The Highest Radiation Dose in Any Human (Who Survived) | Tales From the Bottle

imagine one day you're just going about your business as usual when out of the blue bam you're exposed to high doses of radiation just like that you hadn't even planned on being irradiated that day but now you are imagine not expecting to be highly irradiated but then suddenly being highly irradiated actually i guess that's probably how it happens to the vast majority of people who get radiation poisoning now that i think of it but what separates today's subject from all those other unfortunate souls is that this man was subjected to the highest known accumulated radiation dose in human history and he survived and while this level of radiation may not have been fatal for him what happened to this guy is really messed up and sad and not in the way that you're probably thinking in the usa in the 1940s research and development was underway for the production of the first nuclear bombs famously this research is known as the manhattan project and sure enough it did see the development of the first nuclear bombs the use of which is credited with ending world war ii for the us and changing the world forever even today the power of nuclear weapons looms over the world threatening to destroy it how many conflicts and wars do you think we've avoided just because the threat of nukes being involved was too great on the flip side how close do you think we've come to totally annihilating the planet with the things this is important to consider because i wanted to think about how influential the people who worked on the manhattan project are to world history in not too long it will be 100 years since these mines came up with the nuclear bomb and i'm going to say nukes are still going to be a huge influence on the world by then that's one hell of a thing to create these mines were on the cutting edge of science but science is kind of a funny thing why well imagine i asked you to create a nuclear bomb i've supplied all the materials necessary don't ask where i got them from and provided a small workforce who will carry out your commands don't ask where i got them from you're not locked up in a room or anything you can go out and read up in the library or look things up on the internet or whatever okay now how confident are you that you could build a working nuclear bomb given these very favorable conditions chances are not very it's a complicated task you don't even know what you don't know but the people on the manhattan project didn't have your advantages they had to figure out everything by themselves there was no internet there wasn't even any nuclear bombs how the hell were they supposed to create something that never existed ever they were literally making the first one what i'm trying to say is these people were probably pretty clever okay now imagine i've given you plutonium i've just handed it to you and said here's some plutonium chances are you would be very cautious around this material well it's radioactive right you might not know a lot about it but that's all the more reason to be careful with it you might not even want to be around it this is the funny part of science because back during the manhattan project's research the effects of plutonium exposure were largely unknown so those geniuses that invented the nuclear bomb you know the one that you couldn't even copy after decades of technological advancement these guys were going wild with plutonium just getting silly with it they were unintentionally contaminating everything with it accidentally inhaling the dust tracking it into civilian areas one chemist even accidentally swallowed the stuff for days after his breath could be picked up by radiation detectors from across the room now these guys weren't stupid plutonium had only just been discovered in 1940 the effects of it on the human body were not known that doesn't mean they didn't think it did anything to you they just didn't know what exactly it did having to handle so much of it led to some concerns in the manhattan project over what the effects might be and so a program was initiated with the aim of tracing the course of plutonium through the body in 1944 early tests with rats indicated plutonium concentrated itself in the bones and seemed to stay there for a long time manhattan project leaders wanted more information about the effects on the human body in 1945 approval was granted for human tests and three test sites were chosen the manhattan project army hospital in oak ridge billings hospital in chicago and university of california hospital in san francisco over the course of these experiments 18 people aged 4 to 69 were injected with plutonium one of these people was albert stevens a 58 year old house painter who arrived at the university of california hospital complaining of stomach pains he was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer like many of the test subjects stevens was chosen because the illness he was originally in the hospital for was terminal he only had six months to live this meant the experiments could be performed on him without much care for how it turned out you know he was gonna bite the dust soon enough anyways so who cares oh did i mention the subjects weren't told they were being experimented on yep albert stevens was injected with plutonium without his knowledge why well it was 1945 very few people knew anything about plutonium so it would have been difficult to explain all this to the average joe in order to get his consent more importantly the experiment was tied to a top secret military project during the biggest and deadliest war in history ethics weren't that high up on the priority list apparently even some of the hospital staff involved with the experiments didn't know what was going on a few days after being injected with plutonium albert stevens underwent surgery for his stomach cancer surgeons removed part of his stomach liver spleen lymph nodes pancreas and ribs to stop the spread of cancer these were sent to the lab to study the effects of the plutonium it was in this lab that it was discovered that stevens hadn't got cancer at all but a benign gastric ulcer meaning all that stuff that was cut out of them was for nothing well except furthering the studies of plutonium exposure of course to this end stevens also supplied urine and stool samples to be studied and when stevens recovered from a surgery and was discharged from the hospital he continued to collect samples at their request and workers would come by his house and pick them up you see stevens was never told he didn't actually have cancer and workers were still collecting his samples for nearly a year after the surgery under the pretense that they were researching his miraculous recovery although his family did become suspicious of the continued sample collecting they thought he might have been sort of a guinea pig for a new form of cancer treatments that was highly effective so not only did this guy have a significant portion of his insides removed and not only was he injected with plutonium without his knowledge but the reason for both those things was entirely bogus with no cancer that surgery should have never been performed at all and with no terminal illness stevens was incorrectly chosen for the experiment not that having a terminal illness would make this in any way ethical because just in case i forgot to mention this he wasn't told any of this so what happened to albert stevens after being injected with plutonium well not much actually he lived for another 20 years at some point 10 years after the injection a radiologist noted rather marked degeneration of parts of stevens's spine consistent with previous findings that plutonium accumulates in the bones other than that there doesn't seem to have been any noteworthy incidents regarding his health he died in 1966 of heart disease at the age of 79. upon analysis of his remains it was found that stevens had accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64 sieverts so an average of three per year the annual permitted dose for radiation workers in the us today is 0.05 sieverts around 60 times less than stevens had to endure a single dose of four to five sieverts would prove fatal about fifty percent of the time and a single dose of ten sieverts would be more than enough to kill you this means albert stevens survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in history and he didn't even know it nor did anyone else as you can imagine this research was kept secret for quite a long time until it was uncovered in the 1990s making stevens's unintentional world record famous about 30 years after his death again he had no clue any of this happened nor did any of the other people unknowingly subjected to the human radiation experiments but you know a good number of them did have terminal illnesses and were dead not too long after anyways just as planned it should be noted that none of the subjects died from the plutonium so i guess you could say it all worked out in the end sure some people got injected with radioactive material without their consent but is that so wrong i mean if it's for the advancement of science and the benefit of mankind who cares if a few people get dosed with a little radiation or a small amount of lsd or even a pinch of our good old friend agent orange and if the powers that be who let's not forget were elected by you and i under the glorious tradition of democracy as the most fit representatives of the good people were to let's say research the effects of subliminal programming through modern multimedia would that be a tragedy i mean just imagine all the people who would benefit from such research that would be worth a few harmless tests right you can let me know your thoughts by reaching me at my personal email on screen now thanks the drug is also beginning to affect the other man they no longer take cover they relax and begin to giggle at this time one man is more severely affected than the others losing all contact with reality dropping his rifle and becoming unable to take any further part in the operation in fact he has to be withdrawn from the exercise a few

Channel: Qxir

Views: 2,291,645

Keywords: albert stevens, radiation, survivor, human, experiments, plutonium, injection, tests, testing, 1940s, manhattan project, drawn, illustrated, animated, irish, explained, qxir, creepy, horror, story

Id: vLp-TL29t8k

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022