Albert Stevens

Albert Stevens (1887–1966), also known as patient CAL-1, was an American house painter from Ohio who was subjected to an involuntary human radiation experiment and survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with 131 kBq (3.55 μCi) of plutonium without his knowledge because it was erroneously believed that he had a terminal disease.

Plutonium remained present in his body for the remainder of his life, the amount decaying slowly through radioactive decay and biological elimination. Stevens died of heart disease some 20 years later, having accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64 Sv (6400 rem) over that period, i.e. an average of 3 Sv per year or 350 μSv/h. The current annual permitted dose for a radiation worker in the United States is 0.05 Sv (or 5 rem), i.e. an average of 5.7 μSv/h.

Background Plutonium was first synthesized in 1940 and isolated in 1941 by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley. Early research (pre-1944) was carried out on small samples manufactured using a cyclotron. The Manhattan Project built mass scale production facilities for the war effort, specifically for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In November 1943, the X-10 Graphite Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory began producing significant amounts of the element, and industrial–scale production began in March 1945 with the commissioning of the B Reactor at the Hanford Site in Washington State. The plutonium produced by the B-reactor was earmarked for the implosion-type, plutonium cored nuclear weapons that were being developed as part of the Manhattan Project. Of the three nuclear weapons made during the war, two of them used plutonium as their fissile material.

Plutonium was handled extensively by chemists, technicians, and physicists taking part in the Manhattan Project, but the effects of plutonium exposure on the human body were largely unknown.

Manhattan Project Plutonium-238 and plutonium-239 are exceedingly difficult to detect inside the body because they are alpha particle emitters. Unlike the case of radium, which can be detected quite easily, there are no gamma rays to detect from outside the body. As long as a person is alive, the simplest way to detect plutonium would be to analyze a person's excretion through urine and feces. Unfortunately, this method has its limits in that only a small fraction of Pu is excreted, for example 0.01% of the body burden per day is typical, 2 to 3 weeks after exposure. While Dr. Robert Stone was the Health Director at the Met Lab in 1944, lead chemist Glenn Seaborg, discoverer of many transuranium elements including plutonium, urged that a safety program be developed and suggested: "that a program to trace the course of plutonium in the body be initiated as soon as possible ... [with] the very highest priority."

Tracer experiments were begun in 1944 with rats and other animals with the knowledge of all of the Manhattan Project managers and health directors of the various sites. In 1945, human tracer experiments began with the intent to determine how to properly analyze excretion samples to estimate body burden. Numerous analytic methods were devised by the lead doctors at the Met Lab (Chicago), Los Alamos, Rochester, Oak Ridge, and Berkeley. The plutonium experiments were not isolated events. The fact that he had the highly radioactive Pu-238 (produced in the 60-inch cyclotron at the Crocker Laboratory by deuteron bombardment of natural uranium) Stevens's total dose was approximately 60 times this amount.

He died on January 9, 1966, of cardiorespiratory failure She had uncovered the stories and published a series of articles in 1993 detailing the identification of CAL-1, CAL-2 (4-year-old Simeon Shaw), CAL-3 (Elmer Allen), and others. Welsome was highly critical of the committee's final report, which was released in 1995.