It was a human experiment on an unprecedented scale. Its target: 10,000 Ontario miners. Its tool: a mysterious black powder they were forced to inhale in a sealed room before plunging underground to work.

From 1943 to roughly 1980, an aluminum-based prophylaxis called McIntyre Powder was sold as an apparent miracle antidote to lung disease. It was designed, historical documents suggest, by industry-sponsored Canadian scientists bent on slashing compensation costs in gold and uranium mines across the north.

The problem: experts say aluminum is now known to be neurotoxic if significant doses get into the blood. And victims’ families say those exposed to Canada’s miracle McIntyre dust might be paying a devastating price.

Janice Martell has pulled together hundreds of pages of research on the experiment after her miner father, Jim Hobbs, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2001.

“Small pieces of him get taken away every day. It’s hard to watch,” says Martell, who works as a counselor in Elliot Lake. “I just felt so helpless.”

After a year of outreach, she says she has been contacted by 368 former miners across the province exposed to the powder. Around one third, she says, are living with a neurological disorder. Ten, or roughly 3 per cent, developed Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative and incurable condition that slow kills the ability to swallow, speak and breathe.

In Ontario, the prevalence of motor neuron disease — which includes ALS — is estimated at less than one in a thousand people. Because they are not based on a random sample, Martell’s numbers don’t necessarily prove that miners exposed to McIntyre Powder are more likely to suffer from neurological conditions. But they are concerning enough to prompt McMaster University to start studying survivors.

According to the province’s workers’ compensation board, there is no consistent evidence linking aluminum exposure to neurological disease — a policy formed in 1993 and only now coming under expert review. For the time being, it is impossible for potential victims to make a successful claim.

The board says it relies on the “best scientific evidence available” and recognizes scientific advances can “have an impact” on decisions.

“We understand when a loved one becomes ill we want to know why,” says Christine Arnott, spokesperson for the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. A report on the aluminum policy is expected back this spring.

For many miners, that will be too late.

“Something registered with me that this is not right,” says Ed Graham, who was exposed to the powder when he started mining in Timmins 58 years ago, aged 17.

“A lot of the fellas I knew, a lot of them passed away a long time (ago).”

It was around 2007 when Dr. Christopher Exley, an expert on the toxic effects of aluminum and a professor at Keele University in the United Kingdom, heard a knock on his door.

Outside stood an elderly man clutching a small canister. As a young worker, he was blasted with its contents as part of a trial conducted in England’s southwestern tin mines.

The faded yellow tin of McIntyre Powder still sits on Exley’s shelf. The label reads, “Made in Canada.”

According to Martell’s extensive research based on records at the Archives of Ontario, the product was developed in the 1940s by the McIntyre Research Foundation, which ceased operations in 1992. The group’s founding directors included staff doctors and executives from the now-abandoned McIntyre-Porcupine Mines in Timmins.

The result was an aluminum powder which, when tested — first on guinea pigs and rabbits, then on humans — was believed to dramatically reduce their likelihood of developing silicosis, a fibrosis of the lungs caused by the high content of carcinogenic silica in gold and uranium mines.

A 1942 letter from a doctor researching silicosis in Timmins to the McIntyre mines warns of the “grave potential liability” of the disease, and said aluminum “gives promise of saving the industry large sums of money that otherwise would be expended in compensation.”

In 1979, the Star profiled miners being “dosed with danger dust.” By that time, 190 million individual powder treatments had reportedly been administered, and researchers from South Africa, Sweden and the U.K. had raised the alarm. The article quoted the McIntyre Research Foundation as saying the powder’s beneficial qualities, as proven by animal experimentation, were “now universally accepted.”

Proper ventilation and dust control would have done more to protect workers’ lungs, Martell says — but were more costly.

Graham, now 75 and a resident of Red Lake, some 500 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, remembers the McIntyre drill well. He would take off his street clothes, and enter the mine “dry” where his work clothes hung. Without warning, he says, the doors would close. The ventilation would shut down, and the room would fill with black powder.

The McIntyre Research Foundation described the discharge as “terrifying,” and suggested the powder be dispersed before workers arrived. Graham doesn’t remember being scared. But he does remember being unsettled.

“I remember I used to keep a rag on my hook and I’d try to tie it over my mouth and nose when they sprayed. They told me not to do that,” he recalls.

Graham is now being treated for a spot on his lung; Martell says researchers knew as early as 1937 that breathing in aluminum powder without ventilation could damage the lung structure. But as for neurological effects, no biopsies of test animals exposed to aluminum dust were conducted until at least the late 1980s.

Since then, the evidence has mounted. In the U.K., Exley has spent decades studying a complex and nuanced question in science: whether higher than normal levels of aluminum in the brain connect in some way to Alzheimer’s disease.

“My position now, and bearing in mind that I’ve been working on this subject for nearly 30 years, my decision now is that it more or less certainly does,” he told the Star.

When asked about the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s policy, which says there is not enough evidence linking aluminum to neurological disorders, he has a simple question.

“How can that be?”

Recently, while attending a conference on aluminum organized by Exley’s Keele University, Martell watched a researcher demonstrate the effects of aluminum exposure. The substance was introduced into the system of a rat searching for food. It quickly became confused, disoriented and incontinent.

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Martell began to cry.

“It was the first time in my life I ever felt empathy for a rat,” she says. “I wanted the rat to find that food. I thought, just keep trying. Because I watched my dad have those same struggles.”

For decades, miners in Ontario were subject to mandatory annual chest X-rays administered by the workers’ compensation board. But although they might be the single largest sample size of humans forced to regularly breathe in aluminum dust, there has so far been no research on whether their exposure could be linked to neurological disorders.

That could now change.

A technique called neutron activation analysis offers a solution to previously invasive ways of testing aluminum levels in the body, measuring them quickly and painlessly through a low dose of radiation to the hand. The lab specializing in the procedure is based at Hamilton’s McMaster University, and is currently the only one of its kind in the world.

“I think we were a little aghast at the idea of people sitting in a room inhaling dust,” says Fiona McNeill, McMaster’s director of radiation sciences. “If we can help find out whether there are health effects as a consequence of that, we are willing to do it.”

Although McNeill says there is well-established research showing aluminum is neurotoxic if it reaches the bloodstream, the unanswered question is how much of the dust inhaled by miners ended up there.

“That’s where the science needs to be nailed down,” she says.

The university’s labour studies program has played an active role in connecting victims of occupational disease across the province, including former employees of General Electric Peterborough — whose story was the subject of a Star investigation last year.

But lack of funding, experts say, is a chronic struggle. McNeill says there is no money to conduct studies on miners exposed to aluminum dust, but the faculty believes so strongly in the research project it has decided to self-fund.

It’s the only way to start unravelling whether workers who breathed in McIntyre Powder may have been at higher risk of neurological disease.

In March, the head of Ontario’s United Steelworkers union, Marty Warren, petitioned the province’s Ministry of Labour to dedicate more money to the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) to “enable rapid and sustained response” to the plight of former GE Peterborough employees and miners exposed to McIntyre Powder.

“This was human experimentation at its worst on thousands of unwilling subjects,” the letter says. “It is vital that OHCOW have the funding to devote a dedicated team to its further investigations.”

Ministry of Labour spokesperson Janet Deline told the Star that “discussions on resources and funding” were “currently ongoing with our partners.” It is unclear what the size and scale of that funding will be.

“OHCOW is a critically important partner in Ontario’s occupational health and safety system with its unique role as a labour-based organization delivering specialized clinical and other services to Ontario workers,” Deline said in an emailed statement.

Growing up with a miner as a father, Martell knows them as tough workers of few words. There is pride in the wealth they built for the province. But there is anger, too.

“I felt mad,” says Graham of his experience. “A sick feeling, that we were used like guinea pigs. I just didn’t like it.”

But without research — and a change in policy at the WSIB — Martell says miners exposed to McIntyre Powder will never have a chance at justice.

“It’s like talking to soldiers. They’ve gone to somewhere and experienced something that the rest of us in society gratefully do not know about,” she says.

“There is zero faith in the system.”