The horrors of the nuclear age, in terms of exploding reactors and nuclear bombs, are well known. Behind the well-publicized threat of mass death lies a secret history of nuclear projects being used to destroy individuals. In the late 1940s, United States citizens were injected with plutonium without their knowledge.
In early 1945, Ebb Cade,
a worker at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility,
got into a car wreck. He survived, but was
bed bound with a broken arm and a broken
leg. When doctors interviewed him, they
ascertained that the fifty-three-year-old
African American man was otherwise perfectly
healthy, eating well, drinking well, and had
no history of serious illness. And so,
having obtained a healthy subject, on April
10th his doctors secretly injected him with
4.7 micrograms of plutonium. Who exactly
ordered the injection, and who exactly
administered it, has never been determined,
with the most likely candidates all
contradicting each other.
What is certain is that no one administered
the dose for the man's health. Although
radium was still being touted by
unscrupulous companies to the masses as a
health tonic, enough people had gotten
cancer and radiation sickness that any
scientists knew that radiation was bad news.
Since the beginning of the Manhattan
Project, tests had been done to see how
plutonium isotopes affected living beings.
Animals had been fed and injected with the
element, and their subsequent health
problems were noted. When a scientist
working on separating isotopes of plutonium
had gotten a face full of gas, his stomach
was pumped, to get out any plutonium he had
swallowed, and his face was thoroughly
scrubbed.
Over the next five days after the
injection, doctors collected any excretions from
Cade to see how much plutonium he retained in his
body. Other tests were more invasive. His bones
weren't set until April 15th, and before they were
set samples were cut out of them to see how much
plutonium had moved into the bone tissue. Fifteen of
his teeth were pulled and sampled for plutonium as
well. Ebb Cade was never informed about the reasons
for any of this, but he might have had an idea of
what was happening to him. According to one account,
one morning a nurse opened his door to find he'd
fled during the night. He died in 1953, of heart
failure. He was the first person to be injected with
plutonium in the United States, but not the last.
The next three injectees were patients suffering
from cancer who had come into Billings Hospital in
Chicago for treatment. From April through December,
a man in his sixties suffering from lung cancer, a
woman in her fifties suffering from breast cancer,
and a 'young man' suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma
were all injected. Not much is known about the third
patient. He was not mentioned in many official
reports, nor is the date of his death known. What is
known is he was injected with 95 micrograms of
plutonium, roughly fifteen times what anyone before
had been injected with.
The University of Rochester also became the next
facility to start injections of plutonium, as well
as other radioactive isotopes, including polonium
and uranium. The director of the program there wrote
that nearly all the patients had diagnoses that
meant they were unlikely to live for more than five
years. Although it's true that many patients did
have serious illnesses, many had illnesses that
allowed for more than ten years of life, three were
still living when investigations into the plutonium
injections began in 1974, and one was misdiagnosed
entirely.
Researchers at the University of California also
took part in these experiments. In May of 1945
Albert Stevens came in for treatment of his stomach
cancer. He was injected with plutonium. After the
injection, it was found that the cancer was actually
an ulcer. When Stevens thought about moving away, he
was offered a stipend to stay in the area, so the
lab could continue to test him for radiation, but he
was never told about the injection. In April of
1946, Simeon Shaw, a four-year-old boy suffering
from bone cancer was the next test subject. His
parents, who had brought him from Australia for
treatment in the United States, were told that the
injection, and a subsequent removal of some bone
tissue, was part of his cancer treatment. When he
got sicker, his parents brought him back to
Australia, where he died. It wasn't until thirty
years later that they found out what their son was
actually injected with.
In December of 1946, the
Manhattan Project ordered a halt to the injection of
humans with radioactive materials, at which point
the Atomic Energy Commission took over. In April of
1947, possibly in response to the Nuremburg trials
concerning human experimentation, it was recommended
that patients be told that they would be injected
with a 'new substance' and that 'no one knew what it
did,' but that it could inhibit cancer growth. The
trials continued. A thirty-six-year-old man named
Elmer Allen was injected and his left leg amputated
shortly after.
Although the injections themselves were halted at
the end of 1947, follow up studies, including the
removal of bone tissue and excretion monitoring,
were conducted into the early 1950s. Some of the
eighteen known patients injected with plutonium died
and were actually exhumed for more tests to be
conducted. Their families were still told that they
had received an unknown mixture of isotopes purely
for medical treatment. It wasn't until the 1970s
that a full investigation was conducted. Surviving
patients were informed, families of the deceased
were questioned and eventually informed. Only one
surviving patient never knew what happened to her.
Her current doctors judged her emotional state too
fragile to be told about the injections.
The last survivor of the plutonium experiments was
Elmer Allen, the man whose leg was amputated after
his injection. When doctors looked back through his
notes, they found that his prognosis, at the
beginning, was very good, and that it was deemed
likely that the then-thirty-six-year-old would live
more than ten years. He died in 1991.
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