Ebb Cade

Ebb Cade (17 March 1890 – 13 April 1953) was a construction worker at Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, and an unwilling participant in the first human injection experiments with plutonium.

Ebb Cade
Born(1890-03-17)March 17, 1890
Macon County, Georgia
DiedApril 13, 1953(1953-04-13) (aged 63)
Known forBeing the first person injected with plutonium

Ebb Cade was born on 17 March 1890 in Macon County, Georgia, the son of Evens and Carrie Cade. Ebb Cade was married to Ida Cade. At the age of 63, Cade died as a result of ventricular fibrillation followed by heart failure on 13 April 1953 in Greensboro, Guilford County, North Carolina.[1]

Plutonium injection experiments

On 23 March 1945 Cade was on his way to work at a construction site for the Manhattan Project when he was involved in a traffic accident at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He was an African-American cement worker for the J.A. Jones Construction Company. Cade presented at the Oak Ridge Hospital with fractures of right patella, right radius and ulna and left femur. Dr Friedell determined that as Cade was, as he characterized, a "well developed..well nourished" "colored male", he was suitable for experimentation with plutonium injection. Doctors left his fractures untreated for 20 days until after plutonium injections began on April 10 1945. Cade received the injections at the Oak Ridge Hospital on the Clinton Engineer Works reservation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee without his assent or knowledge. He became known as HP-12 (Human Product-12), and was the first person to be injected with Pu-239.[2][3] In order to test the migration of plutonium through his body, subsequently fifteen of Cade's teeth were extracted, and bone samples taken.[4][5]

Beginning in 1945 and until 1947 a total of 18 people were part of a series of studies that involved the injection of Plutonium. In Rochester, New York at Strong Memorial Hospital 11 people were injected. In Chicago, Illinois 3 individuals received injections at Billings Hospital of the University of Chicago. In San Francisco, California 3 people were injected at the University Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco. The first person injected in California was Albert Stevens.[6][7][8][9] Urine and feces samples were collected from the test subjects and forwarded to Los Alamos (also known as Project Y) for plutonium analysis.[10][11] The studies were utilized to formulate mathematical equations necessary to establish plutonium excretion rates.[12][13][14][15]

gollark: In that case, I understand, you are being REASONABLE™.
gollark: Oh, LibreSSL, neat.
gollark: You should always program as if key features of the language/libraries/runtime may fail at any time.
gollark: They should FOCUS on fixing bugs or at least DOCUMENTING them over adding stupid new features nobody wants.
gollark: The search is really quite poor.

References
  1. North Carolina State Board of Health (27 April 1953), Ebb Cade. Certificate of Death #238, Greensboro, North Carolina: Bureau of Vital Statistics
  2. Openness, DOE. (June 1998). Human Radiation Experiments: ACHRE Report. Chapter 5: The Manhattan district Experiments; the first injection. Washington, DC. Superintendent of Documents. US Government Printing Office.
  3. 1945–1947: Eighteen patients were injected with plutonium in AEC experiments
  4. Preston, D. Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (2005): 277.
  5. Kiernan, Denise (2013). The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. New York, NY: Touchstone of Simon & Schuster. pp. 344–345. ISBN 978-1451617528. Retrieved 9 March 2018. cites Dated September 19, 1945, Formerly Declassified Correspondence, 1942–1947; Records of the Atomic Energy Commission, Record Group 326; National Archives at Atlanta
  6. Durbin, P.W. (1971). Plutonium in Man: A Twenty-Five Year Review. Berkeley: Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, UCRLB20850.
  7. Durbin, P.W. (1972). "Plutonium in Man: A New Look at the Old Data." (PDF) Chapter 7.2 in Radiobiology of Plutonium, edited by B.J. Stover and W.S. Jee. Salt Lake City: The J.W. Press.
  8. Langham, W. H., Bassett, S. H., Harris, P. S., & Carter, R. E. (1980). Distribution and Excretion of Plutonium Administered Intravenously to Man. Health Physics. 38(6): 1031-1060.
  9. Langham, W. H. (1959). Physiology and toxicology of plutonium-239 and its industrial medical control. Health physics. 2(2): 172-185.
  10. Langham, W. H., Lawrence, J. N. P., McClelland, J., & Hempelmann, Louis H. (1962). The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's experience with plutonium in man. Health physics. 8(6): 753-760.
  11. Hempelmann, Louis H., Langham, W. H., Richmond, C. R., & Voelz, G. L. (1973). Manhattan Project plutonium workers: A twenty-seven year follow-up study of selected cases. Health physics. 25(5): 461-479.
  12. Stannard, James Newell, and R. W. Baalman, Jr. (1988). Radioactivity and health: A history. No. DOE/RL/01830-T59. Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (USA).
  13. Stannard, J. N. (1973). Toxicology of radionuclides. Annual review of pharmacology. 13(1): 325-357.
  14. Hodge, Harold C., J. Newell Stannard, and John B. Hursh. (1973). Uranium. Plutonium. Transplutonic elements. ISBN 3540061681 Springer, Berlin, FR Germany.
  15. Openness, DOE. (June 1998). Human Radiation Experiments: ACHRE Report. Chapter 5: The Manhattan district Experiments; the first injection. Washington, DC. Superintendent of Documents. US Government Printing Office.

Record Group 326 (Box descriptions). This is the box cited by Denise Kiernan as containing relevant correspondence

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.