On March 24, 1945, a 55-year-old black truck driver, Ebb Cade, was admitted
to the U.S. Army Manhattan Engineer District Hospital in Oakridge, Tennessee for
treatment of bodily injuries resulting from a car accident. The extent of his
injuries were so severe that he was not expected to live. On April 10, 1945,
documents show that he was injected with a significant amount of plutonium. Cade
was the first patient out of 18--all of which the DOE has still not completely
identified--to be injected with plutonium. He received 0.29 microcuries of
plutonium 239, a dose equal to 1,030 rems or 41.2 times what the average person
receives in a lifetime.
Dr. Karl Morgan, a physicist from
the University of Chicago, who came to Oakridge in 1943 to work on the Manhattan
Project, described in a letter to The Oakridger newspaper how Dr. Robert S.
Stone--the doctor who injected the plutonium--discussed Cade's unsuspecting
involvement and eventual disappearance from the hospital a few days later.
Morgan writes: "Dr. Stone was particularly concerned because, as he said, this
man was part of an experiment to determine the risk to man from exposure to
plutonium. This poor `expected casualty' had suddenly gotten up out of his bed
at the hospital and disappeared. I was upset and concerned when I heard about
this human experiment because as described to me this black man was unconscious
and not expected to live when he was injected with plutonium. I was disturbed
for two reasons: One, the poor man could not possibly have given his consent to
be a guinea pig and two, I was afraid he was selected for this experiment in
part because he was black and it was unlikely any of his family would learn of
the plutonium injection... " Radiation
Scandal By Anthony and Denise Ji-Ahnte Sibert