In May 1945, Californian house painter started his incredible run of bad luck, getting misdiagnosed with stomach cancer and being told he had six months to live.
While a terrible thing to happen, his luck was going to get much worse. Across at the the previous year, scientists had been getting concerned about handling plutonium and its effect on humans, recommending “a program to trace the course of plutonium in the body be initiated as soon as possible.”
Unfortunately for Stevens, people on the project became aware of him and his (not real) terminal cancer while they were looking for patients for their first human trials. Stevens, designated patient , received the highest radiation dose of anyone in the trials, a mixture of plutonium-239 (0.75 micrograms) and plutonium-238 (0.2 micrograms). Plutonium-238 was chosen because its higher activity made it to trace and analyze.
After a year of no new cancer, his doctors believed Stevens actually had a benign gastric ulcer, meaning that they had given an otherwise healthy man the highest accumulated dose of radiation that any human had ever received. In fact, it was the textbook fatal dose of plutonium.
Stevens had not been properly informed of what had happened to him. If he had been told that he was to be injected with radiation, there’s no evidence to suggest he gave his consent.
As well as being unethical, the lack of information given to Stevens caused the doctors practical problems, when he wanted to move away from the area. In order to continue to monitor radiation levels in his body, the doctors decided to pay him $50 a month to stay in the area and continue providing stool samples.
Remarkably, despite receiving the average lifetime exposure to plutonium, Stevens survived for another 21 years, dying of . Dr Joseph Hamilton, who experimented on Stevens, died aged 49, of leukemia likely brought on by radiation exposure during his work.