00:00 they did not tell the families the true
00:03 purpose for the examinations what did
00:06 that they had been given some
00:08 radioisotope or some
00:10 chemical and they wanted to see what it
00:13 in the bodies of their loved ones but
00:15 they did not use the word plutonium
00:17 at 6 am on new year's day 1959 dr
00:20 clarence lushbaugh began an autopsy
00:23 more than just dissecting a body what he
00:25 was about to do would kick off a series
00:26 of semi-secret experiments
00:28 draw comparisons in the media to the
00:30 sci-fi trope of body snatchers
00:32 and result in a multi-million dollar
00:34 class action lawsuit
00:35 37 years later dr lushbaugh was about to
00:39 cecil kelly and remove eight pounds of
00:43 muscles tissues and bone he put these
00:47 including kelly's brain and a few
00:49 hastily gathered mayonnaise jars
00:50 and took them back to his lab for
00:54 is the true story of the body snatchers
01:04 when you work with plutonium things can
01:07 and workers at the facilities of the los
01:09 alamos national laboratory the
01:11 birthplace of the atomic bomb
01:12 were getting dirty in the radioactive
01:15 while some of the smartest scientists to
01:17 ever live were studying their recently
01:19 discovered element and attempting to
01:21 into the heart of the first nuclear
01:23 weapons facility staff were tasked with
01:25 recovering the plutonium from these
01:28 at the los alamos plutonium processing
01:30 facility workers chemically
01:32 separated the element by dissolving and
01:34 mixing unusable slag
01:36 crucibles and other combined residues in
01:40 this process would purify and
01:42 concentrate plutonium
01:43 for further experimentation it was in
01:46 one of these very tanks where cecil
01:48 a 38 year old chemical operator at the
01:50 facility would see the same bewildering
01:53 blue flash that lewis slaughten and
01:55 harry dogly and junior saw
01:57 before the demon core claim their lives
02:00 criticality is at the core of what
02:03 nuclear weapons and nuclear power seek
02:06 radioactive material naturally decays
02:08 and when it does high-energy particles
02:10 release themselves from the nuclei
02:12 in random directions over time these
02:15 particles can also hit other atoms in
02:17 the same material like billiard balls
02:19 cracking together to force
02:20 more of these reactions to occur but
02:23 natural masses of radioactive material
02:26 subcritical there aren't enough atoms
02:29 around to act like a
02:30 large nuclear pool table and constantly
02:32 knock each other around
02:34 if you change the mass and the shape of
02:36 the material however
02:38 the density of atoms can be such that it
02:41 critical starting a self-sustaining
02:44 nuclear chain reaction
02:46 and when criticality is created on
02:48 purpose in something like a nuclear bomb
02:50 the resulting cascade of energy and
02:52 radiation can be directed towards
02:54 catastrophically destructive ends
02:57 criticality by accident is sinister in
03:02 within literally two ten thousands of a
03:04 second you can be dead
03:06 and not even know it yet in a vessel
03:09 meant for dissolving plutonium naturally
03:11 you never want too much plutonium in the
03:15 on the last work day before new year's
03:17 break in 1958 however
03:18 and for reasons that were later
03:20 determined to be no single person's
03:22 an unexpected amount of plutonium-rich
03:24 solids were in the vessel cecil kelly
03:26 was about to switch on
03:28 the solution in kelly's vessel was
03:29 supposed to contain maybe just a tenth
03:32 of a gram of plutonium per liter
03:34 the day before 1959 at los alamos
03:36 however it actually contained over 200
03:41 the upper layer of organic solvents in
03:43 the vessel accidentally washed in from
03:45 two other vessels at the facility that
03:47 should have been handled separately
03:49 now contained over seven pounds of
03:52 half the mass of the demon core and it
03:54 was already close to going critical
03:57 ironically at the same time cecil kelly
03:59 showed up for work that day
04:00 los alamos was reviewing safety
04:02 protocols for the very vessel
04:04 that was about to kill him based on
04:07 experimental reconstructions of what
04:09 within one second of cecil kelly
04:11 flipping the same switch he had flipped
04:13 many many times before
04:14 the stir in the vessel revved up to full
04:18 this instantly flung out the lower
04:20 aqueous layers of solution in the tank
04:22 while simultaneously forming
04:24 a vortex for the plutonium saturated
04:27 to cascade down into this new
04:31 instantly created a critical situation
04:34 and for the next two ten thousands of a
04:36 second the plutonium atoms inside raged
04:41 150 000 trillion unique fission
04:44 before the vessel had been mixed enough
04:47 to return to subcritical
04:49 cecil kelly though who is standing on a
04:51 footstool in front of this vessel and
04:54 through a viewport received this nova of
04:58 in his head and in his chest
05:01 in the next moment kelly found himself
05:03 on his back on the cold
05:05 hard floor of the facility he was
05:09 confused he turned off the mixer then
05:12 turned it back on then ran out of the
05:15 two other operators on duty that day
05:17 reported seeing a blue flash of light
05:20 and then hearing a thud they turned off
05:22 kelly's mixer again
05:24 and followed him outside they found
05:27 twitching with uncoordinated muscles in
05:30 of new year's eve that blanketed los
05:33 all cecil could say was quote i'm
05:42 after finding him in the snow the two
05:44 lab technicians that were with kelly
05:46 took him to a chemical shower mistakenly
05:48 assuming that he had been covered by
05:49 some substance that they couldn't see
05:52 but the burns appearing on kelly weren't
05:55 they were a dermatological reaction to
05:57 the high-energy gamma rays
05:58 that had just ripped through his body
06:01 the technicians laid him on the floor
06:03 and waited for an ambulance a laboratory
06:06 nurse on staff observed that kelly was
06:08 unconscious and had quote a nice pink
06:13 just a few minutes later cecil kelly was
06:15 in the los alamos medical center
06:17 and he was almost dead lips blew and
06:20 eyes red like he had stared too long at
06:23 reports indicate that upon his arrival
06:25 kelly was thrashing
06:27 wildly enough to need physical restraint
06:30 a number of los alamos scientists
06:32 arrived and started taking samples
06:34 kelly's urine was collected it was
06:38 a chemist on hand don peterson used a
06:40 tongue depressor in the room to collect
06:42 kelly's vomit off of the floor and
06:44 scrape his explosive diarrhea off of the
06:47 those two were radioactive as was
06:51 the scientists took everything that they
06:53 could as peterson recalled during a
06:55 legal deposition in 1997
06:57 quote we weren't going to lose anything
07:01 end quote one hour and 40 minutes after
07:05 a mixture of plutonium accidentally
07:07 bathed cecil kelly in gamma rays
07:09 his condition was improving it wasn't
07:12 it was something cecil was coherent
07:15 able to keep down water though he
07:17 complained of tremendous pain in his
07:20 he only occasionally vomited kelly was
07:24 soon moved from the emergency room at
07:25 los alamos medical center
07:27 to a private room he told those watching
07:30 heavenly blue glow that filled the room
07:32 about the rumbling he heard inside of
07:34 the vessel before he found himself
07:36 twitching in the snow finally calmed
07:39 his blood was taken around this time and
07:42 it was also radioactive
07:44 the light metals in his blood like
07:46 sodium had been activated
07:48 or transformed by radiation into
07:50 radioactive material
07:51 themselves it was with his blood that
07:54 the first whole body dose estimate
07:56 during the accident was made
07:58 for context the average dose that leads
08:01 to a one hundred percent
08:02 fatality rate is five graves
08:06 a unit of absorbed radiation kelly had
08:09 much more than five kelly was hit with
08:13 49 greys according to his wife
08:17 doris kelly who was present in his room
08:18 at this time cecil knew that he was
08:21 and his doctors did too six hours after
08:26 all of the white blood cells in cecil's
08:30 doris kelly and cecil's brother waited
08:32 at his bedside for hours
08:34 cecil spoke with them quietly asking
08:36 doris to take care of their two children
08:38 a seven-year-old daughter and an 18
08:42 he dozed off he slept he vomited
08:45 nurses pumped him full of iv fluid
08:48 the next day at 5 pm the doctors wanted
08:51 to take a sample of bone marrow from
08:52 cecil sternum to see if he might be a
08:55 candidate for a bone marrow transplant
08:57 a new and exciting operation in the
09:00 the operation did not go well after
09:03 operating equipment was wheeled to his
09:04 bedside and his chest was cleaned with
09:07 a surgeon made an incision in cecil's
09:08 chest and removed quote
09:10 a good deal of material end quote but
09:13 the material didn't look like a bone
09:17 that was because the surgeon had missed
09:19 cecil sternum entirely so the surgeon
09:24 and what he removed this time made
09:25 doris's stomach churn
09:28 she recalled later quote what they
09:32 was slop they pushed a syringe in his
09:35 chest and pulled it out
09:36 it was it was just mush
09:40 end quote cecil's bone marrow where red
09:44 blood cells in the body are made
09:46 was watery acellular
09:52 it wasn't bleeding like it should be
09:55 obviously a bone marrow transplant then
09:57 was not going to help cecil's chances
10:01 already knew that according to legal
10:04 documents obtained by doris and her
10:06 daughter katie during the discovery
10:07 stage of the lawsuit that was to come
10:10 the attending los alamos doctors had no
10:12 actual intention of trying to save cecil
10:16 one doctor thomas shipman wrote later
10:19 because of the size of the dose it
10:21 seemed obvious that he would die a
10:23 central nervous system death so
10:25 we never seriously considered bone
10:27 marrow transfusions
10:29 end quote this was the first of many
10:32 half-truths that would be told by the
10:34 doctors and scientists
10:39 as the manhattan project continued into
10:43 it was obvious to leading scientists
10:44 that radioactive elements like plutonium
10:47 uniquely dangerous research materials
10:50 they knew from the use of radionuclides
10:52 in medical diagnostics for example
10:54 that material left in the body could
10:56 provide a long-term source
10:58 of harmful radiation but what they did
11:01 was how the body dealt with these metals
11:04 how long would they remain in the body
11:06 where would they be excreted in the
11:08 urine or deposited in the bones
11:11 from these questions spraying the
11:13 impetus to begin the human plutonium
11:15 injection experiments
11:17 from 1945 to 1947 18 people were
11:21 unknowingly injected with plutonium by
11:24 manhattan project doctors
11:25 during unrelated medical procedures
11:28 none of these people knew that they were
11:30 being injected with plutonium
11:32 but the doctors knew exactly what they
11:35 results indicated that plutonium in the
11:37 bloodstream preferred to stay in the
11:40 and for a long time the element also
11:43 accumulated in the liver
11:44 the kidneys and spleen animal models of
11:47 the same experiments
11:48 showed mostly the same thing but the
11:50 results of these experiments came from
11:53 into the bloodstream the exposure that
11:56 workers at los alamos would encounter
11:58 would be from inhalation of airborne
12:02 and it was these workers that these
12:03 experiments were ostensibly supposed to
12:06 and so at best the known biokinetics of
12:10 indirect the most direct way to validate
12:13 early models the best way to find out
12:16 entered and exited the body would be to
12:19 actual tissue samples from actual humans
12:24 as a quick aside if you want to know
12:26 more about the obviously controversial
12:28 plutonium injection experiments
12:30 i recommend the plutonium files by
12:32 pulitzer prize-winning investigative
12:34 eileen wilson where much of the
12:36 information in this video is covered in
12:38 detail and who will enter our story a
12:43 cecil kelly would only live another 10
12:45 hours after his bone marrow was sampled
12:47 the pain in his chest became
12:49 unmanageable even with medication
12:51 and he again thrashed against the
12:52 restraints of his hospital bed
12:55 soon cecil was breathing in a way that
12:56 doctors described as
12:58 froglike breathing slowed to nothing
13:01 after 15 minutes of this
13:02 and cecil kelly was pronounced dead at 3
13:06 on new year's day 1959
13:10 those who were in route to visit cecil
13:11 were notified and told to return home
13:14 one of those who were notified lewis
13:16 hempelman was the man who oversaw the
13:18 medical care of both harry doglion
13:20 and louis slaughten the two physicists
13:22 who also lost their lives after
13:24 criticality accidents with the so-called
13:27 some 14 years before kelly had died
13:30 exactly 34 hours and 45 minutes
13:33 after a plutonium vortex and an
13:34 improperly loaded vessel went critical
13:37 but his job wasn't done scientists had
13:40 cecil's body dragged by
13:41 sled from the los alamos medical center
13:45 back to the lab and into a steel-lined
13:48 his body was still exceedingly
13:52 two hours and 45 minutes after cecil
13:54 kelly died the resident pathologist at
13:57 dr clarence lushbaugh began the autopsy
14:00 that would both start a brand new
14:02 at los alamos and cost the medical
14:05 and the university of california
14:07 millions of dollars
14:09 doris kelly cecil's widow who worked
14:11 with her husband at los alamos
14:13 would eventually be compensated with
14:15 sixteen and a half thousand dollars for
14:18 and given two hundred fifty dollars to
14:21 ever the scientist clarence lushbaugh
14:24 reportedly saw cecil's tragic death as
14:26 an experiment of opportunity he had the
14:29 unique chance here to perform an autopsy
14:31 on a radioactive corpse
14:33 and an opportunity to confirm or deny
14:35 the results of the plutonium injection
14:38 tissue samples from cecil would be
14:40 direct and would therefore directly
14:42 confirm the bloodstream models or not
14:45 lush ball did not ask anyone for
14:47 permission or notify the family
14:50 before removing eight pounds of muscle
14:53 soft tissue brain and spinal cord
14:56 from the body he placed the samples in
15:00 several wide mouth mayonnaise jars
15:01 and transported them back to his lab the
15:04 jars would eventually be sent to labs
15:06 across the country for study
15:08 to the satisfaction of the scientists
15:10 when the results came in they did in
15:11 fact differ from what they thought they
15:13 knew about how plutonium moved around
15:16 for example there was much less
15:18 deposition in kelly's skeleton
15:19 and more in the liver and there was much
15:22 much more plutonium in his lungs and
15:25 and it stayed there for much longer than
15:28 these data based on kelly's 11 and a
15:30 half years of incidental plutonium
15:32 exposure in the lab
15:34 could be used to shape industry safety
15:37 wright langham a radio biologist at los
15:40 alamos who created the protocols for the
15:42 human injection experiments
15:43 called the findings undoubtedly
15:46 they were so unexpected in fact it was
15:49 decided to collect tissue samples
15:51 from other facility staff like kelly and
15:53 from the general public as a control
15:55 the los alamos human tissue analysis
16:03 katy kelly moreau had been trying to
16:05 find out what actually happened to her
16:07 since 1974. the u.s atomic energy
16:10 commission had released a statement
16:11 after the accident that quote the
16:13 accident was directly attributable
16:15 to the errors on the part of the
16:17 deceased operator end quote
16:19 the laboratory director at los alamos at
16:21 the time norris bradbury
16:23 disagreed saying no single cause was
16:26 nonetheless cecil kelly had become
16:28 something of a scapegoat
16:31 it wasn't until 20 years later in 1994
16:33 that miss kelly would receive a stack of
16:35 documents from los alamos
16:37 detailing what actually happened to her
16:40 rather what happened to eight pounds of
16:43 around the same time more details were
16:45 coming out about the human tissue
16:48 immediately after kelly's death it
16:50 turned out clarence lushbaugh made it
16:52 standard practice to take tissue samples
16:54 from everyone he performed an autopsy on
16:56 regardless of whether or not they worked
16:59 tissues from some 1520 people
17:02 were sampled for plutonium in this way
17:04 in operations performed
17:06 all the way up until 1980
17:09 the lab would claim that all organ
17:11 donations and samples were obtained with
17:14 from next of kin it would later admit
17:18 people did not know the samples were
17:20 being sent to los alamos
17:24 in the spring of 1987 investigative
17:26 journalist eileen wilson was working her
17:28 way through some documents at kirkland
17:31 a few papers detailing experiments on
17:33 radioactive animal carcasses had got her
17:36 years of further investigation would
17:38 eventually lead her to los alamos
17:40 and in november of 1993 wilson would
17:43 publish the first in a series of reports
17:46 tribune entitled the plutonium
17:49 outlining the fate of cecil kelly the
17:51 tissue analysis program
17:52 and the plutonium injection experiments
17:56 wilsom would win a pulitzer prize for
17:58 her series and los alamos scientists
18:00 would immediately feel the pressure from
18:03 as the director of los alamos national
18:05 laboratory siegfried s
18:06 hecker said in 1995 quote our
18:10 and integrity were put in question by
18:12 the widespread publicity regarding the
18:14 plutonium injection experiments
18:16 and other human radiation experiments
18:19 and that questioning came from the
18:21 highest office in the land
18:23 the advisory committee on human
18:24 radiation experiments was established in
18:28 by president bill clinton for an
18:31 the los alamos team working with the
18:33 government's committee would end up
18:35 1600 documents to the public
18:38 make no mistake without a loan
18:41 journalist investigation
18:42 a government committee and the
18:44 cooperation from los alamos
18:46 we might not know a thing about cecil
18:49 the tissue program or the injection of
18:52 unknowing human patients
18:53 with plutonium and katie kelly wouldn't
18:57 that somewhere her father's brain
19:00 was in a mayonnaise jar
19:04 just two years later in 1996 katy kelly
19:07 and other families who were affected by
19:09 what the media had dubbed
19:10 the body snatchers of los alamos
19:12 initiated a class-action lawsuit against
19:14 the los alamos medical center
19:16 and the university of california five
19:18 years later in 2001
19:20 the plaintiffs were awarded a 9.5
19:22 million dollar settlement
19:24 and that was that however clarence
19:27 lushbaugh the pathologist who cut open
19:30 never settled he died in 2000
19:34 without once admitting that he had done
19:37 wrong it was a feeling that many
19:39 scientists and doctors at los alamos
19:41 shared at least in part
19:43 focusing more on the results than the
19:45 optics of their experiments
19:47 leshba did have something to say about
19:49 his actions however
19:50 why he did what he did before he died
19:54 lashbaugh was asked during a legal
19:56 deposition who had given him the
19:59 to remove and distribute eight pounds of
20:02 around the country he responded god gave
20:14 thank you so much to the verde nerdy
20:15 staff at the facility for the direct
20:17 and substantial support and the creation
20:19 of this here video today especially i
20:20 want to recognize research assistant sf
20:23 edwards and visiting scholar
20:24 cody kilibrew kind of fitting if you
20:26 want to join the facility drape on a
20:28 silky white lab coat
20:29 join me on discord see episodes early
20:32 see members only live streams not like
20:34 you can go to patreon.com kyle hill
20:36 right now and sign up for the facility
20:38 today and hey if you support us just
20:40 get your name on aria here each and
20:41 every week and as you can see there's
20:43 literally hundreds and hundreds of you
20:44 so i have no idea how i'm going to pass
20:46 if you want to dive more into this topic
20:48 if you want to know more about the human
20:50 plutonium injection experiments
20:52 and everything i do recommend eileen
20:54 wilson's book the plutonium files
20:56 i just ordered it myself it is a little
20:59 hard to find but i think you will find
21:01 quite elucidating illuminating and
21:05 radiant irradiating if you will
21:16 thanks for watching