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Jersey area were to be conducted not by the Department of Agriculture but by the US Army's Chemical Warfare Service (CWS)—because "work done by the Chemical Warfare Service would carry the greatest weight as evidence if...lawsuits are start- ed by the complainants". Meanwhile, the public relations problem remained unresolved: local citizens were in a panic about fluoride. The farmers’ spokesman, Willard B. Kille, was personally invited to dine with General Groves (then known as "the man who built the atomic bomb") at his office at the War Department on 26 March 1946. Although diagnosed by his doctor as having fluoride poisoning, Kille departed the luncheon convinced of the government's good faith. Next day he wrote to the general, expressing his wish that the other farmers could have been present so that "they too could come away with the feeling that their interests in this particular matter were being safeguarded by men of the very highest type whose integrity they could not question". A broader solution to the public relations problem was suggest- ed by Manhattan Project chief fluoride toxicologist Harold C. Hodge in a second secret memo (1 May 1946) to Medical Section chief Colonel Warren: "Would there be any use in making attempts to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of resi- dents of Salem and Gloucester counties through lectures on F tox- icology and perhaps the usefulness of F in tooth health?" Such lectures were indeed given, not only to New Jersey citizens but to the rest of the nation throughout the Cold War. The New Jersey farmers’ lawsuits were ultimately stymied by the government's refusal to reveal the key piece of information that would have settled the case: how much fluoride DuPont had vented into the atmosphere during the war. "Disclosure would be injurious to the military security of the United States," Manhattan Project Major C. A. Taney, Jr, had written in a memo soon after the war's end (24 September 1945). The farmers were pacified with token financial settlements, according to interviews with descendants still living in the area. "All we knew is that DuPont released some chemical that burned up all the peach trees around here," recalled Angelo Giordano whose father James was one of the original plaintiffs. "The trees were no good after that, so we had to give up on the peaches." Their horses and cows acted and walked stiffly, recalled his sister Mildred. "Could any of that have been the fluo- ride?" she asked. (The symptoms she detailed are cardinal signs of fluoride toxicity, according to veterinary toxicologists.) The Giordano family has also been plagued by bone and joint prob- lems, Mildred added. Recalling the settlement received by the family, Angelo Giordano told these reporters that his father said he "got about $200". The farmers were stonewalled in their search for information about fluoride's effects on their health, and their complaints have long since been forgotten. But they unknowingly left their imprint on history: their complaints of injury to their health reverberated through the corridors of power in Washington and triggered intensive, secret, bomb program research on the health effects of fluoride. "PROGRAM F": SECRET FLUORIDE RESEARCH A secret memo (2 May 1946) to General Groves from Manhattan Project Lt Colonel Rhodes states: "Because of com- plaints that animals and humans have been injured by hydrogen fluoride fumes in [the New Jersey] area, although there are no pending suits involving such claims, the University of Rochester is conducting experiments to determine the toxic effect of fluo- ride." Much of the proof of fluoride's alleged safety in low doses rests on the postwar work done at the University of Rochester in antici- pation of lawsuits against the bomb program for human injury. For the top-secret Manhattan Project to delegate fluoride safety studies to the University of Rochester was not surprising. During WWII the US Federal Government became involved for the first time in large-scale funding of scientific research at government- owned labs and private colleges. Those early spending priorities were shaped by the nation's often-secret military needs. The prestigious upstate New York college in particular had housed a key wartime division of the Manhattan Project to study the health effects of the new "special materials" such as uranium, plutonium, beryllium and fluoride which were being used in mak- ing the atomic bomb. That work continued after the war, with millions of dollars flowing from the Manhattan Project and its successor organisation, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). (Indeed, the bomb left an indelible imprint on all of US science in the late 1940s and 1950s. Up to 90 per cent of all federal funds for university research came from either the Department of Defense or the AEC in this period, according to Noam Chomsky in his 1997 book, The Cold War and the University.') The University of Rochester Medical School became a revolv- ing door for senior bomb-program scientists. The postwar faculty included Stafford Warren, the top med- ical officer of the Manhattan Project, | and Harold C. Hodge, chief of fluoride research for the bomb program. But this marriage of military secrecy and medical science bore deformed off- spring. The University of Rochester's classified fluoride studies, code-named "Program F", were started during the war and continued up until the early 1950s. They were conducted at its Atomic Energy Project (AEP), a top- secret facility funded by the AEC and housed at Strong Memorial Hospital. It was there that one of the most notorious human radiation experiments of the Cold War took place, in which unsus- pecting hospital patients were injected with toxic doses of radioactive plutoni- um. Revelation of this experiment—in Sanh 16 = NEXUS APRIL - MAY 1998