In the spring of 1945, 59-year-old painter Albert Stevens, who lives in California, went to a San Francisco hospital because he had a stomach ache. Doctors misdiagnosed advanced cancer that had already spread to the liver. It seemed that Stevens' days were numbered, so American radiologists drew attention to him.
By 1945, American nuclear physicists had learned how to synthesize plutonium in industrial quantities. The effect of radiation on humans in those days was poorly understood, and this needed to be corrected. We needed a man who would die so soon to check how his body would react to severe exposure to plutonium-238 and 239. Albert Stevens was the best fit for this role, because everyone believed that he was already doomed to death.
Without warning the patient about how they are going to "treat" him, he was injected with a mixture of isotopes of plutonium. The injection consisted of 0.2 micrograms plutonium-238 and 0.75 micrograms plutonium-239. This dose was many times higher than the lethal dose for humans described in the manuals of those years. In fact, the US citizen here acted as a dumb experimental rat that was supposed to die suddenly after this injection. And the scientists had to write down exactly how she would die.
Joseph Hamilton - one of the main investigators of experiments on the effect of plutonium on humans, conducted in the United States from 1944 to 1947.
But Stevens, to the surprise of scientists, did not die either in the first hours after the experiment, or in the first days. Therefore, he continued to be treated for cancer. Albert was placed on an operating table to remove the tumor. The operation was successful. When under the microscope doctors got samples of the removed tumor of Stevens, it turned out that it was a benign stomach ulcer, and not cancer at all. The prognosis for his future life would be encouraging, if, of course, Albert's body did not contain a "horse" dose of plutonium.
The experimenters decided not to tell the subject that cancer had never actually been in his body. Instead, they said that he needed regular (once a week) urine and feces tests so that doctors could constantly analyze his condition. In reality, they needed to measure the level of radioactivity in his excrement.
Stevens himself regularly underwent full health monitoring. For the first 10 years, his body functioned normally, and only after that degradation of the intervertebral discs in the lumbar spine began to be observed. Plutonium tends to accumulate in bones.
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Stevens, 79, died of heart disease 20 years after a gruesome injection. In his body, he accumulated a dose of radiation equal to 6400 rem during this period, that is, an average of 320 rem per year. The permissible annual dose for a radiation worker in those years in the United States was 5 rem. The annual dose of Stevens was about 60 times higher than the level of the effective dose that a person received who stood in the immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl reactor core in the first 10 minutes after its destruction.
Radiologists believe that Albert managed to live this long because the half-life of plutonium-238 is 87.7 years. This means that a significant part of it disintegrated and was excreted from the body. Things would be much worse if Stevens received only plutonium-239, since its half-life is 24.1 thousand years.
On January 15, 1994, President Bill Clinton ordered the establishment of an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to conduct an investigation. Compensation should have been paid to all victims or their families. Whether this was done is not reported.