d been convicted of rape. They are painful memories she had locked away until contacted recently by CBC’s The Fifth Estate.

“I’m sorry, but this has thrown me for a loop,” said Margaret, who asked to remain anonymous because many in her life don’t know of her past. “I haven’t thought about that place for so many years.”

“That place” was the forensic unit of the St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital, about 30 kilometres south of London, Ont.

Documents obtained by The Fifth Estate — including institutional correspondence, official records and personal letters — reveal that between 1977 and 1983, men found either guilty or “not criminally responsible” for crimes including rape and murder were sent from the Oak Ridge Psychiatric Unit in Penetanguishine, Ont., to the St. Thomas hospital to serve as “teacher-therapists” to women with mental illness.

“They were criminals. They were convicted rapists,” Margaret said. “They were just on a power trip. Like, they were supposed to be helping people. But … I’ve never figured that out, how they were helping people.”

It is one of the more bizarre chapters in the annals of Canadian psychiatric history. And to begin to understand why doctors might think mentally ill rapists would make good therapists for mentally ill women, you need first to understand the incubator in which the idea was hatched.

I. The Oak Ridge experiment

The male patients sent to St. Thomas were all considered “graduates” of a treatment program at the Oak Ridge Psychiatric Unit in Penetanguishene, for years Ontario’s only forensic hospital for those who were found criminally insane.

The hospital housed some of the country’s most notorious offenders, men like Peter Woodcock, who had been convicted of murdering three children in Toronto in the late 1950s, and David Lariviere, a reputed mafia hitman who’d also killed a woman with a wine bottle as she lay sleeping beside him.

For more than 15 years, patient-inmates at Oak Ridge were subjected to experimental treatments that included sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic drugs and physical punishment.

The program has since been called “flagrant and outrageous” by an Ontario Superior Court judge. But 50 years ago, it was considered avant garde by many in the psychiatric community.

The unorthodox program was the brainchild of Dr. Elliott T. Barker, who in the mid-1960s was a newly minted psychiatrist fresh out of the University of Toronto.

He’d been inspired by the work of British psychiatrist Dr. Maxwell Jones, who’d developed the concept of a “therapeutic community” for the treatment of the mentally ill. A fundamental component of a “therapeutic community” was that patients would take an active role in their own treatment and serve as role models to each other.

The year after graduation, Barker and his wife travelled the world, visiting a Chinese prison camp in Maoist China to observe behaviour control techniques, to a kibbutz in Israel to meet with philosopher Martin Buber and to therapeutic communities in Britain and Denmark.

Barker arrived at his new job at Oak Ridge in 1965 with a novel plan of his own, one inspired in part by his travels. He would combine coercive techniques like truth serums and sensory deprivation with patient-led encounter groups to force psychopaths to confront their illnesses. It would be called the Social Therapy Unit.

“I think I was more idealistic than I am now,” Barker said in an interview recorded in 1993 and obtained by The Fifth Estate. “I thought we were developing the best program in the world and we really were going to fix psychopaths and these patients really were going to get better.”

One of the key components of the Barker plan was that patients would serve as therapists to each other. To an underfunded institution, it was an attractive solution to a rather ugly problem: there weren’t enough doctors on staff to treat prisoners.

But if the initial motivation had been to make a virtue out of necessity, Barker doubled down on his idea.

“I hired a patient when there were no staff around, a patient who could do superb mental statuses, better than I could, and he’d see each new admission and write up a beautiful mental status,” Barker said in 1993. “He was there for about six months until he ran off with the social worker’s wallet and credit cards and whatever.”

The prisoner-patients at Oak Ridge could order drug treatments for each other, including LSD, methamphetamine and truth serums. Alcohol treatments were another favourite. The men, some of them severe alcoholics, have said they would be forced to drink large quantities of high-proof alcohol. The goal wasn’t to treat their mental illness, but to weaken their defences and force them to examine their own shortcomings.

“The point of the whole program was to break us down mentally,” former Oak Ridge patient Jim Motherall said in 2016. “They believed if you could strip away all our bad defences that got us into trouble, they could rebuild us as better human beings.”

Motherall was sent to Oak Ridge in 1972 after he attacked a 15-year-old girl with a tire iron, an offence he admitted was not his first, nor would it be his last. He was diagnosed as having a personality disorder and underwent numerous experimental drug treatments at Oak Ridge, including LSD and a hallucinogen called scopolamine.

“They gave you six shots a day of that stuff. By the end of the first day, you didn’t know who you were or what you were doing,” said Motherall. “You can’t do that to that many people over and over … and call it treatment because that’s the nice word people want to hear when the real word is torture. Cause that’s all it was beginning to end,” he said.

At the outset, Barker thought patients would take part willingly in the new programs, but that didn’t always happen. To ensure that even the most reluctant patients would submit to the “therapy,” Barker invented the Total Encounter Capsule.

Some say he cribbed the idea for the capsule from the U.S. military, but wherever the inspiration came from, the reality was stark.

The capsule was a windowless room with padded walls and no furniture except for an open toilet. Lights were left on 24/7 to remove all references to time and food was administered through a tube in the wall. Groups of prisoners, usually naked, would be locked in together for as long as 10 days at a time, their only task to confront one another about their mental flaws.

“It didn’t matter if you cried, there was no compassion, there was no recognizing you as a human being who’s had enough,” said former patient Allen McMann.

McMann is now homeless and living on the streets of Vancouver, but in the mid-1970s, he was a 16-year-old who’d tried to run away from a group home to escape abuse.

Authorities pegged him as a troublemaker and sent him off to live with the country’s most dangerous offenders in Oak Ridge.

He spent his 17th birthday in the capsule, where he was first celebrated and then punished by a patient who was a few decades older than him.

“They took toilet paper and they wrote Happy Birthday with it on the wall. And later that day … one of the guys wanted me to masturbate him,” he said. “I didn’t know what a pedophile was. When I went there, I was a virgin. I wasn’t the brightest kid on the block, I readily admit that.”

If the capsule was intended as therapy, then to the patients, the MAP program never seemed to be anything other than punishment. MAP stood for motivation, attitude and participation, or as it’s been called more recently by the patients themselves, torture.

“They would strap your legs together and then you’d be put on the floor, and you had to maintain a perfect T-square position,” said McMann. “You weren’t allowed to move unless you asked for permission, and asking for permission would be raising your finger for like two seconds and then putting it down. If you kept your finger up longer than that, they would accuse you of trying to garner favour from the teacher.”

Barker would later describe his role in day-to-day operations at Oak Ridge as not so much a doctor but as a sort of master puppeteer.

“My policy was to work with the key power players, the key attendants who had informal power and the key patients who had informal power and me, and I was like a politician negotiating,” he said in the 1993 interview. “I had total control.”

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how the psychiatric community, let alone government authorities, could have viewed the Oak Ridge experiment as an exciting mental health initiative.

But when you look at the history of mental health hospitals, it becomes clear that change, almost any change, was seen as an improvement. Asylums, as they were known in the earlier 20th century, were desolate places where those with mental illnesses were warehoused and the focus was on controlling patients, not treating them.

Dr. John Deadman, a psychiatrist who was a contemporary of Barker’s, said even as recently as the 1950s, little was known about how to treat mental illness. Treatments for a diagnosis like mania were not only crude but cruel.

“The only way you could deal with a patient who was manic was to put them in a tub with continuously running water through the tub,” said Deadman.

“It had a canvas cover on it so they couldn’t get out, just their heads stuck out … and then you lowered the temperature of the water and they went into a state of hypothermia. That was the only treatment they had for mania at that time.”

Then the swinging ’60s came along. New ideas began to spread like contagion and the field of psychiatry was not immune.

At McGill University in Montreal, Dr. Ewan Cameron was conducting CIA-funded experiments on mind control and sensory deprivation. While the public didn’t know about it, some in the field of psychiatry did.

“At the time Elliott Barker was doing this, this was all new fresh stuff. And I don’t know exactly what his motivations were, but he really felt he was trying cutting-edge therapy,” said Deadman, who would later become medical director of the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital.

“I met him on a stag weekend … and I can remember he was really quite enthusiastic about all these things and perhaps not as critical as he should have been.”

There’s no evidence that the programs at Oak Ridge were funded by the CIA. The federal Department of Health supplied Barker with LSD to conduct his experimental treatments. In the 1993 interview, Barker bristled at the idea that hallucinogens were forced on patients.

“God, the guys we had there were lining up for LSD. Everyone wanted it. It was the ’60s and we gave it in a responsible way,” he said.

For a while, Barker was a darling of the psychiatric world, his programs praised by government officials, the media and other psychiatrists who frequently toured the Oak Ridge facility.

The superintendent of Oak Ridge, Dr. Barry Boyd, bragged about his young doctor’s successes to visiting officials.

But by the early 1970s, Barker himself began to doubt his treatments always worked.

“Boyd used to say to people: ‘Dr. Barker has a program that will cure people — next month. You know, by next month they’ll be cured.'” Barker said. But “by that time, guys had been out and [reoffended] and it was pretty clear that … guys were going out and getting into shit.”

By that time, he’d been working with psychopaths for about five years and his initial belief that he had come up with a way of curing them had been replaced with a new belief, one firmly rooted in reality and tinged with the bittersweet.

“You have to be burned by psychopaths a few times and survive it before you can like them and enjoy them and not be hurt by them,” Barker said.

“Psychopaths are marvellous at making you think that their world revolves around you…. And if you believe that and sort of bask in that glory and then … you find one day that they deal you off or stick a knife in your throat — not literally — that you mean nothing to them emotionally.”

Around 1971, Barker took a leave of absence from Oak Ridge and retreated to his farm just outside nearby Midland. He set up a private practice in town and from time to time, he served as an expert witness in court.

In the 1970s, when Canada was debating the abolition of the death penalty, Barker developed a new reputation — one he described as a “hanging psychiatrist.”

“There are guys who are so dangerous nobody is going to affect that,” he said. “It’s far better [rather] than curtailing parole, which is what they were doing, to hang a few people even though it was wrong. And you can pick out a few people who are absolutely dangerous and absolutely untreatable and hang them.”

But even though Barker now believed that the sickest of his patients could never be cured, the programs he’d developed for treating them continued at Oak Ridge under a new doctor, Gary J. Maier.

“Gary Maier was really out of the box, you know, he’s a kind of spiritual guy,” said Welsh-American author Jon Ronson, who interviewed him for his 2011 book The Psychopath Test. “He talked to me a lot about looking into people’s eyes and seeing their souls.”

Maier had recently graduated from medical school, was not a psychiatrist and did not have a background in forensic medicine. Two or three times a week, he’d pay a visit to Barker to discuss whatever issues came up. It became clear early on that Maier was quite different from Barker.

“I’m an agnostic psychiatrist — I don’t really believe a lot of psychiatry,” Barker said in the 1993 interview, “but he was a believer. But his fatal flaw was he didn’t recognize the politics of the situation and after a year, I went to Boyd and said: ‘Look, I want to stop supervising Gary. I think it’s not going to work. I think this guy is going to run afoul of the attendants.’ “

Barker’s prediction was correct. Ronson said Maier tried lots of what might now be considered new age therapies on his patients — things like chanting and dream analysis — but his favourite treatment was said to be LSD. He’d tried putting small groups of prisoners on acid trips, but one day decided to give LSD to the whole ward at once.

“That seemed to be a turning point,” said Ronson. “I think the guards were like ‘This is becoming a real safety risk now.’ And Gary Meier turned up one day to find that … his key didn’t work anymore, the locks had been changed and that was the end of the program.”

Barker had been in and out of Oak Ridge since going into private practice, but now with Maier’s departure, he was lured back full time, at least for a year.

What his involvement was in the next evolution of the Oak Ridge experiment isn’t clear from the documents, but the programs he’d created had long since taken on a life of their own. And they were about to mutate.

II. The St. Thomas experiment

In 1976, the first forensic unit for women in Ontario was opened in a corner of the St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital, a vast sprawling institution in southwestern Ontario.

There were fewer than 30 women in the unit in the early days.

Few people save for those directly involved would ever have known about what went on there if it wasn’t for a former Oak Ridge patient, an American named William Brennan.

In 2018, Brennan died of cancer at the age of 62. Not long after his death in Grand Island N.Y., his widow, Kristie, came across an old trunk her husband had kept tucked away.

Inside was a stack of documents about a treatment program at the St. Thomas hospital. The program appeared to mirror the one at Oak Ridge, with one important difference. Mentally ill patients like her husband Bill — men convicted of rape and murder — were sent to St. Thomas to serve as therapist-teachers to mentally ill women.

Brennan was 18 years old when he was sent to Oak Ridge after being convicted of raping two women near Sault Ste. Marie and the attempted rape of a third.

He’d told Kristie about his experiences at Oak Ridge but he’d shared few details about St. Thomas, saying it was too upsetting.

“I feel sad and guilty that he didn’t tell me more,” she said.

Prior to being sent to St. Thomas, Brennan had been told he would soon be paroled.

His prison records, though, indicate a change of heart on the part of corrections authorities who describe him as being “unstable” upon his arrival at St. Thomas and having poor impulse control. Nonetheless, in 1977, he became the fourth Oak Ridge patient to serve as a “teacher” at St. Thomas.

The Fifth Estate was able to track down the first “teacher” to be sent in 1977 from Oak Ridge to St. Thomas. John, an incarcerated sex offender, is serving time in a maximum security prison for a variety of crimes, but his “index offence” back in 1975 was the rape and indecent assault of a young woman in southern Ontario. He was sent to Oak Ridge at the age of 19, where he became a model prisoner.

“I realized the path of least resistance was to just do what they said and see if I could get out of there cause it was a hellhole. It was torturous,” said John, whom CBC is not identifying to protect his personal safety in prison. “I [became] the poster child for the program because I’d sucked it all in, hook, line and sinker.”

John was sent to St. Thomas with Mike, another Oak Ridge patient who John said had also been convicted of violent sexual assault.

It appears from the documents obtained by The Fifth Estate that a steady stream of patients convicted or found not criminally responsible for crimes like murder and rape were sent to St. Thomas over the next few years to be “therapists” to the women.

The women confined to the forensic unit had typically committed serious offences, but like Oak Ridge, there were also those who were considered nothing more than troublesome teenagers.

“I was really scared,” said Margaret, who was 17 and not mentally ill when she was sent to St. Thomas.

“I thought it would be a bunch of teenagers, you know, no freedom, and maybe learn something out of the deal.”

Instead, she found herself locked up with women who had serious mental illnesses.

There was Judy, who’d killed her two children, and Gloria, who was dubbed “the swallower” because of her penchant for swallowing objects like spoons.

“Mary, poor soul,” said Margaret. “She was really mentally challenged and she shouldn’t have been on that ward…. She spent her whole time in that room, sitting on the floor and never getting out of there…. She was not getting helped whatsoever.”

The “room” she’s referring to was where women who ran afoul of their “teachers” were sent for punishment.

Like at Oak Ridge, the program was known as MAP, which stood for motivation, attitude and participation.

Women, often in restraints, would be forced to sit on their knees on a cold floor for hours. At night, they’d sleep together on a bare mattress in a locked room. How long they spent in the MAP room was up to their “teachers.”

“They were inmates. They weren’t, you know, psychiatrists or trained to do [anything]. The real staff … the nurses, the male and female nurses, you’d hardly ever see them,” said Margaret.

There was one doctor in charge of the ward, Dr. P.D. Gatfield, who came by no more than once a week, she said.

The female patients were forced to attend group “talk therapy” sessions that were meant to help them open up and discuss their problems, but the reality was much different.

“Really it was an attack therapy. It was very aggressive,” said John. “So what you would do is enlist other people, the other patients, like up north, and [say], ‘You have to confront them, and you have to confront them very hard,’ and it became really reactive.”

Some of the women refused to take part, or at least they tried to.

One former patient had been found not criminally responsible for murder and knew she needed help, but she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to get it from the Oak Ridge patients.

“I told the teachers that I didn’t trust them and that they weren’t doctors, and this program … was not legitimate,” said Emily, whom CBC has agreed not to identify to protect her privacy.

When she tried to leave the room, she said, the men went after her and took her to a cell where they tied her to a mattress and left her there for hours.

“They acted like they were experts,” said Emily, “like they were holier than thou. That was their whole attitude.”

John said the use of physical restraints to control the women was common, a technique they copied from the Oak Ridge program.

“It was a whole belt system,” he said, “and [the women] could be put in cuffs to make them come to group and tied to another woman who would sit beside them and had to deal with their reaction…. It bordered on sadomasochistic restraining.”

III. ‘I was terrified’

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the St. Thomas experience, at least from the women’s standpoint, was that the patients from Oak Ridge were housed on the same ward.

“I was terrified. And so were a lot of the other girls that were in there,” said Margaret.

“Everybody was afraid to even go to sleep at nighttime because the guys were always wandering around later than everybody else. And they were having relationships with other women there.”

John said both he and the other prisoner sent with him had sexual relationships with women on the ward.

“There was no real security,” he said. “The staff were at the front end in the office, more times than not. We would sit, you know, around a table, at off times with meals and the women would be in their nightclothes and whatever. So, we’d go, all go to the yard together and…”

His voice trails off.

John said he believes the relationships he and Mike had with women on the ward were consensual, but according to Emily, who was not there at the same time as John, that wasn’t always the case.

She told The Fifth Estate that two women, including one who was physically disabled, told her they’d been raped.

The Fifth Estate was unable to independently confirm that was the case. However, at least one pregnancy occurred in the six years the program existed.

Records show that William Brennan had a sexual relationship with a patient we’re calling Ann, who subsequently gave birth to a baby girl. The baby was given up for adoption in 1979.

Sometime after Ann became pregnant, Brennan was moved, although it’s not clear whether he was sent to another ward or another prison.

What is known is that later in 1979, he was transferred to a U.S. prison against his wishes.

The Canadian government had recently signed a prisoner exchange treaty with the U.S. that called for the voluntary repatriation of prisoners who wanted to return to their home country. In a formal hearing, an audio recording of which is contained in the documents saved by Brennan, he told a U.S. judge he preferred to stay in St Thomas.

Nonetheless, he was transferred to Lewisburg Prison, a high-security facility in Pennsylvania, far from his family in Wisconsin.

“I thought his treatment at Oak Ridge was bad,” said Kristie, who met her husband years later, “but only after going through his letters and [the documents] did I realize how cruel and heartless Canada was.”

Throughout her pregnancy, Ann wrote letters to Brennan that make it clear she hoped he would return for her.

“I still see a worthwhile and fulfilling future for the three of us,” she wrote in 1979.

“Do you still have plans in marrying me? I would very much want to be your wife,” she said, seemingly unaware that he already had a long-term common-law partner.

Her letters also describe a steady stream of Oak Ridge patients coming and going from St. Thomas and in some cases, engaging in sexual relationships with female patients. Despite being pregnant, she also mentions her own frequent confinement in the MAP room.

The Fifth Estate was unable to locate Ann but tracked down relatives who still live on a Cree reserve in northern Quebec.

They, too, have lost touch with Ann, who they said had been adopted by the widow of a local fur trader when she was just a girl.

She was sent to a residential school in Quebec and she later ran away, they said.

The only record of her after that is a small clipping from 1975 in a Halton, Ont., newspaper that said she was found not criminally responsible for the killing of a man in her rooming house. She was sent to St. Thomas for treatment.

IV. The end of the experiment

In 1983, the Barker-inspired treatment programs ended at both St. Thomas and Oak Ridge. By that time, Dr. Maier had obtained his psychiatric credentials and moved to Wisconsin where he went to work for the Department of Corrections.

Several years before that, Barker had left the hospital and returned to private practice. He had long since stopped believing that all psychopaths could be treated and now believed that poor parenting and consumerism were ultimately to blame for mental illness. He argued that parents driven by a desire for two incomes were abandoning their most important job, that of raising their children.

“I see that the two forces that make parents want daycare and lead away from the attachment [parenting] are consumerism and patriarchy,” he told a freelance journalist in 1997.

Along with a former Oak Ridge patient, Barker founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, an organization that never captured the attention of the psychiatric community the way his Oak Ridge programs had.

In 2000, some of his former patients at Oak Ridge tried to file a class-action suit against Barker and Maier and the Ontario government, saying their treatment amounted to torture and a breach of the doctors’ fiduciary responsibilities.

The former patients were not granted class-action status and refiled their case listing 28 plaintiffs. The case dragged on for years and eight of the men died before a judgment was delivered.

In June 2020, an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled in favour of the Oak Ridge plaintiffs, saying their treatment amounted to “assault and battery,” and that the defendants had indeed violated their fiduciary responsibilities.

Earlier last month, the judge awarded the 28 plaintiffs a total of about $10 million plus interest going back to 2000. The individual awards ranged from a low of $1,000 to a high of $2.7-million plus interest.

The provincial government and the doctors are appealing the judgment. No one representing the government or the doctors was available for comment.

In 1993, as he sat with a historian, their rambling two-hour conversation recorded on VHS, Barker seemed to predict the lawsuit.

He told his guest that “by the ’80s, every patient would rather have a lawyer than a psychiatrist.” He complained that history was being “rewritten retrospectively,” and predicted the pendulum would swing back again.

“It was seen at the time as a reasonable thing to be doing,” he said. “And now, I resent the time I have to answer questions about it or defend it or being accused of doing awful things. It pisses me off.”

Barker still lives in Midland, but for the past eight years, he’s suffered from dementia, said his wife, Julie Barker.

She said she hasn’t told him about the legal judgment against him because she doesn’t see the point of upsetting him. He was excused from testifying in court because of his illness.

But on that June day in 1993, his mind still sharp and the video camera rolling, he shared a story with his guest.

Barker recalled how a former doctor from Oak Ridge had come to visit him and he’d encouraged the former colleague to leave the hospital and go into private practice.

“It’s like this,” he said, as he described the job of an Oak Ridge psychiatrist, smiling at the punchline he knew was coming. “You’ve got your head halfway down in a 45-gallon drum of shit, and you’re moulding the surface and you’re getting all excited about the shapes you’re creating. But that’s where you are.”

And he laughed heartily at his own joke.

Former criticality experiment lab demolished at Oak Ridge

Crews make progress tearing down the former Criticality Experiment Laboratory. The teardown began this past summer after months of deactivation activities. (Photo: DOE)

Work crews at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee have successfully completed the demolition of the former Criticality Experiment Laboratory. Crews worked this past summer to bring down the dilapidated 1940s-era facility, also known as Building 9213.

With the building down, work has begun to remove waste and debris, which is expected to fill an estimated 525 truckloads for disposal in the coming weeks. The work will clear the land for reuse at the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration Y-12 Complex.

“Removal of this facility is another sign of our steady progress transforming DOE’s Oak Ridge Reservation,” said Laura Wilkerson, acting manager of the DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management.

History: More than 50 percent of the facilities throughout the Oak Ridge Site, which includes Y-12, are more than 40 years old. The Criticality Experiment Lab was one of them.

Built in 1949, the two-story, 24,000-square-foot lab was used to conduct experiments with fissile uranium isotopes for nuclear reactor designs. Employees performed more than 9,700 experiments there in its first decade, and the facility later supported the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor program. The building has been closed since 1992.

Workers spent significant time deactivating the facility leading up to its teardown. They removed nearly 1,500 linear feet of asbestos-insulated piping, 300 linear feet of process piping, and 8,500 square feet of other asbestos-containing material.

Crews are also preparing three large former uranium enrichment facilities—known as Alpha-2, Alpha-4, and Beta-1—for demolition at Y-12.

Resources

ahf.nuclearmuseum.org, “Human Radiation Experiments.” By Samuel H. BassettJoseph HowlandHymer FriedellRobert S. StoneWright LanghamStafford L. WarrenJoseph G. HamiltonLouis H. Hempelmann; newsinteractives.cbc.ca, “What happens when you turn a psychopath into a therapist?” By Lynn Burgess; ans.org, “Former criticality experiment lab demolished at Oak Ridge.”

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