Imagine one day you're just going about your business as usual when out of the blue - bam!
you're exposed to high doses of radiation.
Just like that.
You hadn't even planned on being irradiated that day but now you are.
Imagine not expecting to be highly irradiated but then suddenly being highly irradiated.
Actually, I guess that's probably how it happens to the vast majority of people who get radiation
poisoning now that I think of it.
But what separates today's subject from all those other unfortunate souls, is that this
man was subjected to the highest known accumulated radiation dose in human history.
And he survived.
And while this level of radiation may not have been fatal for him, what happened to
this guy is really messed up and sad - and not in the way that you're probably thinking.
In the USA in the 1940's, research and development was underway for the production of the first
nuclear bombs.
Famously, this research is known as the Manhattan Project, and sure enough, it did see the development
of the first nuclear bombs - the use of which is credited with ending World War II for the
US, and changing the world forever.
Even today, the power of nuclear weapons looms over the world, threatening to destroy it.
How many conflicts and wars do you think we've avoided just because the threat of nukes being
involved was too great?
On the flip-side, how close do you think we've come to totally annihilating the planet with
the things?
This is important to consider because I want you to think about how influential the people
who worked on the Manhattan Project are to world history.
In not too long it will be 100 years since these minds came up with the nuclear bomb,
and I'm gonna say nukes are still gonna be a huge influence on the world by then.
That's one hell of a thing to create.
These minds were on the cutting edge of science, but science is a kind of funny thing.
Why?
Well imagine I asked you to create a nuclear bomb.
I've supplied all the materials necessary, don't ask where I got them from, and provided
a small workforce who will carry out your commands, don't ask where I got them from.
You're not locked in a room or anything, you can go out and read up in the library or look
things up on the internet or whatever.
Ok, now how confident are you that you could build a working nuclear bomb given these very
favourable conditions?
Chances are, not very.
It's a complicated task, you don't even know what you don't know!
But the people on the Manhattan Project didn't have your advantages, they had to figure out
everything by themselves.
There was no internet, there wasn't even any nuclear bombs, how the hell were they supposed
to create something that never existed ever?
They were literally making the first one!
What I'm trying to say is, these people were probably pretty clever.
Ok, now imagine I've given you plutonium.
I've just handed it to you and said 'here's some plutonium'.
Chances are you would be very cautious around this material - well, it's radioactive right?
You might not know a lot about it, but that's all the more reason to be careful with it.
You might not even want to be around it.
This is the funny part of science, because back during the Manhattan Project's research,
the effects of plutonium exposure were largely unknown.
So those geniuses that invented the nuclear bomb, y'know, the one that you couldn't even
copy after decades of technological advancement - these guys were going wild with plutonium.
Just getting silly with it.
They were unintentionally contaminating everything with it, accidentally inhaling the dust, tracking
it into civilian areas - one chemist even accidentally swallowed the stuff.
For days after, his breath could be picked up by radiation detectors from across the
room.
Now these guys weren't stupid.
Plutonium had only just been discovered in 1940.
The effects of it on the human body were not known.
That doesn't mean they didn't think it did anything to you, they just didn't know what
exactly it did.
Having to handle so much of it lead to some concerns in the Manhattan Project over what
the effects might be.
And so, a program was initiated with the aim of tracing the course of plutonium through
the body.
In 1944, early tests with rats indicated plutonium concentrated itself in the bones and seemed
to stay there for a long time.
Manhattan Project leaders wanted more information about the effects on the human body.
In 1945, approval was granted for human tests and three test sites were chosen; the Manhattan
Project Army Hospital in Oak Ridge, Billings Hospital in Chicago, and the University of
California Hospital in San Francisco.
Over the course of these experiments, eighteen people, aged 4 to 69 were injected with plutonium.
One of these people was Albert Stevens, a 58-year-old house painter who arrived at the
University of California Hospital complaining of stomach pains.
He was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer.
Like many of the test subjects, Stevens was chosen because the illness he was originally
in the hospital for was terminal, he only had six months to live.
This meant the experiments could be performed on him without much care for how it turned
out, y'know he was gonna bite the dust soon enough anyways, so who cares?
Oh, did I mention the subjects weren't told they were being experimented on?
Yep, Albert Stevens was injected with plutonium without his knowledge.
Why?
Well, it was 1945, very few people knew anything about plutonium so it would have been difficult
to explain all this to the average Joe in order to get his consent.
More importantly, the experiment was tied to a top secret military project during the
biggest and deadliest war in history.
Ethics weren't that high up on the priority list.
Apparently even some of the hospital staff involved with the experiments didn't know
was going on.
A few days after being injected with plutonium, Albert Stevens underwent surgery for his stomach
cancer.
Surgeons removed parts of his stomach, liver, spleen, lymph nodes, pancreas and ribs to
stop the spread of cancer.
These were sent to the lab to study the effects of the plutonium.
It was in this lab that it was discovered that Stevens hadn't got cancer at all, but
a benign gastric ulcer, meaning all that stuff that was cut out of him was for nothing.
Well, except furthering the studies of plutonium exposure, of course.
To this end, Stevens also supplied urine and stool samples to be studied.
And when Stevens recovered from his surgery and was discharged from hospital, he continued
to collect the samples at their request and workers would come by his house and pick them
up.
You see, Stevens was never told he didn't actually have cancer, and workers were still
collecting his samples for nearly a year after the surgery under the pretense that they were
researching his miraculous recovery.
Although his family did become suspicious of the continued sample collecting, they thought
he might have been a sort of guinnea pig for a new form of cancer treatment that was highly-effective.
So not only did this guy have a significant portion of his insides removed, and not only
was he injected with plutonium without his knowledge, but the reason for both those things
was entirely bogus.
With no cancer, that surgery should have never been performed at all, and with no terminal
illness, Stevens was incorrectly chosen for the experiment.
Not that having a terminal illness would make this in any way ethical, because - just in
case I forgot to mention this - he wasn't told any of this!
So what happened to Albert Stevens after being injected with plutonium?
Well, not much actually, he lived for another twenty years.
At some point, 10 years after the injection a radiologist noted rather marked degeneration
of parts of Stevens' spine, consistent with previous findings that Plutonium accumulates
in the bones.
Other than that, there doesn't seem to have been any noteworthy incidents regarding his
health.
He died in 1966 of heart disease at the age of 79.
Upon analysis of his remains it was found that Stevens had accumulated an effective
radiation dose of 64 sieverts, so an average of 3 per year.
The annual permitted dose for radiation workers in the US today is 0.05 sieverts, around 60
times less than Stevens had to endure.
A single dose of 4 to 5 sieverts would prove fatal about 50% of the time and a single dose
of 10 sieverts would be more than enough to kill you.
This means Albert Stevens survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in history,
and he didn't even know it.
Nor did anyone else - as you can imagine, this research was kept secret for quite a
long time, until it was uncovered in the 1990's, making Stevens' unintentional world record
famous about 30 years after his death.
Again, he had no clue any of this happened.
Nor did any of the other people unknowingly subjected to the human radiation experiments,
but y'know a good number of them did have terminal illnesses and were dead not too long
after anyways.
Just as planned!
It should be noted that none of the subjects died from the plutonium.
So I guess you could say it all worked out in the end.
Sure some people got injected with radioactive material without their consent but - is that
so wrong?
I mean, if it's for the advancement of science and the benefit of mankind, who cares if a
few people get dosed with a little radiation, or a small amount of LSD, or even a pinch
of our good old friend Agent Orange.
And if the powers that be, who, let's not forget, were elected by you and I under the
glorious tradition of democracy as the most fit representatives of the good people were
to, let's say, research the effects of subliminal programming through modern multimedia, would
that be a tragedy?
I mean, just imagine all the people who would benefit from such research.
That would be worth a few harmless tests right?
You can let me know your thoughts by reaching me at my personal email on screen now.
Thanks.