Revisiting Human Product 12 - The Man Secretly Injected With Plutonium

Summary

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True Weird Stuff – Revisiting Human Product 12: The Man Secretly Injected With Plutonium

Podcast Host: Sheri Lynch (with Max Sweeten)
Air Date: July 24, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this gripping episode, Sheri Lynch returns to a dark chapter of American science: the secret radiation experiments performed on unwitting individuals during the atomic age. Focusing on the harrowing story of “Human Product 12”—a Black man named Ebenezer “E.B.” Cade, who was secretly injected with plutonium as part of a classified experiment—the episode explores the intersection of scientific progress, government secrecy, systemic racism, and the ongoing ethical reckoning these stories demand. Lynch and co-host Max Sweeten probe the history, human cost, and troubling legacy of these experiments, drawing haunting parallels between America’s own actions and those of regimes we revile.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Atomic Age and Radiation Fallout

• Contradictions of the Atomic Age:
  Lynch contextualizes post-WWII America’s mix of optimism and anxiety (“shiny and new and limitless as the American dream itself… On the other hand, humanity had also learned the terrible cost of unleashing nuclear power.” [02:45]).
• Widespread Exposure:
  Every American born after 1951 exposed to fallout from nuclear testing; invisible risks no one consented to.
• Government Reassurances:
  The CDC and others described risks to the public as “minute”—Lynch’s tone is sardonic: “our government is super honest and totally focused on the well-being of we the people. Except when it isn’t.” [04:19]

2. The Landscape of Human Radiation Experiments

• Types of Experiments:
  • Dose response studies
  • Tracer studies with radioisotopes
  • Radionuclide metabolism
  • Experimental treatments that developed into standard therapies (e.g., cancer radiation therapy)
• Consent Largely Absent:
  • Lynch: “Informed consent, or any kind of consent from a human subject, wasn’t even legally required until 1974.” [06:36]
  • Many subjects had no idea they were in experiments; records were fragmented, and oversight was poor.

3. Chilling Examples of Human Experimentation

• Mental health patients injected with radium [10:21]
• Prison inmates subjected to radiation on testicles, often under false pretenses, including “free vasectomy” offers [14:53]
• Orphaned and disabled children given radioactive milk [18:22]
• Poor, minorities, and marginalized routinely targeted as “ideal” subjects—often underpinned by racist and ableist attitudes

Memorable Quote:

“They were drinking milk from cows fed iodine 131, which sounds benign, but isn’t.” – Sheri Lynch [12:00]

• Inadequate Compensation and Legal Redress:
  Lawsuits, when brought, resulted in meager settlements (e.g., nine plaintiffs split $2,215—“Seems low, doesn't it?” [17:39]).

4. The Story of E.B. Cade, Human Product 12

Timeline and Details

• Accident & Hospitalization:
  March 23, 1945 – E.B. Cade, a Black cement mixer, is severely injured in a car accident and brought to the Oak Ridge hospital (part of Manhattan Project infrastructure).
• Selection as Test Subject:
  Deputy director Dr. Heimer Friedell identifies Cade as an “ideal candidate” and delays treatment of his fractures. [18:22]
• Unwitting Injection:
  On April 10, 1945, Cade is injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium-239—without any consent and using a code name (“HP12,” for Human Product 12).
• Experimental Purpose:
  To study plutonium’s long-term effects and excretion in humans.
• Treatment and Suffering:
  Cade’s care is deprioritized; he endures untreated injuries, has 15 teeth extracted for analysis, and is monitored for prolonged periods for biological samples.
• Human Cost Ignored:
  “The humanity of all those test subjects smothered under technical language... It’s impossible to tell their stories when we don’t even know their names. Except there is at least one story we can tell. And it goes like this...” – Sheri Lynch [18:22]

Major Points

• Systemic Racism and Exploitation:
  Lynch draws attention to Cade’s status as a Black man in 1940s Tennessee, the limited rights and protections, and the likelihood his race contributed to his selection and mistreatment.
• Recordkeeping and Secrecy:
  Records were so poor that key data was lost (“almost like they hired raccoons on meth to do their filing.” – Lynch [29:30])
• Investigator Guilt and Conscience:
  Dr. Joseph Howland objected to the experiment, but was overruled.
  Dr. Joseph Hamilton (San Francisco) later compared these experiments to Nazi atrocities and urged switching to animal subjects (“a little of the Buchenwald touch about it.” [31:55])

Notable Quote:

“Dr. Friedell saw what he described as a well-developed, well-nourished colored male. He ordered Cade to be admitted, but the man's injuries were not to be treated, not for weeks... Consent? Forget it. No one will seek your consent. Not ever.”
– Sheri Lynch [00:37, 18:22]

Aftermath

• Cade’s Escape:
  He vanished from the hospital, later turning up in Greensboro, NC in 1953, dying of heart failure with no knowledge of what had been done to him.
• Later Recognition:
  Decades on, Cade’s identity surfaced thanks to journalist Eileen Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning work. His family was never found to collect compensation from a DOE settlement.
• Historical Reckoning:
  Lynch emphasizes the importance of knowing these stories:

  “We can be grateful for advances in human knowledge and hold ourselves accountable for the unethical and atrocious ways that knowledge was obtained. We can do both at the same time.” [39:11]

5. Broader Reflections and Legacy

• Parallels with Nazi Science:
  The hosts discuss the disturbing similarity between these American experiments and Nazi war crimes, making it clear that “We were doing similar things here.” – Max Sweeten [41:44]
• American Myth-Busting:
  Lynch repeatedly challenges rose-colored notions of American exceptionalism, lamenting how the nation’s progress was built on unethical sacrifices.
• Uncomfortable Truths About Progress:
  Advances in radiation medicine saved lives, but “we paid for so much of that knowledge with our humanity.”
• Modern Relevance:
  The hosts reflect on how such abuses could occur again if history is forgotten—“the darkness is all around you... if you don’t stay on top of it, it comes right back in.” [70:47].

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Informed Consent:
  “Informed consent… wasn’t even legally required until 1974.” – Lynch [06:36]

• On Recordkeeping:
  “It’s almost like they hired raccoons on meth to do their filing.” – Lynch [29:30]

• On Dr. Hamilton’s Memo:
  "Hamilton's memo urged the Atomic Energy Commission to rethink its position on human subjects warning that the organization was risking what he called... 'a little of the Buchenwald touch about it.'" [33:12]

• On Cade’s Ordeal:
  "Cade would remain in the hospital for up to 60 days longer so that his bodily excretions could be analyzed... doctors proceeded to remove 15 of his teeth, which were then sent off to be tested for plutonium." [27:44]

• On Progress and Accountability:
  “We can be grateful for advances in human knowledge and hold ourselves accountable… It doesn’t fit into our idea of ourselves as the world’s hero. It’s an ugly story, but it’s one we have to tell. Because if we don’t, there’s a chance it happens again.” – Lynch [39:11]

• On Vulnerability:
  “This is the stuff of horror movies... Hi, we’re gonna inject you with some plutonium. Oh, and then we’re not gonna set your broken bones for a while. So just lay there in agony and enjoy.” – Max Sweeten [51:03]

• On Systemic Racism:
  “If you don't know what that means, I don't want to hear it from me.” – Lynch [70:26]
  “Please, please. Because those dark days are coming back. I—I mean they can.” – Lynch [70:33]

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Important Timestamps

• [04:19] – Discussion about the government’s “teensy” reassurances about radiation risks.
• [10:21] – Radium injection experiments on mental health patients and eugenics context.
• [14:53] – San Quentin testicular radiation experiments and manipulation of inmate consent.
• [18:22] – Introduction of EB Cade’s case; Human Product 12.
• [27:44] – Cade's ordeal: delayed treatment, invasive procedures, and lack of consent.
• [28:27] – “...more bone specimens and extracted teeth will be shipped to you very soon for analysis.”
• [31:55] – Dr. Hamilton compares US experiments to Nazi camp atrocities.
• [39:11] – Lynch’s reflection on duality of medical progress and ethical responsibility.
• [41:44-42:02] – Hosts acknowledge the uncomfortable moral resemblance to Nazi practices.
• [51:03] – Graphic description of subjects' suffering and hospital escape.
• [63:40] – Lynch: “We can totally own up to these atrocities...”
• [70:33] – Closing warnings about loss of collective memory and repeating history.

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Host Reflections and Emotional Undercurrents

• Sheri Lynch: Mournful, angry, and sardonic; repeatedly emphasizes how personal, societal, and systematic “blind spots” enabled atrocities.
• Max Sweeten: Shocked, sometimes darkly humorous; highlights the cognitive and moral dissonance of the “benign” scientific mindset.
• Historical empathy: The hosts probe how definitions of “full humanity” have shifted, urging that today’s dark corners could yield tomorrow’s scandals.

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Conclusion

"Revisiting Human Product 12" is a sobering, nuanced dive into the ethical and human toll behind some of America’s most celebrated scientific advances. Lynch’s vivid storytelling puts a name and face to the “invisible” victims of government secrecy and scientific hubris, and the episode serves as a call to acknowledge the ugly truths woven into the fabric of progress. The hosts’ frank, unsparing analysis echoes through the decades: "If we don’t tell these stories, there’s a chance it happens again. And this time maybe it happens to you." [39:11]

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Transcript

[Sherry Lynch]

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Visit four patriots.com today. That's the number four P A T R I-O-T S.com and see why families trust four patriots to stay ready. You're on your way to work. And you banged up pretty good. In the er, they find that your right knee is fractured. Your left femur is broken. So is your right arm. Bad as it is. You're lucky. Well, you were lucky. Kind of. What you don't know is that your luck completely ran out the moment that car slammed into you. Never mind that you're in the hospital. Your broken bones won't be treated, not for weeks. You don't know that a doctor sees you lying there on that gurney and decides, this one, this one is ideal. You don't know what an excellent candidate you are for a little experiment. No one will tell you what's about to happen. Consent? Forget it. No one will seek your consent. Not ever. Congratulations. I guess you just became human product

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

12 and make out a small beam of light against the mirror. 01.

[Max Sweeten]

True Weird stuff.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

Atomic radiations of any kind may prove damaging to human beings. So techniques of protecting those who work with such radiations have had to be perfected. Special equipment and different kinds of protective barriers are some of the measures that have been adopted to safeguard humans. Inventing instruments to detect radiations and discovering materials that will block and stop radiations require extensive tests.

[Sherry Lynch]

That's from an instructional film Produced in the 1950s by Encyclopedia Britannica. The atomic age in America was a wildly contradictory time. On the one hand, atomic energy seemed as shiny and new and limitless as the American dream itself. On the other hand, humanity had also learned the terrible cost of unleashing nuclear power. Knew the world annihilating risks had already seen and Hiroshima and Nagasaki just how big a price there was to pay for splitting the atom. Every single human being on Earth born after 1951 has been exposed to radiation fallout from nuclear weapons. Testing every last one of us. The degree of exposure varies though. And while for some people there might be an increased risk of cancer, for most of us that increased risk is very small. Not that anyone asked your permission to take that risk. It's just sort of baked into the idea of being born on this planet. What you might call a literal occupational hazard. The CDC puts it in the most blandly wholesome way imaginable.

[Max Sweeten]

Your individual dose from fallout will depend on a number of factors, such as where you lived when the testing occurred, how much time you spent outdoors, the weather, how much milk you drank and fresh fruits and vegetables you ate, and other personal, lifestyle and individual factors.

[Sherry Lynch]

I guess the first question I have is about these lifestyle factors when you consider that before 1963, there had been more than 500 tests of nuclear weapons conducted in Earth's atmosphere. All those particles and gases, all invisible, traveling through the atmosphere and then falling to the ground, exposing every soul in the contiguous United States to some level of radiation. All the body's organs, all the body's tissues, everyone 100% exposed. So maybe let's don't beat ourselves up for not doing enough pilates or drinking green juice. Because you can't dodge what you can't see. And how can you avoid something you don't even know exists? Iodine 131, strontium 91 can lead to thyroid disease and thyroid cancer. The other can up your chances of developing leukemia. All falling to the ground like the worst kind of invisible fairy dust. But not to worry. The government promises us that the risk is so small, so, so teeny tiny, so very minute, that it's hardly a risk at all. And you know, our government is super honest and totally focused on the well being of we the people. Except when it isn't. Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, Filters ready to clog. H VAC on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 247 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. For example, the U.S. department of Energy acknowledged doing four basic types of radiation experiments on human Subjects from the 1940s to the 1970s. Dose response studies looked at the biological impacts of radiation exposure. Tracer studies Used radioisotopes to investigate the pathways and processes in the human body, as well as the impact of radiation on the body. And then they also did something called radionuclide metabolism study studies. These were aimed at discovering not just how the radioisotopes were retained or excreted, but how they behaved inside the body. Then there were the experimental treatments for disease, and many of those became routine medical options. If you or someone you know has received radiation therapy for cancer, this is where all of that began. There are people alive today thanks to those therapies. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could thank the individuals who chose to be part of those medical breakthroughs? Well, unfortunately, we can't thank them. One, because the feds grimly acknowledged that informed consent, or any kind of consent from a human subject wasn't even legally required until 1974. And two, many of the human subjects involved in these radiation protocols had no idea that they were part of any experiment. To be fair, there were experiments using volunteer subjects, Sometimes the employees of whatever research facility was conducting the tests. There were experiments done using chronically ill patients, including children, and experiments that involved terminally ill patients. Prison inmates were often used, and in a handful of cases, the scientists themselves served as their own guinea pigs. In those days, before computers, record keeping wasn't optimal. Documentation was apparently half assed and sketchy. The words the feds use is fragmented. Researchers weren't great about dates, so that made for a big old mess to sort out. And some of these experiments went down at universities and private hospitals, with the Department of Energy paying the bills and but not providing much in the way of oversight. It was far, far too easy for files to be misplaced, damaged, or destroyed. In February 1995, the US Department of Energy, on the orders of energy secretary Hazel o', Leary, published a little something called Human radiation experiments. The DOE roadmap to the story and the records. It's dense and dry and absolutely delightful if you're nerdy and enjoy paging through declassified documents. It covered 150 radiation experiments on human subjects dating from the early 1940s through the early 1970s. And then in July 1995, the DOE released another version with an additional 275 research programs they'd unearthed. I'll tell you what's shocking, but probably shouldn't be. It's just how loose and improvisational so many of these experiments appear to have been. Like the one where they got some volunteers to drink water laced with plutonium. To be fair, they did tell the men what they were Drinking. They just said that the levels were so low that it was almost not even worth the bother. But why not just humorous and chug a lug?

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

The manifestations of radiation in the body are many and range from slight to severe. Loss of hair, nausea, bleeding, inability of the body to resist other ailments and make its own repairs. These are some of them, and they may be climaxed by the ultimate symptom, death itself. However, complete recovery is more probable.

[Sherry Lynch]

Now, if you had the misfortune of being a pain patient at the Elgin State Hospital in Elgin, Illinois between 1931 and 1933, you might have found yourself injected with radium as part of an experiment in treating mental health disorders. This was more than 15 years before the Argonne National Laboratory was chartered. And here's why that mattered. America's first national lab. Argonne's state admission was cooperative research in nucleonics. When Argonne got their hands on Elgin State Hospital's records, they found a mess. Argonne gamely tried to locate the patients to figure out what, if any, impact the radium injections had had on the health and longevity of these subjects. None of whom gave consent. And they weren't in any position to consent. But you know, back in the 1930s, the attitude appeared to be, oh well, they're mental patients, so whatever. Defective and undesirable. Remember, this was a time when eugenics was the rage. And selective breeding in humans to eliminate so called inferior people and undesirables was a concept that was more widely embraced than any of us like to think about, because we like to imagine ourselves as much nobler than we really are. It just so happens that in 1933, during the Elgin Hospital radium experiment over in Germany, the Nazis were busy passing their first eugenics policy, the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring. This law required all physicians in Germany to record and register every patient with genetic based illnesses. They made an exception for women over the age of 45, women past childbearing age. The Nazis had this maniacal fixation on controlling reproduction. Which is crazy, right? Because can you even imagine such a thing happening today? And think about this. Hitler had only been in power for six months at that point. That's how fast a monstrous idea can become the law of the land. But back to the usa let's talk about the Hanford Laboratory in Washington State. Part of the Manhattan Project, hanford produced nearly 2/3 of the plutonium used in America's nuclear stockpile. You saw the movie Oppenheimer the plutonium used in the Trinity test came from Hanford. So did the materials for the bombs that helped end World War II. It seems like if you wanted to work at Hanford, he needed to be up for anything. Like volunteering to stand outside in a cloud of radiation and intentionally inhale, then submit to a slew of tests to measure just how much of that radiation had been taken in by the thyroid. Eight other Hanford employees spent a month drinking milk from cows fed iodine 131, which sounds benign, but isn't. Iodine 131 is a product of nuclear fission, a major source of contamination from the 1950s atomic bomb test to Chernobyl and the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. Once again, the goal was to assess uptake by the human thyroid. I just hope those eight Hanford employees at least got a pizza party as A thank you. Iodine131 was the star of another study involved involving 65 psychiatric patients at a clinic in San Francisco. Diagnoses ranged from anorexia to manic depression to schizophrenia. The control group of so called normal minds consisted of volunteers from the clinic's medical and clerical staff. The goal was to figure out if the thyroid functioned the same in people with a mental health disorder as it did in the mind normal population. Spoiler alert. There was zero difference. For nearly a decade, beginning in 1949, inmates at San Quentin were a buffet of human subject research. In one experiment, test subjects had blood drawn which was laced with phosphorus 32 and then re injected. We know now that phosphorus 32 can damage DNA and cause a host of other rough side effects, like nausea, cramps, inflammation of the lungs, inflammation of the abdominal wall, and bone marrow depression, which could be permanent. Bone marrow depression means a decrease in white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. But hey, these were criminals, right? Paying their debt to society one way or another. Another inmate experiment was conducted by renowned scientist Dr. Carl and Heller. He wanted to test the effects of radiation on the testes. What dose would produce changes in human sperm, he wondered. And how long might it take for those cells to recover? He recruited subjects by offering them a free vasectomy. So thoughtful, right? Of course, the real motive was to prevent these men from going out post radiation and fathering defective children. The inmates who agreed thought they were consenting to the vasectomy, not to the irradiation of their nuggets. Dr. Heller offered little in the way of information. The early subjects were told nothing about any future risk. And later subjects were given only the vaguest answers to their questions. And here's a wild detail. No Roman Catholic inmates were permitted to participate. Why? Because each test subject was required to produce weekly semen samples. The Catholic Church was like, that requires masturbation. So that is going to be a no from us. Dr. Heller built a special device that would give a precise calibrated dose of radiation from two sides. The test subjects. The inmates laid face down with their scrotum slotted into a plastic box filled with warm water. Very spa like so far. With the testes fully descended thanks to that warm water, Heller would hit the button and zap. Acute burns of the skin were one side effect. Inflammation and bleeding were another. Pain was a strong possibility. As you can imagine, in 1976, a handful of these surviving participants filed lawsuits alleging lack of informed consent and inadequately supervised research. The depositions read like outtakes from a horror movie. Inmates being permitted to control their own dose of radiation. Vasectomies performed with no anesthetic of any kind. In his deposition, Dr. Heller admitted that he hadn't properly informed the subjects of the risks. He said he didn't want to scare them by talking about cancer. He insisted that he had used the phrase tumor of the testes, something echoed in many of the subjects reports. Problem was, he allegedly told the men that the risk was one in a million, which was more than a little optimistic. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 1979 and. And the nine plaintiffs split a whopping $2,215. That's about 9,628 in today's money. Seems low, doesn't it? But there you go.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

The estimated dose needed to bring about permanent sterility exceeds the lethal dose. So obviously sterility by radiation would be just incidental, a matter of dead man wouldn't worry about.

[Sherry Lynch]

From employees at Oak Ridge volunteering to inhale airborne uranium oxide dust to comatose, terminally ill patients getting plutonium injected into their brains. To the seven orphan children who were given milk contaminated with iodine 13 for 14 days. The atomic Energy Commission stayed busy for decades. When you read the reports, it's so easy to forget that these were human beings with families and friends and hopes and dreams. It's all data and statistics. The humanity of all those test subjects smothered under technical language. It's impossible to tell their stories when we don't even know their names. Except there is at least one story we can tell. And it goes like this. Ebenezer Ebb Cade was a cement mixer employed by the J. A. Jones Construction Company in Oakland Ridge, Tennessee. Cade was headed to work on the morning of March 23, 1945 when he was badly injured in a car accident. His right kneecap and left femur were fractured, his right arm broken in two places. It was his bad luck that the deputy director of the Manhattan District Engineer Hospital, Dr. Heimer Friedel, had an agenda beyond providing life saving care to patients. Dr. Friedel was an army physician. He'd been stationed at Oak Ridge with explicit orders to protect the health and safety of the Manhattan Project. On that fateful morning in March 1945 when E.B. cabe was brought into the ER, Dr. Friedell saw more than just another victim of an auto accident. Dr. Friedell saw what he described as a well developed, well nourished colored male. He ordered Cade to be admitted, but the man's injuries were not to be treated. Which sounds barbaric, but at the time wasn't all that uncommon. These were the days when antibiotics were just coming into use and surgeries were often delayed. If there was any possibility of infection that would put the patient at risk of sepsis. Cade, despite being in good health overall, suffered from tooth decay and obvious inflammation of his gums. As per usual, though the records are vague and murky and unclear as to why Cade's fractures were allowed to go untreated. Benefit of the doubt, the medical team feared infection via gum disease. Sinister interpretation. Fredell had other plans for Ebcade. You be the judge. Because delayed treatment for his injuries would turn out to be the least of Cade's problems. And Ebenezer Cade had no way of knowing that his car wreck had landed him in the crosshairs of a highly secretive program buried deep inside the Manhattan Project. Stafford Warren, head of the medical team, had arrived at the conclusion that controlled experimentation on human beings was critical to national security. How else to determine the effects short and long term, of radiation on human beings? How much radioactive material will be toxic? How much would remain in the body after normal metabolic processes and for how long? It was decided that civilian test subjects would be injected with polonium, plutonium, uranium and amarisium. The experiments will be performed at hospitals affiliated with the Manhattan Project. Strong Memorial hospital in Rochester, New York with 11 test subjects. Billings Hospital at the University of Chicago with three test subjects. University Hospital in San Francisco with three test subjects. And the Manhattan District District Engineer Hospital in Oak Ridge, Tennessee with just one test subject, Ebcade. The secrecy of it all can't be overstated. At the time, plutonium and uranium were so classified that they were Identified only by code names. Atom bomb Daddy. J. Robert Oppenheimer knew about the planned human trials. He approved shipments of uranium and plutonium to be used in the experiments. He just didn't want any of them to be carried out at his facilities in Los Alamos. Not because he had any moral objection to the clueless human guinea pigs. More because he knew full well that exposure to plutonium could cause so much damage to staff that work on the atomic bomb might slow down or even be halted. Oppenheimer could not and would not take that risk. Not in my backyard, said the father of the bomb. We're doing important work here, okay? So, following orders, Dr. Friedell left his patient's bedside in Tennessee and immediately wrote to his superior at Los Alamos, Dr. Lewis Hempelman, saying that he believed he'd identified the optimal candidate for plutonium injection. 53 year old EB Cade. Kate, of course, completely unaware that upon entering the Manhattan District Hospital that March Day in 1945, got a new name. HP12. HP as in human product. On April 10, 1945, more than two weeks after his car accident, with his Injury still untreated, EBK was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. We know now that plutonium, whether it's inhaled or ingested or injected or enters the bloodstream via a wound, heads straight for the lungs, the liver and the bones. How long can plutonium atoms remain in the human body? Decades. Adding to that bad news news, plutonium has a long, long half life. Half life means how long it takes the isotope to lose half its radioactivity. But there's more than one kind of plutonium isotope. There are five common plutonium isotopes. The longest has a half life of 80.8 million years. The shortest has a half life of 14, 14.4 years. The plutonium 239 they injected into EBCADE had a half life of 24, 100 years. Whatever the half life, plutonium in the body becomes a long term source of radiation to other cells in the neighborhood. An invisible biohazard. With all the time and patience in the world. The physicians who were cheerfully shooting plutonium into Ebcade's veins would like you to please understand that there is a difference, okay, between the administered dose, 4.7 micrograms and the retained dose, which was. Well, who even knows? That's why it's called an experiment. Duh. Try to keep up. Those doctors had no idea how much plutonium might remain in Cade's body. They guesstimated that he had another 10 to 20 years ahead of him based on his overall health and life expectancy at the time. Which meant they couldn't rule out the possibility that Cade would develop a plutonium related cancer. But who really knows, right? Why burden the man with the knowledge? Why make him fear a future that may never come? This mindset is about as far from informed consent as you can get. And at least one member of that medical team was troubled by was the man holding the syringe. Dr. Joseph Howland was an army doctor stationed at the Oak Ridge site during the 1974 investigation into the human radiation trials conducted by the atomic energy commission. Dr. Howland testified that there had been no consent of any kind on the part of Ebcade that he, Howland, had voiced his objections to injecting the man with plutonium. Those objections were forcefully overruled in writing by Howland's boss, Dr. Friedell. Friedel, of course, denied it and said that in any case, Howland was mistaken. It was another physician, Dr. Dwight Clark, who'd been assigned the task. Not surprisingly, the Atomic Energy Commission threw up its hands and was like who can say? The messy record keeping rearing its head. It's almost like they hired raccoons on meth to do their filing. Poor Ebkade, who was probably in real pain from his untreated broken bones and now starting to be more than a little bit scared by the fact that there seemed to be no exit plan for his hospital stay. What did he make of all those white coats hovering at his bedside? All he knew was that four hours, hours after that strange injection, they were back drawing samples of his blood. Four days later, they were telling him to hold absolutely still as they removed samples of his bones for biopsy. On the fifth day post injection, they finally said his broken bones. Was he to be discharged at long last? No. Cade would remain in the hospital for up to 60 days longer so that his bodily excretions could be analyzed. And remember that tooth decay diagnosed when Cabe was Transported to the ER from the accident scene, doctors proceeded to remove 15 of his teeth, which were then sent off to be tested for plutonium. We know that because a letter written in September 1945 by a man named Captain David Goldring at the Oak Ridge site promised the Manhattan Project biochemist, Dr. Wright Langham at Los Alamos that, quote,

[Max Sweeten]

more bone specimens and extracted teeth will be shipped to you very soon for analysis.

[Sherry Lynch]

What we don't know is if Cade's teeth were being yanked for medical reasons and then sent out for Testing? Or if they just tore the man's teeth out because they were curious to see if plutonium had migrated into the enamel. We know very little, very little about what Abcade made of this experience. For starters, no one seemed to care enough about the man's thoughts or feelings to have added them to his chart. Plus, you have to remember the time a Black man in 1945 in the state of Tennessee did not have the same legal rights and protections as the white men in white coats who stood by his hospital bed. Starting in 181966, with the passage of a law mandating separate schools for white and black children, segregation was serious business in Tennessee. Mixed race marriage was a felony. Hotels, restaurants and theaters had the legal right to refuse entry to black people. I'm not saying that the Manhattan Project doctors in Oak Ridge viewed E.B. cade as less of a human being than themselves, because I can't prove that. I'm just saying that given the historical context, it's not a huge stretch to say that these men did perhaps see Mr. Cade as their inferior. Oak Ridge was a secret place not found on any maps until after 1959. E.B. cade was one of 7,000 African American workers recording recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. They weren't told much of anything. Still, the jobs were appealing because President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlawed racial discrimination by federal agencies. Pay for African American workers at Oak Ridge was better than what was typically available in the South. The opportunities, though, those were the same old, same old. Domestic and menial labor. Construction work. Work like the job E.B. cade held as a cement mixer. Recruited workers were sent by train and bus to this odd little town near Knoxville, a town patrolled by armed troops. There were signs everywhere that read, see nothing, Hear Nothing, say nothing. E.B. cade and his fellow workers had no idea what their labor supported. And they didn't learn the truth until after the US Dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. EB Cade had been working for the Manhattan Project for more than two years at the time of his car accident. He knew better than to ask questions. Plus, he was injured and probably thought that the doctors knew best. As many of us would in that situation. But at some point, Cade clearly realized that whatever was happening was not in his best interest. Maybe it was the loss of 15 of his teeth that triggered his panic, because one bright spring morning, a nurse pushed open the door to his room and was shocked to find his bed empty. EB Cade, Human Project 12 was gone. Disappeared as the though he'd never existed. And not just gone from that hospital bed gone from Oak Ridge. Gone, gone, gone. This next part is hard to believe given that it's the Manhattan Project at a top secret hospital with a highly trained staff led by army doctors. But here goes the point. Point of this plutonium injection experiment was to discover how much of the plutonium dose would be retained and how much would be excreted. This meant constant surveillance of Ebcade's urine, among other things. But a really big and really stupid mistake was made. Early on Cade's before injection and after injection, urine samples were accidentally commingled. Oops. That meant there was no pre plutonium baseline kidney function to measure against. So sloppy, so stupid, so embarrassing, so very unprofessional that when big boss Dr. Wright Langham had to present the Oak Ridge injection data at a conference, he fudged the screw up by claiming that Ebkade may have had a pre existing kidney disease that rendered him less than an ideal subject. Since Langham was known as Mr. Plutonium, this version of events was permitted to stand. The doctor who objected to injecting abcaid wasn't the only person in the program who had concerns. On the other side of the country in San Francisco, the lead plutonium researcher at University Hospital, Dr. Joseph Gilbert Hamilton, was increasingly troubled by the work. Under his supervision, three people were injected, one of whom was a four year old boy named Simeon Shaw. Child had bone cancer. He died 255 days after his plutonium injection. The other two subjects fared much better. Elmer Allen lived for 44 years and Albert Stevens clocked another 20 years and earned bragging rights for being the man who survived the highest known accumulated dose of radiation of any human being. Dr. Hamilton, like the others in the program, justified not informing his patients about the plutonium being injected into their bodies. His reasoning was national security. And also these test subjects all had cancer. Did he see them as having nothing to lose? And now it's time for a shocking little fun fact. Albert Stevens had been misdiagnosed. He didn't have cancer. He had a stomach ulcer. Oh well. At any rate, Hamilton's conscience must have been gnawing away at him. In 1950, Hamilton wrote a memo to the Atomic Energy Commission's Director of biology and Medicine, Dr. Shields Warren. In it he strongly advised replacing human subjects with chimpanzees. It was more than an attack of conscience. Hamilton was drawing some very uncomfortable parallels between his work with human radiation studies and the Nazis. Hamilton's memo urged the Atomic Energy Commission to rethink its position on human subjects warning that the organization was risking what he called considerable criticism and that the program had a little of the Buchenwald touch about it. Buchenwald as in the largest Nazi concentration camp in Germany. Buchenwald as in the Nazi concentration camp where more than 56,000 souls were murdered. Experimentation on human beings was among the many atrocities cities committed at Buchenwald. There were the typhus vaccine trials, the maximum poison dose trials and the horrifying burn tests. Prisoners were intentionally burned with white phosphorus burns severe enough to cause death. And that was the point. How long would it take that burned prisoner to die? You can see why Dr. Hamilton was so troubled. He didn't have to carry the burden of guilt or remorse for long. However, Hamilton died in February 1957 at age 49 after a two year battle with leukemia. His colleagues openly expressed their belief that it was his long and repeated exposure to radiation that led to the blood cancer that took his life and ebcade human product 2012 the injured and unwitting victim of the only plutonium injection experiment at Oak Ridge. What became of him? After he fled his hospital bed, Cade resurfaced in Greensboro, North Carolina in April 1953. In his own obituary, the cause of death was listed as heart failure. The Greensboro Record, knowing nothing of the Cade's story, gave his passing just one line in the May 2 edition of the paper under the heading Negro Deaths. Forty years later, with Cade's identity and role in the human radiation experiments now public, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy told reporters that they had been unsuccessful in locating any next of kin. In November 1995, Department of Energy Secretary Hazel O' Leary announced that E.B. cade was one of the individuals eligible to receive compensation under a $4.8 million settlement for victims of the human radiation experiments. Which sounds nice, but Cade was long dead and he died never knowing the truth of what had happened to him in 1945 at the Manhattan District Engineer Hospital Hospital it's very possible that no one would know his name today if not for the work of a journalist named Eileen Wilson. While working as a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune, Wilson published a three part series in 1993 called the Plutonium Experiment. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her work in exposing the truth about the human radiation experiments. The truth about American citizens who didn't know and never consented to be the human guinea pigs for the atomic age.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

In the fields of medicine and biochemistry, isotopes are performing near miracles of diagnosis and discovery. With radioactive sodium, doctors are solving more of the seeming mysteries of heart Disease and circulatory disturbances. Radioactive phosphorus has been used to locate tumors in the brain and greatly simplify operations for their removal. Iodine 131 finds one of many uses in revealing conditions of the thyroid. And there are many more. New ways of using isotopes are being discovered constantly through the tireless work of modern pioneers in such fields as chemistry, metallurgy, medicine and biology.

[Sherry Lynch]

It's true that good came from the Atomic Energy Commission's research. We know now what levels of radiation exposure are harmful to humans. You benefit from this every time you get an X ray. Workers at nuclear power plants are safer. People are alive today. Thanks to advances in nuclear medicine. Diseases that used to be straight up death sentence sentences like acute myeloid leukemia are now treatable. But we paid for so much of that knowledge with our humanity. Like when we dose children with disabilities at the Fernald School in Massachusetts. We dose them with radioactive calcium and iron without informing their parents. Like when we dosed more than 800 poor press pregnant women in Tennessee with radioactive iron. Like when we left EB Cade in a hospital bed with severe and untreated injuries while we waited for the delivery of the plutonium 239never agreed to have injected into his body. We can be grateful for advances in human knowledge and hold ourselves accountable for the unethical and atrocious ways that knowledge was obtained. We can do both at the same time. Yeah, it's uncomfortable. It doesn't fit into our idea of ourselves as the world's hero. It doesn't fit into any of our mythic ideas of America. It's an ugly story, but it's one we have to tell. Because if we don't, there's a chance it happens again. And this time maybe it happens to you.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

You. But all are within man's power, subject to his command on man's wisdom, on his firmness in the use of that power. Depends now the future of his children and his children's children in the new world of the atomic age.

[Sherry Lynch]

I'm so heartbroken when I think about Ebcade. There were so many people whose names we don't know, who suffered mightily during these atomic age human experiments. But because we know just enough of E.B. cade's story to make it a human story. I just can't shake it, Max. I cannot seem to let this one go.

[Max Sweeten]

You know, we. We do like to think of ourselves as a little bit more civilized in this country. But when you compared it to what they were doing at Buchenwald, it's like out that we were doing that, we were doing similar things here.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

We were.

[Sherry Lynch]

We really were. I mean, we really were.

[Max Sweeten]

I say we. I don't think. I don't think people, Mainstream Germans, knew what was going on, just like mainstream Americans didn't know what was going on here. What my question is, the people making these decisions, was there no moral conundrum about what they were doing to the people they were doing it to? I mean, well, we.

[Sherry Lynch]

We have to put ourselves in the historical context, which does not excuse their behavior. Back in the 1930s, 1940s, right up through. Honestly, right up through the 70s, when this whistle got blown, we did not think of people in psychiatric hospitals as fully competent human citizens, did we?

[Max Sweeten]

No.

[Sherry Lynch]

The racism in this country that we're still battling today, and it's back and bigger than ever. We didn't think of black people as fully human citizens in those decades. We did not consider children as something a resource worthy of our protection. I mean, the number of children that were human subjects in these radiation experiments would bring you to your knees. Look what they did, like, at the Fernald School in Massachusetts, we could have done a whole episode just on that. But the Fernald School in Massachusetts, these were kids with disabilities. And so, hey, they're defective already. Why don't we mess with them?

[Max Sweeten]

Well, and at a certain time in this country, we would warehouse everybody together, no matter what it was that they had going on, whether they had down syndrome, they had mental problems, they had alcoholism, they were all sort of warehoused. And it's just like, just get them out of society and stick them all together. And I saw when you said the thing that they were giving orphan's milk. So just because they're orphans, they went, well, they're defective. They're orphans. We can do whatever we want to them. They have no adult that's going to say, no, you can't. I mean, that's. That's really upsetting. The other thing that I really enjoyed was your description of the scrotums being zapped with radiation. Thank you for that, Sherry. I. I appreciated that a lot.

[Sherry Lynch]

I. You know, I was thinking about scrot. Shades of the testicular testosterone experiment episode that we did. Yeah, it's called Ballsy if you haven't listened to that one. It's about a different doctor at San Quentin who was mashing up testicles and injecting them into people to give them more vim and vigor and all of that. Goat testicles, people testicles. Like, he was just. He was just crazed by the testes. Yeah. And I would love. I would love. I wish I could believe that we've made a ton of progress in the direction of granting people their full humanity, regardless of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, job status. Like, I would love to feel like we've come a long way. I don't think we have. And I. I don't think we've come as far as we think we have, clearly.

[Max Sweeten]

You know what this makes me wonder. It always makes me wonder what's going on now that we don't know about, that we're going to find out 20, 30 years from now that's happening now that we would be horrified to know about.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah. And you know that there's something. And this was so. This was, this was a one where I was like, really wrestling with. Yeah, like the. Yeah, but. Yeah, but look at all the good. When you read these declassified documents for all of these different radiation experiments, many of them, to be fair, many of them were fairly benign. And by that I mean they weren't injecting plutonium into someone's brain or giving a child radioactive milk. Those are not the benign ones. A lot of these were fairly benign. And they were working with, you know, blood samples or tissue samples or whatever. And we did. We learned an awful lot. Like, when I was a child, leukemia was a death sentence. Now there are people who don't survive leukemia, but it's considered a treatable disease now, which is a new thing. We've made extraordinary advances with breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer. We've made incredible advances with nuclear medicine, full stop. But. But people don't ever stop to think, how do. How did we do that? Like, how did we get there?

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

And, and everybody, if you ask people, they'll go, oh, well, you know, that's like laboratory animals, right? Like mice, rabbits, monkeys. Because you don't want to think that your own government, you know, was not turning a blind eye, but, like, actively recruiting and participating. This is not a blind eye.

[Max Sweeten]

Somebody was making a decision to grant money to somebody who was a doctor to make these experiments. I just. What's astonishing is. And I guess there were people, as you pointed out along the way, were going, hey, I'm sorry, I've got, I've got a conscience and I have a sense of morals. This is immortal moral, what we're doing. But you had to figure there were a bunch of people along the way who rationalized this was absolutely perfectly fine to do to human beings.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, look at. I wanted to make a point of shouting out Dr. Joseph Howland in this episode because he, he objected firmly and, you know, was overruled. And he's military. You know, you're in the military. Like, I think people that aren't, those of us that are not in the military perhaps have no comprehension of military discipline and how that's its own separate world. And he eventually complied on orders. The other thing I want to. So I want to talk about the amount of time Ebcade spent in that hospital bed before they injected him and then treated his injuries, which were pretty significant. Okay, yes, they feared infection. And there was, there was not, you know, a ready supply of antibiotics in 1945 like we enjoy today. But you also have to remember, no Internet and no overnight FedEx. So Dr. Fredell had to write to his superiors in Los Alamos, who then had to greenlight his choice of this experimental test subject. And then the plutonium had to be delivered to Oak Ridge in an army transportation. It wasn't like, you know, you're going to Amazon.com and getting prime delivery on your plutonium 239. So ebbs delay for treatment was a function both of. Yeah, we're a little worried about infection and also how much time it took, do you see what I'm saying, To just get the approval and the plutonium on board to do the experiment.

[Max Sweeten]

All I could think about was, did they duke him the hospital stay?

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, they had to because the man escaped. You know, he escaped. He never paid a bill.

[Max Sweeten]

You mean he didn't get one of those envelopes with a window in it that says open immediately? Yeah, you know, I, I wondered about that as well. I'm hoping they duked him. The hospital stay at least.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, they were never able to find a next of kin to serve them the bill. And he, I, I think he went through a window. I mean, he got the hell out

[Max Sweeten]

of there, rightfully so.

[Sherry Lynch]

It's also, it's also, if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, like you saw one facet of an enormous prism, right, of the, the, the atomic age, Oak Ridge. It's fascinating to me that they built the Oak Ridge laboratory and the Manhattan District Engineer Hospital and all of the housing for all of the support personnel, all of that was built and it was a secret. It was not on the map. Think about that. Think about how fascinating that is, the idea of this secret city and all of the things that were happening at that time and you could get away with it. Back then, people didn't have drones. They didn't have, you know, Facebook like they didn't have just you didn't have a camera on your phone. And it was a very different world. So that all by itself is fascinating. And E.B. cade, all he knew was that because it was a federal construction job, the money was so much better than he could have made on a civilian project at that time. You think he knew that at any time he might be plucked out of the crowd for this?

[Max Sweeten]

How could he have any way of knowing? I mean, this, this is the stuff of, of horror movies. This is the stuff of Saw movies. Hi. We're gonna inject you with some plutonium. Oh, and then we're not gonna sit your broken bones for a while. So just lay there in agony and enjoy. Oh, we're gonna pull your teeth too. Fifteen of them.

[Sherry Lynch]

Terrible, terrible. And like the. Okay, so they had a award filled with terminally ill patients, many of whom were comatose. And the attitude was, well, they're dying anyway. Let's see what happens if we shoot plutonium right into their brains. And I know there are people that would go, well, they are dying anyway. And you just have to constantly like interrogate your own humanity. Like, okay, yeah, they are dying anyway. But shouldn't, shouldn't they get a say? Because here's what you don't know. That plutonium injection right into their brain. What, what happens as a result of that? Do they spend their last hours alive in excruciating agony like you? How can you be so cavalier about what you do to another human being? Like, it's mind blowing to me. And like the little boy, the four year old boy, Simeon Shaw, who was part of the human test cohort at the Manhattan Project Hospital in San Francisco. Yes, he had bone cancer. He did. And back then, very likely a death sentence. And he did die 255 days after the injection. You might say, well, maybe he would have died sooner. Or what difference if he died? 255 versus 275, he was probably suffering. But do you hear yourself? Yeah, how about if that was your 4 year old? Do you hear yourself?

[Max Sweeten]

Well, the thing that's interesting too is no two people are going to react. Exactly. Well, I say no two people are. Exactly. But, but just because you have something happen doesn't necessarily mean that you're, you are going to develop it because of the way genetics are. You know, our genetics, you know, you have one person that smokes until they're 100 years old, never seems to have any problems with it. And then you have other people that get lung cancer when they're in their 20s, you know. Yeah, it's. You don't know, Janae. You don't know.

[Sherry Lynch]

You don't know The. So. So one thing you can say is pre. Like when they first started working on the atom bomb, they really didn't know what the impact of radiation was on the human body. Again, if you saw the Oppenheimer movie, do you remember the scene when the bomb fired and all the soldiers standing right in the field with it were told to hit the mattress? Lol. Like that's any kind of protection. Right? They did not know. And they felt that this amoral experimentation on human beings was justified by the overwhelming need to have that knowledge. So you. You always have to put yourself back in the historical moment. But damn.

[Max Sweeten]

Well, it was. It was a big deal in Las Vegas. If they were doing one of those out in the desert to go and watch it, certainly those people had some radiation from that.

[Sherry Lynch]

There's an entire community of people called the downwinders that were living in downwind of the Trinity test site. And those folks got whomped with radiation fallout. And like the data is really frightening. And that's its whole. That's a whole separate. They deserve their own story and maybe we'll do an episode on that down the line at some point. They. That's its own entire thing because the, the soldiers at Los Alamos, all the personnel at Los Alamos, they may not have known all of what was possible, but they were aware of what was happening. They knew they were working on the atomic bomb. The downwinders were just like it was Tuesday. You know what I mean? They were just living their lives. They didn't know in the same way that these test subjects didn't know. And I find it interesting to. That when you realize that every single person born in the contiguous United States has been subjected to radioactive fallout. That's. That's a thought, isn't it?

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

It is.

[Sherry Lynch]

That's something to think about. So let me tell you a quick little story. My father had one sister. And when she was Quite young, like 33, she was diagnosed with very, very aggressive breast cancer. Cancer. So this is back in. Like I was. I mean, I wish that I had been older when this happened. I would have asked questions, but I was a little kid and she was sent away. She had a double mastectomy. And it was pretty barbaric back then. Now things are different, you know, But. But her body was butchered and they did that to save her life. So I'm not saying that the doctors were sloppy it was just the time. And they sent her away to a hospital in New York State, probably strong in Rochester for all I know, for an experimental radiation protocol.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

And

[Sherry Lynch]

they had her in a room, she couldn't have visitors. And the medical people that tended to her were in full like radiation biohazard, lead shielded outfits. I know this from the stories I've been told in her description of it. She's gone now. There was concern that her breast cancer had metastasized and it ultimately did. It metastasized to colon cancer. So, so they inserted this sort of radioactive cylinder into her body through her vaginal canal. And that was supposed to like irradiate these cancer cells that were spreading and save her life. And, and you know, it did, but it, it like the, her internal organs were fused and burned and the damage was catastrophic. And she, she had to live with. And I just, in her memory, I will not describe some of what happened to her. And the scar tissue, she would have to periodically go back to that hospital and they would break the scar tissue like manually, like with their hands. It was agonizing and she was, she was disfigured and scarred and did not have the same level of functionality that you know, the factory settings and it, she lived for another 20 years beyond the initial diagnosis. But there was never a day where she didn't carry the, the pain and the difficulty of managing her body despite all of this horrific radiation damage. And it was not in vain. She was one of many people that were part of these experimental protocols with consent. Right. So now this is like 1977 maybe, I think so this is, you know, we're past the point of this disclosure. Disclosure and the Geneva Convention, the World Health Organization, everyone has unilaterally agreed that people have to. Human beings have to consent to being part of a medical experiment. So she did consent. She didn't understand what she was consenting to. None of us do, right? But because of her consent and her suffering and her participation, people don't go through that anymore. But having like having seen what she endured. She died shortly after I got out of college. Having seen what she endured and knowing the brutality that it left like the wreckage of her body that was left. I don't know, maybe that kind of set me up, predispose me to feel more fierce and protective of somebody like Abcade. You know, like it's really easy to read about it in a book or hear about it on a podcast or you know, in a passing thing on 60 Minutes or whatever. If you read this, these declassified DOE reports. They're very, very dry. I mean, the only one that really comes to life is the testicle experiments. Those are described in such careful, loving detail that it's crazy. Drop those. Let's drop those ballsies into that hot water, fellas. You know, like,

[Max Sweeten]

Sometimes I want to interrupt you and go. I just want you to know this is making me really uncomfortable. Please continue.

[Sherry Lynch]

What did you think about. Ooh, side note, Side note. Isn't it interesting that Catholic inmates were prevented from participating, not because it was immoral or inhumane or dangerous, but because we can't have that. Them spanking the bishop in order to get you a semen sample?

[Max Sweeten]

I'll never. I. I'll reveal something. One time when I was, I don't know, teenager somewhere in there, and I went to Face to Face confession with a priest, and he looked at me and he said, if you ever tell me this again, I'll throw you out of here. He says, let's talk to what you're doing in your life. He says, if you go to hell on this, it's on my head.

[Sherry Lynch]

I mean, really, you know, like, I just have to say, I'm gonna just take you to 1940. And they're still yanking on about the masturbation thing. That's crazy to me like that, folks. Let it go.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

Well, let it go.

[Max Sweeten]

You know, they did clean up their act a little bit after Vatican II with some of that craziness.

[Sherry Lynch]

Although, you know, not 100%, but you gotta say all those Roman Catholic inmates at San Quentin and. Oh, my God, is San Quentin not just the most happening spot for crazy?

[Max Sweeten]

I know Tim wasn't in San Francisco, too, where we had. They had. They were doing the experiments where they were giving the guys the. The johns with the prostitutes. They were dropping acid and monitoring what they were doing. Yeah, man, that was a hot bed of crazy back then.

[Sherry Lynch]

Then it's so everybody thinks that the Manhattan Project was just at Los Alamos, but the Manhattan Project was at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. And we talked about that in our episode about the disappearing ship. It was in Chicago, San Francisco, Tennessee, New York. The Manhattan Project was in a lot of places, y'. All, not just in Los Alamos, not just where they tested the bomb. The Manhattan Project was kind of everywhere and very secretive, obviously, for obvious reasons.

[Max Sweeten]

And by the way, if you haven't listened to the episode Tripping John's, I think it was one of our first half dozen episodes when we started doing true weird stuff. I had no idea that was going on that was government funded. I had no idea that level of crazy was going on. Listen to that episode. Your jaw will be open the whole time.

[Sherry Lynch]

And that's all. I mean, that's all, like, factual, declassified stuff. Like, you don't have to.

[Max Sweeten]

Like.

[Sherry Lynch]

There are a lot of things I would love to do an episode on, but I can't find enough facts to back up the story. Like, I'm mesmerized by, like, the vanishing staircases in national parks. I can't. I can't do an episode on something that I can't find a single factual source for. But the United States government experimenting on children, widows, orphans, the sick, the dying, babies, inmates, people in mental hospitals, random passersby. How much time do you have? Like, it's just everywhere. Everywhere.

[Max Sweeten]

Well, I'm glad our tax money's been well spent.

[Sherry Lynch]

I do. I just. I just want to say I think we can totally own up to these atrocities and be very grateful for the knowledge that we now have. Because who among us doesn't have a family member or a friend or a coworker or a neighbor whose life has not been spared thanks to advances in chemotherapy and radiation? Can anybody out there not throw up a hand? You know, no one. Right? Like, we, we really, really and truly have come so far. But what's the harm? Like, are we so childish and defensive and narcissistic that we can't say? We have really come so far and we owe an enormous debt to the people who had no idea they were our guinea pigs. And we have to be accountable and we have to take steps to make sure these kinds of things don't ever happen again. Why are. Why is it so hard for us to do that, do you think?

[Max Sweeten]

I don't know. I think there's some things people just don't want to look at. They just. They'd rather stick their head in the sand.

[Sherry Lynch]

I had a. So, you know, I went to Catholic school. I went to a Catholic prep school for high school, and Max and I were probably going to get visited by the Vatican because between us, we. We are not maybe the best ambassadors for any of that. But I. I went to a Catholic prep. I'm very thankful. My grandmother pawned jewelry to put me in a school because she so believed in my future. And I will never, never, ever be able to repay that. But one of my teachers was an elderly nun who taught English and she was very like, you know, sort of apple cheeked and silver haired and, you know, always lenient with us. Right. And so Nobody really took her very seriously. And she was a brilliant mathematician, but she would not teach math. She would only teach literature. Because as a young woman, she had been a mathematician with the Manhattan Project. She was not at Los Alamos. She was at one of the other many Manhattan Project sites. And her experience working as a mathematician for the Manhattan Project and the resulting atomic bomb. She gave up her career and her academic pursuits and she went into religious life. And that was the end for her. She felt that. That what humanity had unlocked and unleashed was more than, I guess, her conscience could reconcile and you would never have known in a million years. We called her everything from Sister Mary English to Sister Mary Office to Sister Mary Library, depending where she was. Right. Like, we never. Only Catholic school kids can even relate to that. Right.

[Max Sweeten]

Like, you would call somebody with a real. With a real moral conscience about things who's trying to give back to children. And I know. I think about some of the stuff I did, too, and I'm like, oh,

[Sherry Lynch]

like, we just called the nuns. Like, they would all have, like, real nun names, but we called them by whatever task they were involved in.

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah, we had Sister Mary Chemistry and Sister Mary Library. We did the same thing.

[Sherry Lynch]

Sister Lisa Biology. Like, we had, you know, whatever. Right.

[Max Sweeten]

Sister Pencil Nose. Yeah, it was Sister Elephant Ankles.

[Sherry Lynch]

So as a child, I didn't. As a kid, as a student in her library or her classroom, I didn't know anything about the Manhattan Project besides, like, the atomic bomb. Right. That was all I knew. And I didn't know anything about her journey because she never, ever, ever talked about it. You found out about it after she died, when you read her obituary, like, that's how you found out. And after she passed away, one of my teachers was a priest, and he was. He was very. He was a very important figure in my life. He. He understood that I was dealing with some stuff at home that made it hard for me at school. And he. He. He made a lot of money, My future happen by being so incredibly supportive and nurturing and. And tough on me, too. You know, like, he wouldn't let me make excuses. Like, he helped. He made me be accountable. But he was the one who told me, you know, Sister Mary Office, she could have been anything. And he. He told me just the barest outlines of her story. And I thought about her when I watched the Oppenheimer movie, and I thought about her when we were working on this episode. Because to your point, Max, there were plenty of people with a conscience, plenty of people who questioned and had doubts and who didn't think that giving radiation laced milk to orphans was like what we needed to be doing. There were a lot of people along the way. So it's not like everybody was ruthless and unscrupulous. That's just not true. And if there are any surviving descendants of Ebenezer Cade out there, I hope the government found them and gave them Mr. Cade's share of that legal settlement. I can tell you that newspapers all over North Carolina right through the 90s, you know in the classified section where you have to post legal, legal notices.

[Narrator/Archive Voice]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

You've seen them like for bankruptcy or whatever. Every, pretty much every newspaper in. Because he died in Greensboro, North Carolina. Every newspaper in North Carolina ran these notices in their classified sections for a long time looking for next of kin because you know, he was part of this federal settlement. And the, the problem is, can't tell you if they ever found them because EB Cade was a black man in pre civil rights America. And if you don't know what that means, I don't want to hear it from me.

[Max Sweeten]

Don't know what that means. Do a little reading.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah.

[Max Sweeten]

If you don't, if you don't know what that means.

[Sherry Lynch]

Please, please. Because those dark days are coming back. I, I mean they can.

[Max Sweeten]

If we don't watch it, they can always. Experience has shown we think we evolve and then we don't.

[Sherry Lynch]

So the thing about the darkness is, you know how like when you come home at night and nobody's left any lights on and you pull up into your driveway and your house is so dark and it's a little bit, you're a little bit nervous, but you go in and you flip the light and the porch light comes on and the lamp comes on and suddenly you're in this little golden glowing island. It's still dark all around you, but you're in this safe puddle of warmth and security. That's kind of how civilization is. You've got this little puddle of light, but the darkness is all around you. And if you don't stay on top of it, it comes right back in. And anybody paying any, any attention to the world today right now knows it's gotten a little bit closer and a little bit darker.

[Max Sweeten]

Thank you for listening to this classic episode of True Weird Stuff. To fall even further down the rabbit hole of weird history, follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and YouTube. True Weird Stuff is a now media production written and hosted by Sherry Lynch. Executive produced by Tony Garcia. Directed by Max Sweeten. Additional support from producers Carrie Bowser and Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader, Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artwork by Olivia Axelund. True Weird Original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and zane Nash. Copyright 2026 Now Media. All rights reserved.

[Sherry Lynch]

All wrongs remembered Granger knows When you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, Filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24.

[Max Sweeten]

7 support.

[Sherry Lynch]

Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.