I had two great uncles who worked on the Manhattan project. The first was a physicist and was featured in Life magazine briefly for his work after the war.

The second was more or less a low-level technician/lab gopher whose job, among other things, was to cart radioactive material around various lab facilities.

That one did not find any renown for his work, but what he did get were lesions of necrotic flesh on his shins for the rest of his life that never healed. The doctors were baffled to describe a cause, but as near as he could guess, it was from walking flatbed carts of radioactive material around during the development of the bomb.

The trouble was, he couldn't prove it to anyone. The Feds didn't describe his position in any record-keeping, so when he went to claim for the injury, they had no record of him as a government employee, anywhere. What he did have, however, were all his pay stubs, so eventually they did relent and he got some sort of compensation for it.