From 1945-47, doctors at Strong Memorial Hospital secretly injected 11 people with plutonium.

URMC held a discussion of the episode Tuesday, including family survivors.

Part of the focus was on how medical ethics have changed in the last 70 years.

The doctors asked Janet Stadt: Can we move you into a more comfortable room? One where we can offer a better sort of treatment?

And why would she say no?

The 41-year-old hairdresser was at Strong Memorial Hospital with scleroderma, a rare connective tissue condition that at that time, 1946, was often fatal. She had come to Rochester from Belarus, where she was subject to violence as a Jew. The state-of-the-art medical facilities must have seemed magnificent.

Stadt never learned what that better treatment amounted to. All she knew was that after March 9, 1946, she became a very sick woman. She lived an addtional 29 years, undergoing multiple bouts with cancer and frustrating her friends and family who believed her to be a hypochondriac, always complaining about something.

It was not until 1992, 17 years after her death, that her family found out she was one of 18 people whom the United States government had secretly injected with plutonium from 1945 to 1947 as part of the Manhattan Project.

None of them ever found out.

"She left (Belarus) to avoid persecution, and she came here and got injected with plutonium," her grandson, Jon Stadt, said Tuesday.

Of the 18 people, 11 were injected at the University of Rochester. The story was a massive scandal when Eileen Welsome, a reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune, published a Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé in 1993.

The families ended up winning a financial settlement from the university. But this Tuesday was the first time UR reopened the painful episode for public examination, hosting a roundtable discussion on the topic with Welsome, Stadt, a bioethicist and the nephew of another experiment subject.

Patients were never informed

In 1945, World War II was still underway and the United States was racing to understand and harness the destructive properties of plutonium, uranium and other elements. The effort was labeled the Manhattan Project, and it resulted in the atomic bombs that fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

While one army of researchers was trying to figure out how to design plutonium-based weapons, another was studying what the health effects would be. That work was done in labs in Berkeley, California; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Chicago; and Rochester.

Under the supervision of the Department of Defense, a select group of doctors were asked to inject unwitting patients with catastrophic amounts of plutonium, uranium and polonium. None were informed, either in advance or afterward. The intention was to find people with terminal illnesses, though that directive was ultimately not followed.

John Mousso was another unwitting subject. His nephew, Jerry Mousso, later helped organize a survivors' group. In one instance, he said Tuesday, doctors accidentally dropped a vial of uranium on the floor before they could inject it into a woman. It burned a hole in the floor.

The 18 subjects had greatly varying experiences after the plutonium exposure, Welsome said, surviving from 6 days to 29 years afterward. Many suffered from various cancers, mental health problems and other illnesses.

President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the incident in 1995 and the government paid $4.8 million in damages.

"Human product"

Stadt said the money didn't help his family forget the issue. He recalled the first day he received a large box in the mail from the Department of Energy containing recently declassified information about his grandmother that he never possibly could have imagined.

She was labeled HP-8. The acronym, Welsome said, was for "human product."

"It slowly turned me into a very skeptical person with anything to do with government," said Stadt, now the owner of Flour City Pasta.

The illicit injections were only one of several instances of unethical medical testing carried out by the U.S. government in the 20th century; the syphilis experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama is another. The discussion Tuesday was intended in part to encourage current medical providers to think about the ethical implications.

One particularly incriminating factor: while the injections were limited to 1945-47, the research component of the experiment extended for at least 20 more years, including after the project was declassified. Stadt said his grandmother was exhumed and had her bones transferred as late as 1989.

Dr. Gary Chadwick, former director of school's Office for Human Subject Protection, said the concept of informed consent in the 1940s was still very much evolving — as indeed it is today.

"We're still learning about how to treat our fellow human beings when they move from being a patient in a medical setting to a subject in a research setting," he said.

JMURPHY7@Gannett.com