Alone and nearly anonymous, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary traveled Friday to the Caribbean coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
Finally, for O’Leary, the time was right to return.
She would, during the weekend, scatter the ashes of her husband, Jack, into Ascencion Bay, eight years after his death and cremation.
“I promised him,” she told me last Thursday as word of her trek to what had been the couple’s favorite spot in southeastern Mexico slipped out during an interview.
Obviously, the journey would be intensely private, personal and painful. But, given the subject of our conversation-her department’s involvement in the treatment of a virulent form of cancer-it became clear that a little-known aspect of her duties in the Clinton administration helped her determine that “this is the time” for her to return to Ascencion Bay.
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Jack O’Leary, a former utility executive and Carter administration official, had a melanoma that attacked a retina. Four years after the eye was removed, the cancer spread. He participated in some anti-cancer experiments but did not survive.
“There’s a passion in the hearts of people who know they are terminal with a disease for which there seems to be no cure,” Hazel O’Leary said. “They want a better quality of life. Both Jack and I involved ourselves in that.”
And that is why O’Leary unexpectedly found herself involved in a series of unpublicized private dramas involving Americans who have turned to her for help.
They are among the roughly 7,000 people diagnosed each year with a horrendous brain tumor called glio-blastoma multiforme. Using conventional radiation and chemotherapy, these people’s life expectancy is a maximum of one year.
Since the 1950s, the Energy Department’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island has done medical research, along with the high-energy physics research for which it is far better known.
Animals and humans were injected with the element boron, which, in theory, would concentrate in their tumors. Then beams of neutrons from a nuclear medical reactor would be directed at the boron. Again, theoretically, that would create a reaction in which the boron broke down, giving off gamma rays and killing tumor cells.
There wasn’t much success, and, in fact, some patients’ deaths were hastened. Research stopped amid no shortage of guilt within the research community.
But years later the subject was reopened with the discovery of new compounds of boron thought to have a better ability to concentrate in tumor cells.
Medical research at Brookhaven is supervised by Brookhaven researchers, doctors from New York’s Beth Israel Hospital, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Energy Department.
Last year, the decision was made to begin new experiments in which the boron would be injected into the brain. The initial plan was not to use neutron beams.
But Joann Magnus, 51, of Westbury, N.Y., who had been diagnosed with the disease, proved more persistent and sophisticated than anyone might have imagined as she lobbied to get the full treatment.
“She pushed and pushed,” recalled Janet Anderson, a top aide to O’Leary. “She called every day.”
At that point last year, no medical protocol, or approved set of guidelines, existed for the scope of the research. Brookhaven was in no rush. Beth Israel doctors, on the other hand, were eager to experiment, Anderson said.
O’Leary forced a dialogue, wondering why greater dispatch couldn’t be demonstrated. The result was that Brookhaven accelerated by as much as a year its plan to conduct a study using boron and the neutron beam.
A proposed protocol was submitted to the FDA. The agency didn’t like it but nonetheless granted a special exemption for Magnus. Last September, the woman got the one-time treatment during an hourlong session.
Eventually, a protocol was agreed upon by all parties. It mandated that an initial group of 28 patients be made up of people older than 50 without any previous exposure to radiation or chemotherapy.
In short order, O’Leary and Anderson were swamped with calls and letters from those younger than 50, as well as those who had undergone some radiation or chemo. As their pleas arrived, dramas played out. Officials who tend to be immersed in somewhat dry, emotionally distant policy now were immersed in flesh-and-blood decisions in which, it seemed, they were playing God.
O’Leary, for example, who knew nothing about boron therapy until it was mentioned at her 1993 Senate confirmation hearing, now faced what she called “a bolt of lightning” in the form of Magnus.
“I didn’t take the initial phone call, but then I did end up being involved with her personally. She just wanted the opportunity for one more day,” said O’Leary. During the period in which Magnus has survived-the initial prognosis was that she had only eight weeks to live-she has become a grandmother.
Another caller was a Georgia man in his 50s who contacted the state’s two U.S. senators, Sam Nunn and Paul Coverdell, and then-presidential counselor Thomas “Mack” McLarty. With the help of a little political clout and the fact he fit the requirements, he, too, gained entry.
Then came a woman, 46, from Vancouver, Wash. (“a thoughtful and delightful person,” said Anderson), whose physicians didn’t want her to consider it. She raised the question of the seemingly arbitrary cutoff at age 50.
“The Brookhaven researchers are too close-minded, the doctors at Beth Israel too flip and liberal,” said Anderson. “The age-50 cutoff seemed arbitrary.”
Prodded by the Energy Department, Brookhaven’s review board last week approved the first big step toward lowering the minimum age to 18. Beth Israel and the FDA must now do likewise for the protocol to be changed.
Some will still lose out.
Last week, the mother of a 34-year-old woman with three children camped out in front of the White House, demanding that her daughter be included in the experiment. Unfortunately, the daughter already has had extensive radiation and chemo.
In recent years, the Energy Department has been the focus of blockbuster stories that exposed secret government radiation experiments on unsuspecting Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, O’Leary has been a vocal supporter of extending the U.S. ban on nuclear weapons testing.
Virtually unnoticed was the agency’s role in the boron experiments, which O’Leary calls the “positive side of nuclear technology.”
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For O’Leary-a methodical, measured Virginia native and daughter of two doctors-the cancer protocol has helped close a certain personal circle.
That’s why, after nearly eight years, she prepared to make the sentimental journey to Ascencion Bay overlooking the “beautiful Mayan ruin” at Tulum.
“I promised him to scatter the ashes in the bay when I was ready. I am now ready.”
Justice Thomas speaks
Nothing is beyond imagination. Clarence Thomas spoke last week.
It was missed by The New York Times and Washington, but Justice Thomas, the Silent Sam of the American judiciary, opened his mouth during a public session of the U.S. Supreme Court last week.
As best one could tell, it was the first time in at least six months that he’d asked a question during an oral argument before the court.
He questioned an attorney representing a group challenging Georgia’s congressional redistricting plan. He asked what would be wrong in trying to create a solid Democratic district by legally drawing up one that was overwhelmingly black because blacks are the most loyal Democrats.
The lawyer headed off on a wrong track with his answer and was quickly, and politely, cut off.
“My question is purely political,” Thomas said. “The state of Georgia is becoming increasingly Republican. We don’t want to lose the entire state. To retain the three (Democratic) districts, we’ll create three with the most loyal Democrats, who happen to be black. What is wrong with that?”
That done, Thomas returned to his apparently natural state of quietude.