He worked as a cement mixer for a construction company, a job that required strength and stamina. And he most likely would have lived out his days in obscurity if he hadn't suffered an unfortunate auto accident in March 1945. Ebenezer's accident left him with multiple bone fractures so severe that the doctors at Oak Ridge believed he would die. Certain doctors at Oak Ridge were hoping to find a patient like Ebenezer Cade, someone organically sound but not expected to live. They hastily concluded that Ebenezer met their criteria.
Plutonium is a highly radioactive metal with unusual properties.
It will also stay around a long, long time. To understand why Ebenezer was made radioactive, it helps to understand how little was known about radiation in March 1945. The United States was still building the nuclear weapons that would later destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb had not yet been exploded, and no one knew the metabolism and toxicology of long-lived radioactive elements. Ebenezer, although he didn't know it, had become a human guinea pig for nuclear weapons safety research.