The sad part about Elmer's story is that nobody believed him. He went to his doctor and told him, “I think I've been injected with something.” His doctor diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic at the same time that he was conversing with the atomic energy scientists in Argon National Lab to provide them with tissue samples. [Interview Eileen Welsome] Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed Radioactivity to Thousands of Americans
Elmer Allen was an African-American Pullman porter who, because of a freak
accident on a train, injured his leg which was diagnosed first as a fracture,
then a lesion, and finally bone cancer. The treatment recommended was
amputation. But on July 18, 1947, at the University of California Hospital at
San Francisco, three days before his leg was amputated, Allen received an
injection of plutonium 238 in the muscle of his leg. Though his injection of
plutonium was a smaller dosage than the other 18 plutonium subjects, Allen's
plutonium 238 dosage is considered "hotter" as it is more radioactive than
plutonium 239. Further, due to Allen's amputation, approximately half of the
plutonium 238 stayed in the remaining part of his leg resulting in his receiving
six times the radiation for the average person. Allen was the last subject of 18
people injected with plutonium during the 1940s.
Officials who designed the study
say that Allen was informed about the experiment and signed a consent form
allowing them to make the plutonium injection, but a 1974 follow-up
investigative study by the Atomic Energy Commission found that patients were not
told plutonium was being injected into their bodies (Allen was told he was
receiving a radioactive substance), relatives were not properly informed for
requests to exhume bodies, and long-term survivors such as Allen, who lived
decades after the injections, were not properly informed in 1973, the reason
they were part of a follow-up study.
Radiation Scandal By Anthony and Denise Ji-Ahnte
Sibert