"On April 10, without his consent, and five days before setting his broken bones, military physician Joseph Howland injected [Ebb] Cade with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium- forty-one times the normal lifetime exposure. The man-made element plutonium is a "fiendishly toxic" radioactive substance, one that Cade's body would harbor forever: the half life, or time it takes half a dose of plutonium to disappear, is 24,056 years.
...Wright Langham, the chemist who devised the human experiment, justified the toxic injection by explaining to Manhattan Project physicians that "the subject was an elderly male whose age and general health was such that there is little of no possibility that the injection can have any effect in the normal course of his life." But Cade was only fifty-three and held down a grueling job hauling long trucks. Except for a cataract, he enjoyed excellent health.
Before they set Cade's broken legs, AEC doctors completed higher priority tasks. They extracted bone chips and pulled offer of his teeth to measure Cade's newly elevated plutonium levels; only then, five days later, did they set his broken bones. Six months later, Cade was still in the hospital, and in a September 1945 letter, Capt. David Goldring M.D., of Oak Ridge informed Langham that "more specimens and extracted teeth will be shipped to you very soon for analysis."
But before he could lose more teeth or bone, Cade slipped away. One morning, the nurse opened his door, and he was gone. Morgan recalled, "They were surprised that a Black man who had been expected to die got up and walked out of the hospital and disappeared." They were also disappointed: Doctors had hoped to autopsy Cade's body, because the purpose of the injection had not been to treat Cade, but to experimentally calibrate the plutonium's physiological destruction."
Chapter 9- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
