In 2008, the British Ministry of Defence issued a statement to the subjects in its own drug-testing program: “The government sincerely apologizes to those who may have been affected.” That the U.S. Army is unwilling to do such a thing is a source of pain for former subjects. John Ross, the soldier who was given an overdose of nerve agent, struggled for years to convince the Department of Veterans Affairs that he was even at Edgewood. “It’s too late for me,” he said. “I just want an official apology. It was like a con job.”

The case will have to wrestle with unsolvable questions. Test subjects were given many drugs, some of them in combination. One of the named plaintiffs, Tim Josephs, was involved in an experiment carried out by George Leib, who had given him scopolamine and Prolixin, to assess the combined effect. During the test, Josephs began to experience tremors and muscle spasms akin to symptoms of Parkinson’s, and was rushed to the toxic-aid station. Shortly after leaving Edgewood, he felt unusually nervous. He was deployed to Thailand, where, he says, he worked near barrels of Agent Orange. Upon his return to the United States, he lived a healthy life until 2004, when he was given a diagnosis of Parkinson’s. Specialists I contacted could not agree whether the test had helped cause the disease, and, in any case, Josephs was already receiving care; the V.A. presumes that any veteran who was exposed to Agent Orange, and who exhibits signs of Parkinson’s, is entitled to treatment for the disease. But he was filled with hurt and frustration over the ambiguous cause of his illness. Perhaps, in the moral calculus of the Edgewood legacy, such ambiguity must be considered: to take a powerful drug, and then spend decades not knowing what it might have done to you, may be its own form of psychological trauma.

Some mysteries go deeper still. In 1995, Ronald Zadrozny, the mild-mannered soldier in one of Ketchum’s BZ tests, fatally shot his third wife and then himself. Zadrozny’s second wife told me that he had never seemed that bothered by his time at Edgewood. It is fair to believe that his violent meltdown, more than three decades later, had nothing to do with BZ. But can that be proved in a court of law?

This August, Ketchum, while sitting beside his archive, had a stroke, and he was rushed to the emergency room. He had never tried BZ, but in the hospital he experienced eight hours of delirium, in which he saw himself lecturing about Edgewood. “I awoke when the thirty-second PowerPoint slide got mixed up, and people came onstage to whisk me away,” he told me. “I babbled for hours while tubes and catheters were installed all over, and then said to Judy, ‘I can speak perfectly clearly,’ as if I had not been acknowledged. I was soon fully normal, but was kept off food and drink for twenty-four hours, which angered me, thinking it was forty-eight hours.”

“I’m sorry, Arthur. I’ve decided to secede from our marriage.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

As the fall wore on, Ketchum grew less interested in testifying in the lawsuit. He was coming to believe that the case was mainly an arena for venting anger. He once told me that he had a need to debate, but that he regarded debate as something like a scientific process, rather than an adversarial contest. “The truth remains my goal, even if it casts a shadow on my reputation,” he said. And although he is a psychiatrist, he often appears to avoid deep self-reflection. In one of his manuscripts, he discussed his experience with therapy while he was a young doctor at Walter Reed. “He had tried the dark recesses for eighteen months of personal therapy in the office of a D.C. psychoanalyst and ended up in a stalemate,” he wrote. “Apparently he still had a residual fear of the dark, and kept the lights of hyperactivity on.”

The lawsuit had been keeping the lights of Ketchum’s hyperactivity burning so brightly that perhaps he hadn’t noticed how little he would still defend. Ketchum readily concedes that the lack of medical follow-up was wrong. He concedes that Van Sim’s management and his experiments on unsuspecting subjects were unethical. He concedes that the research after Project DORK was mostly fruitless—“There wasn’t much place to take it,” he told me. Yet between 1968 and 1974 Edgewood investigators tested a hundred and fifty-six men with EA 3834—one of the newer versions of BZ. “It scrambled your brain,” one soldier, who suffered years of flashbacks, told me. “They had to send a couple of guys to the hospital.” I asked Ketchum about the tests, which continued years after Nixon decided that the United States would not use such chemicals. Were they worth even that one veteran’s psychological hardship?

Ketchum responded defensively. “To be frank, I would consider it dishonest to claim regret simply to gain forgiveness by critics,” he said. But a few days later he pursued the question. “This morning I pulled out my notebook containing lists for each BZ-like compound, and was stunned when I found 3834 was indeed given in one hundred and fifty-six cases!” he wrote. “Some were done while I was actively in charge, but many while I was not.” He had searched his archive for more information. Some of the protocols, he said, were poorly designed. “I feel bad about what appears to be an inefficiency of testing,” he said. “I can imagine a fair criticism for this sloppiness and its accordingly excessive stress in terms of number of volunteers required. I must take blame for at least a significant fraction of the suboptimal design.”

More than anything, it seems, Ketchum had wanted to do something good and meaningful with his life, even something celebrated, but he never paused to consider if the limits of the Army’s chemical-warfare program would allow for such a thing. After leaving Edgewood, he had opportunities. He took on an associate professorship at the University of Texas Medical School, but in both academia and private practice, he told me, he always chose at the last minute to back away from success. He considered this a character trait, but it was hard not to see in it the caution of a man who had pursued success without restraint and found himself in ethically contested territory. As he grew older, he came to live “with psychic pain, and a tendency to be depressed,” he later confessed. Free-associating at his typewriter, he wrote, “I am about to be consigned to the junk heap of mediocrity and obscurity. So be it.”

In a press release about the lawsuit, Morrison & Foerster called the experiments “diabolical.” Whether such a term is accurate may ultimately come to rest on one question: were the rights of the test subjects abused? The precepts set forth in the Nuremberg Code are at the heart of the lawsuit. One long afternoon, Ketchum and I sat in his living room, embroiled in a discussion of the code. The Edgewood research had certainly violated parts of it—but so did a great deal of American research in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. When the Army contracted with Harvard to conduct clinical studies, demanding that the university conform to policies shaped by Nuremberg, the university insisted on looser strictures. Many doctors at the time held that the code, designed in the aftermath of Nazi barbarism, was inapt for ordinary science. In 1962, Henry Beecher, a Harvard anesthesiologist, argued that it would be folly to think that true informed consent would always be obtainable. He believed that the character of the investigator—“wisdom, experience, honesty, imaginativeness and sense of responsibility”—ultimately determined the morality of a clinical trial.