The Plutonium Injections: Hospital Patients Used in Secret Experiments

The Story

In the spring of 1945, the Manhattan Project had a practical problem. Its workers were handling a brand-new element, plutonium, and nobody knew how much of it a human body could absorb before it became dangerous. Rats only told you so much.

According to the final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, the answer came from hospital patients. On March 26, 1945, Louis Hempelmann of Los Alamos recommended that a hospital patient be injected with plutonium. The patient turned out to be Ebb Cade, a 53-year-old cement mixer at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who was in the Army hospital there after a car accident. On April 10, he was injected with 4.7 micrograms. His broken bones were not set until five days later, when bone samples were taken. Fifteen of his teeth were pulled and tested for plutonium; the committee could not determine whether that was for medical reasons or for sampling.

"Do not make the examination look unusual in any way." (Los Alamos scientist Wright Langham on follow-up X-rays of two plutonium subjects, 1950)

Was Cade asked? An Army doctor told federal investigators in 1974 that he gave the injection, without the patient's consent, and only after his objections were overruled by a written order from his superior. That superior told committee staff that he never ordered it and that a different doctor gave the shot. The committee could not resolve the contradiction.

More injections followed in Chicago, at the University of Rochester, and at the University of California. In Chicago, three cancer patients were injected; two of them received about 95 micrograms, the highest doses of all eighteen. A 1946 report explained the logic: "two people were selected whose life expectancy was such that they could not be endangered by injections of plutonium." In California, a 58-year-old man named Albert Stevens was injected in May 1945 because doctors believed he had advanced stomach cancer. A biopsy soon showed he had a benign ulcer instead. A researcher later recalled that Stevens was paid to stay in the area so his samples could keep being collected, and that "to my knowledge he never found out." A four-year-old Australian boy with bone cancer was also injected after being flown from Australia to the University of California for treatment.

At Rochester, the committee found no documents showing what patients were told, but every surviving recollection pointed the same way: the patients did not know. In a 1950 letter about follow-up X-rays of two Rochester subjects, Los Alamos scientist Wright Langham wrote: "Do not make the examination look unusual in any way." The son of one Rochester patient told the committee in 1995 that his parents "were never told or asked for any kind of consent."

The secrecy outlasted the war. When federal scientists followed up with surviving subjects in 1973, the committee found, the real purpose was kept from two of them, and AEC officials misled one subject's doctor and the families of deceased subjects.

The committee's verdict was careful. With one exception, it said, the record suggests the patients were not told they were part of experiments that could not help them, so "it is unlikely they consented." It found no reason to expect acute effects from the plutonium and could not conclude whether any individual was physically harmed. It also noted that some patients picked as hopeless cases lived for decades. The data helped protect the people building the bomb. The patients who supplied it, the committee concluded, were very likely never asked.