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The article you supplied appeared in The Dallas Morning News on Friday, December 31, 1993, under the headline:

“Family of radiation test victim now realizes significance of events”

It was written by Laurie Wilson. A nearly identical Associated Press/Washington Post version appeared nationally on January 1, 1994. Read the reprinted article.

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One correction to the question: Allen was one of 18 plutonium-injection subjects, so there were 17 other people, not 18 others.

Who was Elmer Allen?

Elmer Allen was born in Temple, Texas, on January 26, 1911, although the replacement grave marker reportedly uses January 25. He lived in Italy, Texas, south of Dallas, and worked for many years as a railroad porter. He and his wife, Fredna, had a daughter, Elmerine Whitfield Bell.

In 1947, at age 36, Allen developed pain and swelling around his left knee. He traveled to the University of California Hospital in San Francisco, where physicians concluded that he had a malignant cartilage tumor—chondrosarcoma.

The surviving medical record described the cancer as malignant but slow growing, late to spread and associated with a “moderately good” prognosis. In other words, Allen was not necessarily a terminal patient expected to die shortly. The federal Advisory Committee’s account confirms these findings.

What was done to him?

Allen was assigned the secret code CAL-3.

On July 18, 1947, researchers injected approximately 0.006 micrograms of plutonium-238 into muscle tissue in his diseased left leg. The amount was extremely small by mass but radioactive. It was intended as a tracer—not as cancer treatment.

His leg was subsequently amputated above the knee. According to the later Los Alamos review, removal of the leg also removed approximately half of the injected plutonium. Researchers examined the amputated tissue to learn how plutonium was distributed in human bone and other tissue.

Allen’s injection differed from most of the other cases:

• Most subjects
  received plutonium-239 intravenously.
• Allen received
  plutonium-238 intramuscularly.
• The injection was
  placed in the leg that researchers knew would probably be removed.
• His surviving
  chart contains a note claiming that the experimental nature of a
  “radioactive tracer” was explained orally.
• No signed consent
  form documenting informed permission has been found.
• The injection
  offered Allen no medical benefit.

The Advisory Committee concluded that the chart note did not establish that Allen had been told the substance was plutonium, that it carried long-term risks, or that the experiment was solely for research. The procedure also violated a contemporary Manhattan Project requirement that such an experiment have some expectation of therapeutic benefit.

Why was the experiment conducted?

Plutonium was a newly created and poorly understood weapons material. Manhattan Project officials needed to establish occupational limits for workers at Los Alamos and other nuclear facilities.

Researchers wanted to determine:

• How quickly
  plutonium left the body in urine and feces.
• How much remained
  in bone and liver.
• How exposure could
  be estimated from urine tests.
• What amount might
  be considered a permissible occupational “body burden.”
• How plutonium
  behaved in humans compared with laboratory animals.

Urine, fecal, blood, bone and tissue samples were collected. Results were sent principally to researchers at Los Alamos.

The experiments produced scientific data, but the government’s own 1995 investigation found profound ethical violations. Subjects generally were not told that the injections were nontherapeutic weapons-worker research, and meaningful informed consent was not obtained in most cases. Advisory Committee conclusion.

The deceptive 1973 follow-up

One of the most disturbing parts of the Dallas article concerns events 26 years after Allen’s injection.

In 1973, Elmer and Fredna Allen were offered a government-paid train trip from Texas to Rochester, New York. They were told that physicians wanted to learn why Allen had survived his bone cancer for so long.

During a stop in Chicago:

1. A limousine met the couple.

2. Allen was taken to Argonne National Laboratory.

3. Fredna was taken sightseeing while he was examined.

4. Allen was then admitted to the University of Rochester metabolic ward.

5. Researchers collected additional biological samples.

The real purpose was to measure the plutonium remaining in Allen’s body and to obtain long-term excretion data. Government personnel did not tell the couple that Allen had been injected with plutonium.

An internal December 1972 memorandum instructed personnel that outside the research center they should never use the word “plutonium” when discussing these patients. Instead, they were to say that the individuals might once have received an unidentified radioactive material.

The Advisory Committee later characterized the explanation given to Allen’s physician as “deceptive and manipulative.” Official discussion of the follow-up program.

During the follow-up, an Argonne radiologist observed changes in Allen’s jawbone “suggestive of damage due to radiation.” Investigators cautioned that the X-ray findings did not prove plutonium was responsible.

Psychological and family consequences

According to Elmerine Whitfield, her father suspected for decades that something improper had happened to him. She told reporters:

• His life changed
  dramatically after 1947.
• He believed that
  he had been used as a “guinea pig.”
• He spent many
  years expecting to die from the experiment.
• He was later
  diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
• Fredna did not
  learn the full truth about the plutonium injection during his lifetime.

The newspaper article emphasizes the family’s sense of betrayal. Fredna had even mailed thank-you cards to the physicians after the 1973 trip, believing they had treated her husband generously.

Allen died on June 30, 1991, at age 80. The Los Alamos historical table lists respiratory failure and pneumonia as his cause of death. He survived approximately 44 years after the injection, longer than any of the other 18 subjects.

The federal Advisory Committee ultimately found that the surviving evidence could not prove or disprove that the plutonium injection caused physical injury to any particular subject. That finding should not be confused with an ethical exoneration: the committee strongly condemned the absence of adequate disclosure and meaningful consent.

How the Allen family learned the truth

Investigative reporter Eileen Welsome discovered references to anonymous plutonium patients in declassified records. She traced CAL-3 to Italy, Texas, in 1992, only to learn that Allen had died the previous year.

Her three-part series, “The Plutonium Experiment,” appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune beginning November 15, 1993. It identified the previously anonymous patients and won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Account of Welsome’s investigation.

The publicity prompted Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to open records. President Bill Clinton then created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in January 1994.

In 1995, Elmerine Whitfield Bell testified before that committee. She said her family did not accept the claim that her father had knowingly consented and asked why, if he had signed other hospital papers, he had never been asked to sign a plutonium-injection consent form.

The 18 plutonium-injection subjects

The following information comes primarily from the 1995 Los Alamos historical reconstruction and the federal Advisory Committee. Many public government tables continued to identify the patients only by code. Names are included only where identification is reasonably established.

The Los Alamos table and technical history are available in “The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments”.

Important qualifications about the list

• The codes do not
  run consecutively because they came from different institutional systems: HP
  for the Rochester series, CHI for Chicago and CAL for
  California.
• Ebb Cade was
  injected at Oak Ridge but subsequently designated HP-12 because Rochester
  researchers analyzed his samples.
• Public sources
  sometimes disagree about the mapping between particular Rochester codes
  and the later-disclosed names. The federal narrative explicitly names Eda
  Charlton, John Mousso and Jan Stadt as surviving Rochester subjects, but
  does not consistently pair every name with a code in its public narrative.
• CHI-2 and CHI-3
  received by far the greatest mass—approximately 95 micrograms each—but
  were gravely ill and survived only a short time.
• Albert Stevens
  received a much smaller mass but a relatively large amount of highly
  radioactive Pu-238. Because he survived for more than 20 years, his
  estimated accumulated radiation dose was the highest in the group.
• Elmer Allen
  received the smallest mass, although Pu-238 is much more radioactive per
  unit of mass than Pu-239.

Photographs and grave marker

The photograph printed in your second newspaper image shows Elmer Allen and his wife, Fredna, in an undated family photograph. Allen is standing with crutches, consistent with his life after the amputation.

His Find a Grave memorial records burial in Italy Cemetery, Italy, Ellis County, Texas. Elmer Allen’s cemetery memorial.

The family replaced or altered his marker to memorialize what happened. Published descriptions give the inscription approximately as:

ELMER
Jan. 25, 1911 – July 18, 1947
CAL-3
July 18, 1947 – June 30, 1991
One of America’s human nuclear guinea pigs

By dividing his life at July 18, 1947, the marker expresses the family’s belief that the injection effectively ended one part of his life and began another.

What ultimately happened legally?

In October 1995, the Advisory Committee recommended apologies and compensation for the plutonium-injection subjects or their surviving families. President Clinton publicly apologized for the government’s human-radiation experiments.

In 1996, the federal government reached settlements reportedly totaling approximately $4.8 million with families of several plutonium-injection subjects. The Allen family was among those pursuing accountability arising from the revelations.

The strongest historically supportable conclusion is therefore:

Elmer Allen was deliberately injected with plutonium for nontherapeutic government research; the evidence does not establish meaningful informed consent; officials concealed the true purpose during later follow-up; and his family learned the full story only after his death.