Interview with L O Jacobson at the University of Chicago (Plutonium Injections)

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Interview with Dr. Leon 0. Jacobson inthe presence of Mr. Kupferberg, and Dr. George V . LeRoy, Professor of Medicine, all of the University of Chicago. Dr. Jacobson arranged for the presence of the other gentlemen. The interview was conducted by Dr. Marks and Mr. Miazga a t 1:30 pm on 4 / 1 6 / 74.Dr. Jacobson i s Dean of the University of Chicago Medical School. H e was Chief of the Clinical Medicine Section, Deputy Director and, later, Director of the Health Program of the Metallurgical Laboratory. Dr. Jacobson stated repeatedly during the interview that he knew very little about the injection of plutonium into patients at the University of Chicago and that he was not involved i n making the injections.Hedid acknowledge that he was the Deputy Director and, for a brief period,Director ofthe Health Program of the Metallurgical Laboratory. However, he volunteered the information that Dr. J. Garr ott Allen, who i s now a t Stanford University, would be more likely to have known something about those patients than Dr. Jacobson himself. He said that Dr.Allen was the only cleared clinician on the surgical ward where the injections would have been likely to take place. Dr. Jacobson was also cleared for such activities but is a hematologist rather thana surgeon. However, the patients need not have been confined to a surgical at the time of the injections. When we mentioned Dr. Nickson's name asthe co-author of a paper dealing with the first two patients,Dr. Jacobson expressed the opinion that Dr. Nickson might also have been the physician who gave the injections. This line of questioning was pursued in order to discover who might have held discussions with the patients about the procedure. We raised the question of whether Dr. Jacobson knew anything of informed consent or disclosure to the patients. To this he responded that he thought that disclosure in some form would have taken place,but he had no direct information that any such disclosure did in fact occur for those particular

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Dr. Jacobson raised the question of whether the third patient was, in fact,a Billings Hospital patient.Dr. Jacobson felt that,if the third patient had Hodgkin's Disease i n accordance with are collection of E. R. Russell, he (Jacobson) would have definitely known of the patient since he had attended failure to find a hospital record or case number for CHI-3 when Dr. LeRoy conducted a search for those records'for Dr. Durbin a few years ago. expressed the opinion that that patient might have been injected at Michael Reese Hospital since animal research sponsored by the Manhattan Project did go on a t Michael Reese at that time.He didn ' t present any specific leads in connection with this but thought that the patient must have been at another hospital in the Chicago area and that Michael Reese would have been the most We inquired as to the availability of the records on the first two Chicago patients and were told that these were in storage in the Museum of Science and Industry where Drs. George LeRoy and Pat Durbin had access to them previously. We asked whether they could be retrieved and made available to us for our inspection on our return trip from the West Coast ifour time permitted. However, w e were discouraged from doing so.At one point,Dr. Jacobson said that he will look through the hospital records himself but later said that Dr. LeRoy would examine the records. Dr. Jacobson suggested that we call Dr. LeRoy later to find out what he might have learned from the hospital records. @