PLUTONIUM FILES

Opening

Between April 1945 and July 1947, doctors working for the Manhattan Project injected eighteen hospital patients in the United States with plutonium, without their informed consent, to learn how the new element moved through and left the human body. The patients were in hospitals in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Rochester, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Most were never told what had been done to them, and the records were classified for decades.

The experiments became public in full in 1993, through a series of articles by the journalist Eileen Welsome in The Albuquerque Tribune. They led to a presidential advisory committee, a formal apology from President Clinton in 1995, and settlements with some of the families. This is a case where the conspiracy turned out to be real, documented and admitted.

Timeline

10 April 1945Ebb Cade, a Black construction worker hospitalised at Oak Ridge after a car accident, is injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. He is the first subject. Doctors later take bone samples and extract teeth for analysis. He leaves the hospital and dies in 1953 of heart failure.

14 May 1945Albert Stevens, a house painter at the University of California hospital in San Francisco, is injected after a diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer. The diagnosis is wrong: surgery finds a benign growth. Stevens lives about twenty more years, carrying the highest accumulated radiation dose recorded in a human. He is never told.

1945 to 1946Eleven patients at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester are injected. Patients at Billings Hospital in Chicago are also injected.

1946Simeon Shaw, a four-year-old boy from Australia with bone cancer, is brought to San Francisco for treatment and injected. He dies the following year.

18 July 1947Elmer Allen, a railway porter, is injected in the leg at the San Francisco hospital before the leg is amputated. He is the last of the eighteen.

1947An Atomic Energy Commission memo recommends that documents on human experiments be kept secret, citing the risk to public opinion and of lawsuits.

1976 and 1986Parts of the story surface in Science Trends and, in 1986, in a congressional staff report for Representative Ed Markey on human radiation experiments. The subjects remain unnamed.

15 November 1993Welsome's series "The Plutonium Experiment" begins in The Albuquerque Tribune, naming five of the patients.

7 December 1993Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary announces a policy of openness and releases records on human radiation experiments.

15 January 1994President Clinton creates the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, chaired by the bioethicist Ruth Faden.

April 1994Welsome wins the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

3 October 1995The committee's final report is released at the White House, and Clinton apologises on behalf of the government.

1996The government settles with the families of a number of the injected patients.

1999Welsome publishes The Plutonium Files.

Key figures

The eighteen patients are the centre of the case, and Welsome's reporting is why several of them have names rather than code numbers. Joseph Gilbert Hamilton led the San Francisco experiments. Harold Hodge supervised the injection at Oak Ridge. Hazel O'Leary opened the records. Ruth Faden chaired the committee that judged the work. Ed Markey's office raised the issue years before it became national news.

Physical and documentary trail

The committee's thousand-page 1995 report, the Department of Energy's released records, Welsome's articles and her book make this one of the best-documented cases in the archive. Patients were identified in the records by code numbers such as HP-12. Doses ranged from 95 to 5,900 nanocuries. Stevens' cremated remains were acquired by Argonne National Laboratory in 1975 without his family's consent, and some were later held at a tissue repository at Washington State University. The 1947 memo on secrecy is part of the record, and it shows that the decision to classify was made in part to avoid embarrassment and legal liability.

repugnant because human subjects were essentially used as guinea pigs

Things you might not know

• One subject did not have cancer. Albert Stevens was misdiagnosed, injected and never told.
• A four-year-old was among them. Simeon Shaw was flown from Australia for treatment.
• Patients were chosen because they were expected to die soon. Several lived for decades.
• Secrecy was recommended to avoid lawsuits. The 1947 memo is explicit about public opinion and legal risk.
• The plutonium programme was one of many. The 1995 committee reviewed thousands of radiation experiments, including radioactive iron given to pregnant women in Nashville and radioactive oatmeal fed to boys in Massachusetts.

Competing explanations

A real, secret and unethical programme. This is the documented position, and the government itself accepted it in 1995. The committee concluded that wrongs had been done, while noting that consent standards were different in the 1940s.

A defensible wartime safety study. The scientists' argument at the time was that they needed to know how plutonium behaved in the body to protect workers handling it. The committee accepted the purpose and rejected the method: patients were not told, and the secrecy continued for decades after any wartime need.

Later life of the case

The plutonium injections are now a standard case in the history of research ethics, alongside the Tuskegee syphilis study. The 1993 openness initiative and the 1995 report changed how the Department of Energy releases records about its own history.

Finding

Eighteen people were injected with plutonium without informed consent, the government hid it for decades, and in 1995 it apologised. The documents settle what happened, who was involved and why it was kept secret. The case shows that some government secrets the public suspected were real, and that it took a reporter, not an official inquiry, to put names to them.

What still will not resolve: the identities and later lives of all eighteen patients, several of whom are still known mainly by their code numbers.