|
|
|
Going back now to Franklin McLean and his offer of
a job in Los Alamos. I went to Los Alamos and looked at the job and found that
there was a job there for a pathologist and that the pathologist would be loaned
50 percent of his time to the Los Alamos Medical Center. I subsequently took the
job and went to Los Alamos; it was in 1949, one year after I received my M.D. at
the University of Chicago in 1948. I took the examination for the State of New
Mexico for the practice of medicine. I took the scientific examination, which
was then given by the AMA in Denver, Colorado, and I did qualify. I passed the
basic sciences exam and then, by virtue of the fact that I had spent another
year at Chicago as the assistant professor of Pathology, I was given that time
as radiation practice and medical practice and I was licensed in the state of
New Mexico.
|
|
At New Mexico, one of my first jobs there as a
clinical pathologist was to become chief of staff and to see to it that the
Federal physicians at the Los Alamos Medical Center became private-practice
physicians. This led to some of them having to be fired, because they didn't
want to leave the cushy role that they played there. Then we replaced them. So
we had adequate medical care. Then I became the chief of staff. I was chief of
staff for how many years? Two or three years?
|
| SIPE:
|
About three. |
|
|
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
It was during that time that I was the pathologist
at the Medical Center, and I was the pathologist there at the Medical Center
until 1963, when I left to become a member of the Oak Ridge Associated
Universities, which was then ORINS17. I began to investigate radiation accidents.
The first radiation accident I ever investigated — there were several of them — had
happened in Los Alamos before I had gotten there. The first one that happened
when I went there in 1958. The first one, there was a woman, a murder there that
I had to report to, in which a woman had been killed by her husband, who was a
security policeman at Los Alamos. He parked his revolvers in his bedside table.
After a tryst in the bed one evening, he decided that she wasn't measuring up,
somehow or another. So, he let her have a blast in one shoulder blade that went
through her heart. I subsequently found this bullet in the bed. In so doing, he
became overwhelmed by his actions and he got another pistol from his bedside
table and shot himself in the stomach. This bullet located in his vertebral
bodies and penetrating his spinal cord and gave him paralysis of the lower
extremities. He threw this dead woman, his wife, across the bedroom onto a floor
furnace. Then the person who did the shooting called the police, and the police
reported to the house. They opened the door and they found all this stench and a
newborn baby crawling through the blood. The open door caused the floor furnace
to turn on and the woman on the floor furnace began to cook. I faithfully noted
her falling body temperature, because I had read the German literature about how
you can determine the time of death and I had never had this chore before; this
was my first time doing it. I took the woman's temperatures all the time with an
ordinary old-fashioned mercury thermometer. I got reams and reams of data out of
this.
|
|
I then took it to the thermonuclear scientists atLos Alamos to try to find out whether or not they could decipher this data for
me and tell me when she had died. They said that there wasn't any way for them
to decipher that data, and what I needed to do was get an apparatus built for
myself that would record this data. It would have reference points, which would
then actually allow you to extrapolate back to the normal temperature so you
could find out when sudden death had occurred. With the help of Los Alamos's
Physics Lab, we built a thermistor thermometer and invented the thermistor death
probe at that time. We built a large thermometer that could be inserted into the
rectum of the victim and could be pushed in as far as it could go. It was 10 or
more centimeters18 long. It led to large wires that went to a table, which allowed
me to sit outside of the person's room and watch this meter record the central
body temperature, and I could tell when the person had died.
|
|
Then, because Los Alamos was a sequestered town
and had a fence around it, there were a lot of people there that should not have
been in a sequestered town and they subsequently killed themselves. We had a lot
of murders and suicides that allowed me to use this thermistor probe as a way to
finding the time of death. This was one of my other major accomplishments.
|
| FISHER:
|
Was it patented? |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
It was not patented because it was put out in the
public domain. The article was published in the journal of the police, The
Police Gazette.
|
|
So it should have been available to departments
all over the place. It was thought by the then-AEC19 that if it were available to
police departments, police departments would make their own and take it away
from them. Your question reminds me that prostatic20 cancer is the most frequent
cancer in the male human being. One of the things I didn't know as an academic
pathologist was that persons with cancer of the prostate often had their
prostate removed. These persons often had infections, infections caused them to
have hyperthermia,21 so they were often cooled off by having them packed in ice
cubes at the time of their operation. What my present wife and I — by the way, my
present wife and I were married in 1963.
|
| FISHER:
|
And her name is? |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Dorothy Bess Hale Lushbaugh. We were married in
Oak Ridge. One of my craziest ideas was that there was a substance called popop.22
Do you know that substance?
|
| FISHER:
|
Yes, I've heard of it. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Popop was a chemical that was made into a solution
to measure the radioactivity that was in that solution, so that one could figure
out what the radiation was coming from hydrogen or helium or some other
water-soluble substance on radioactive chemicals. Then I got the idea that one
of the ways that one could measure radiation exposure in people was to use
popop, and of course, because I was an experimental pathologist, the first thing
I did was to put this in animals. At that time we injected popop in mice and
found, much to our horror, that mice became very cold. We subsequently found out
that what popop did to mice and rodents was, it made them unable to regulate
their body temperature, to keep up their body temperature when being
refrigerated. If you took a mouse with popop in him and put him in the
refrigerator, he became the same temperature of the refrigerator. So if you took
a hold of him as a mouse, he became the same temperature as you.
|
|
We thought this was applicable to the therapy of
prostatic cancer. This was a very good idea, but it turned out that it wasn't.
It was obviously the kind of thing that needed a whole lot of work done by some
kind of a radiopharmaceutical company. So in order to do that and maintain
control of it, we thought the AEC should get a patent of this stuff and patent
its use so that if it was investigated, the investigator would then have to
report to the AEC what they found. An AEC official then met with me in Los
Alamos, and felt that the best way to do this was the way we had done the
thermistor probe and to just publish it and let it go out to the public domain
as a fact in a published article. It was.
|
|
|
|
| FISHER:
|
You did some early studies at Los Alamos on a
couple of interesting areas: the response of skin to beta radiation and the
response of monkeys to acute gamma radiation.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Los Alamos is often concerned with the use of
radiation in human beings. The area that I worked in, we didn't use human
beings, except we did use patients, in that the patients were referred to me as
the pathologist at the Los Alamos Medical Center. They were referred by other
physicians.
|
| FISHER:
|
Or for cancer treatment. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
For various kinds of treatment, for thyroid uptake
and various other studies that we did. These were patients that did not react to
therapy. There was once an aboveground atomic shot where a radioactive cloud
drifted over southern Utah and northern Nevada. Cedar City [Utah] was one place
where we had sheep. One of the sheep was sent to us in Los Alamos, where we
called her Cedar City Sue. This sheep came from a flock from around Cedar City.
This is how we got started on the beta radiation. We found out that all these
animals had rather bare ears and they developed scabby excoriations23 of ears,
which was actually due to a virus and was not due to the fallout itself. The
fallout was such that we subsequently [had] plaques that were made for us, by
New England Nuclear. We put these on the wool of the animals, and found that it
took something like 40,000 rep, which was equal to a rad, to actually get
radiation burns of the skin. The lesions of the ears were due to a virus, which
apparently was a well-known sheep disease. I had to spend a great part of my
young life at the Federal court in Salt Lake City, Utah, educating the judge on
how these lesions occurred. Since at that time, I was a professional, I had
photos made of these sheep and the lesions that developed. I had to show the
photos to the Federal judge. Because I had to designate which [of] these were
with controls, we had one-two-three-four-five, hello honey, six-seven-eight,
hello Dolly.
|
| SIPE:
|
I don't remember. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
We had an H one. The judge knew the answer to that
joke. He was a sheep herder from Utah. He reversed himself, in spite of the fact
that I showed that these skin lesions could not have been due to a fallout from
the radiation. He awarded the sheep owners.
|
| FISHER:
|
In the lawsuit. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Anyway, he awarded the people who were suing, the
plaintiff's case. He awarded them money for the damages to the sheep, since
quite a lot of them had died. Apparently they had died as a result of bad forage
and bad water, etc.
|
| FISHER:
|
Some people have wondered if their deaths hadn't been caused by the ingestion of fallout on forage.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
We took sections of their stomachs and we couldn't
find any evidence that they had ingested radiation.
|
| FISHER:
|
You did some pathological analysis on their
stomach?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes, we autopsied all the sheep. I forget the
man's name, although he was an AEC official who was in charge of that study who
went through Wright Langham and Dr. Shipman. Anyway, one of the other things I
did when I was at Los Alamos was to expand the use of blood cell counters that
were then being established. I started out with a cell counter which was made by
a Florida concern. There was a physicist there at Los Alamos whose name was
Marvin Vandilla. He was a physicist, which I never was. He showed that the
artifact that intrigued me was, in fact, an artifact. And that everything that I
did as far as the Coulter counters were concerned was wrong: I had made the
mistake believing that the aperture, which I thought was merely a hole, actually
had some depth. He showed that the aperture in the Coulter counter was too
short, and needed to be elongated, and that in elongating the aperture as you
were counting then prevented measuring the tumbling, and you actually measured
the actual diameter of the cell. Vandilla's work with this counter became the
way to go. Los Alamos still has a Coulter counter investigating team.
|
| SIPE:
|
We're talking about Paul Aebersold. You were
talking about Shipman and somebody was having control over him. Wasn't it Paul
Aebersold?
|
| ANDERS:
|
I don't think it would have been Aebersold. It
would have been someone in the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine. Paul
Pearson or maybe Charles Dunham.
|
|
|
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Charles Dunham was the man who got us involved
here, the ORINS area into the NASA area. Charles Dunham raised the question as
to here we have this facility which simulates one and a half R per hour. Did you
say 1.6?
|
| SIPE:
|
1.6 R per hour. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
1.6 R per hour. That this was much too fast for
NASA, so we needed to cut it down by some factor. This is why we came up with
the number of 60. So we did it at 1.5 R per hour. Also, since that was the
radiation flux in the Van Allen belts24 and also in space, if there was a release
of radiation from a starburst, or something like that. We were given the
opportunity, and of course, we were all looking, as everybody did then, for
monies that would support research, monies that would support your facility,
money that would support your staff. We subsequently got this from the NASA
people. Actually, it was a study that was unnecessary in a way, in that if the
heat shield on the capsule had just been reversed, and they had put the heat
seal between themselves and the burst, they would have been more than adequately
protected from the radiation damage. Nobody actually got a sufficient amount of
radiation to produce radiation damage in space. So that was a lost cause.
|
| ANDERS:
|
This happened after you came to Oak Ridge.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Right. In 1963! |
| ANDERS:
|
Was NASA's interest in these kind of studies, did
that predate your coming to Oak Ridge or did that happen after you came?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Afterwards. |
| ANDERS:
|
And that was primarily because of Charles Dunham?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Charles Dunham was then the head of the Division
of Biology and Medicine at [the] AEC.
|
| ANDERS:
|
He was the person — |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
He was the person who fingered Dr. Gould Andrews,
who was then the head of the Medical Health Science Division.
|
| SIPE:
|
He was at the University of Michigan, was he not?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
He was at the University of Michigan. And he had
been brought down to replace the doctor who died the other day, Marshall Brucer.
|
| SIPE:
|
Dr. Pollard was the director.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
But he was the director of ORINS. Dr. Marshall
Brucer was replaced by Dr. Andrews and I replaced Dr. Andrews.
|
| ANDERS:
|
I want to make sure I get some of this down on
tape.
|
| SIPE:
|
(pointing to a copy of a resume) That
right there is going to be your own. This, I fixed for you. You have your
CV, so that's for him [Anders]. I can make another copy. I also have one on the
nuclear medicine about Brucer's book, which is fantastic. He said he didn't know
much about it.
|
| ANDERS:
|
Thank you. We appreciate copies of all this. It's
helpful to us.
|
| SIPE:
|
Dr. Brucer had written these things called
vignettes, and then the megacurie with garnet, which of course went on, too,
while we were doing what we were doing when we were doing it here. This is when
ORINS's Medical Division began. This is from Brucer's book also, but it will
give you something until you got your book. These were some things that I had
just done which will come in later when he gets here to ORINS. But I want you to
know some of the things here that I have. The Brucer total body irradiation in
1929. I'm always trying to defend the things that were done so many years ago
that nobody knows about. That was something else that came out of this Brucer's
big book, which you can get out of the vignettes, which is great.
|
| ANDERS:
|
Thank you. |
|
|
|
| ANDERS:
|
This should be the third side of a taped interview
with Dr. Clarence Lushbaugh. Roger Anders and Darrell Fisher are conducting the
interview, assisted by Ann Sipe. On the first two sides of the interview tape,
Dr. Lushbaugh was referring from time to time [to] lists of journal articles
that are on his vita and other items on his vita. He also referred to an article
by Arthur C. Heubline. This was published in Radiology, volume 18, no.
6, June 1932, and the title of the article is "A Preliminary Report on
Continuance Irradiation of the Entire Body." Having done these housekeeping
chores, I think we can resume now. As we mentioned, I think we'd like to go back
to Los Alamos.
|
| FISHER:
|
Could you tell us a little more about what you
learned from the studies on high-dose irradiations of primates?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
One of the things that [we] did in Los Alamos,
believe it or not, was to avoid purposeful irradiation of human beings. We only
irradiated persons who were thought to be without any other hope of being cured
of their cancerous disease. But in the business of trying to determine what was
the effect of radiation upon primates and primate bone marrow, we were bugged at
that time by an article by Leon Jacobsen in which he shielded the liver of rats.
Dr. John Storer, who is a fellow pathologist M.D. from the University of
Chicago, whom I got to come out to Los Alamos, he and I developed a type of
shielding of rats, in which we shielded the tail. We were trying to spoof Leon
Jacobsen at the time. We called the paper that we wrote, "The 'Piece of Tail'
Factor." This was based upon studies of Dr. Charles Huggins, who was then
professor of surgery at the University of Chicago, who showed that the tail of
the rat contains yellow marrow and that one could make it, however, contain red
marrow by transplanting the tip of the tail into the abdomen. So the rats went
around the laboratory with their tail in a "U" as the tip [of the tails] was
sewn into the abdomen. Then it became like a spleen and took things up. We were
able to show that the splenic factor was not really a splenic factor but was due
to the stem cells that were present in the marrow of the animal, as well as in
man. These cell are [in] our vertebrae, and in our pelvis, at the head of our
femurs. But they are not in our fingers or hands or wrists. It was present in
the warm parts of our bones and in primates.
|
|
It was for this reason that Langham had a primate
colony in Los Alamos, in which one of my jobs was to try to keep these animals
healthy and to help Langham, who was trying to irradiate them in various kinds
of situations and to try to tell why the animals had died. The spinoff from that
radiation, that kind of study, was the fact that we went and looked at the
people who died in various kinds of things. We also looked at people who died
following radiation accidents.
|
|
We had this one radiation accident that occurred
in Los Alamos. We had another radiation accident — that was the "Kelley Case." We
had another radiation accident that occurred at "Wood River Junction." We had
another — that was the radioactive submarines. We had various kinds of radiation
accidents that occurred, so I became a specialist in investigating radiation
accidents. I also became Wright Langham's pathologist in investigating the
effects of irradiated primates to see whether there was any difference between
the radiation of primates from that of irradiated man.
|
| FISHER:
|
So the response of the man and the primates was
similar?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Right, exactly. I guess I avoided telling you that
in 1963, after getting divorced from my first wife, I decided to marry the
woman, whom you know, Dorothy Bess Hale, who worked for me in Los Alamos. I was
awarded the custody of the children from my first marriage and I brought them,
with my mother, into Oak Ridge. My mother found that keeping track of these
early teenagers was too much for her, so she demurred. My solution to the
project was to marry Dorothy and make Dorothy the mother of my children and to
give her the task. The other day we celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary and
she's still the mother of the children.
|
| SIPE:
|
She sure is. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
The youngest child was born in '52.
|
| SIPE:
|
She'll be 42 this year [1994].
|
|
|
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
In Oak Ridge, this is where we came in contact
with Dr. Dunham. We also came in contact with the radiation accidents at your
place, Battelle Northwest, which is the SL-1 accident.
|
| FISHER:
|
SL-1 was at Idaho. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Idaho Falls, right. I think of Idaho and Battelle
as being the same place.
|
| ANDERS:
|
They're close enough. |
| SIPE:
|
You came in contact with Y-12 too, in 1968, when
you came here.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes, right. One of the things I did when I was in
Los Alamos was to take charge of the REAC/TS program. The REAC/TS name is sort
of funny. [It means Radiation Emergency Assistance Center/Training Site.] We did
visit most radiation emergencies and provided emergency assistance. Our deal was
that we would not try to horn in with these things, but we'd go and see what we
could do to help the persons who were investigating the radiation accident. So,
we did this for a great number of people. One of the persons that I got coming
along was Bob Ricks, whom I hope you have a chance to interview.
|
| SIPE:
|
We tried today, Dr. Lushbaugh, but he's going to
Egypt.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
He's presently the head of the REAC/TS program. He
was a physiologist at the time. He came to me and was assigned to me one summer
as a summer student. Then he stayed on and became my associate in the REAC/TS
program and subsequently became my replacement in the REAC/TS program when I
took over as the head of the Medical Division.
|
| ANDERS:
|
While you were at Los Alamos, did you become
involved in the investigation of the SL-1 reactor accident?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Actually, my reputation — I guess was becoming so
widespread that I was "Johnny on the Spot" at various accidents. Dr. George Voelz,
who had been at Los Alamos as an intern in industrial medicine under Dr.
Shipman, he was the person, the physician in the SL-1 accident who took care of
the three persons who were injured there and who died.
|
| ANDERS:
|
They were all killed. |
| SIPE:
|
But you found out something, too, while you went
up there to do your thing. Do you remember about the tattoos? The
identification. They had them identified wrong and where they were.
|
| ANDERS:
|
You mean the bodies were initially incorrectly
identified?
|
| SIPE:
|
Two of them were. |
| ANDERS:
|
Could you tell us what you did?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
The way we did the autopsies was: You had this
working station which the team of health physicists used, and they assisted you
and helped you from getting yourself killed. We also had the team of
pathologists and physicians; largely, that was a team of persons that was made
up of George Voelz and his medical people, and me and the health physicists from
Los Alamos. One of the guys at the SL-1 accident was a guy whose name was
Colonel Jim Brennan. Jim Brennan suggested to a general by the name of General
Humphries, my name as a person who could do the autopsies.
|
| ANDERS:
|
There was General Leudecke, who was a general
manager of the AEC at that time, and he was deeply involved in the investigation
of the accident.
|
| SIPE:
|
I don't remember if we had that in the paper.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I think I got called by General Humphries, who was
asked by Colonel Jim Brennan to call me in Los Alamos and ask me to come up and
do the autopsies on these people. We did the autopsies on these people and
established the cause of death. First, we had them laid out on a table that was
made by a couple of sawhorses with a used plank door laid on it. We went in and
mapped the persons. One person had struck his head and died as a result. The
accident was energetic, and it threw this one person, who was apparently
bringing in the bell housing that was unused.
|
|
There was another fellow who was the fellow who
was pinned on the ceiling. This was the guy who was the chief of the group. He
was sitting on one of the control rods, and this control rod took off in the
explosion and pinned him to the ceiling of the reactor. The persons who were on
the scene at the reactor felt that if they dislodged him and he fell on the
reactor, they feared they might have a criticality again. They spent a long
time, up to a week, cutting a hole in the containment silo, where the reactor
was, and then building a beam and a net, so that they could catch this person's
body and bring this person down. By that time, we had done the other two
accident victims. One of the fellows, was he lifting?
|
| SIPE:
|
They had identified one of them wrongly. There was
a tattoo involved. They were Army guys and one had a tattoo.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
What was the tattoo? |
| SIPE:
|
I don't remember what it was. They said that was
not the right one and you discovered that they had mixed up the bodies in
different places. They were going to end up trying to bury them at the wrong
place.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
It was that time that we came to the conclusion
that burying the person in the family graveyard was probably a very bad idea and
that this would put a radioactive man into the town's drinking water!
Unbeknownst to the town, they drank the groundwater that came from the cemetery.
This was the first time the cemetery groundwater had ever been labeled25 or
threatened to be labeled. This person didn't get buried there. I remember that
the third person was a navy Seabee.26 who had a bumblebee tattooed on his
shoulder.
|
| SIPE:
|
There was three Army guys. If I had known, I would
have had it all here with me. I'll have it later if they'd like to know.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
We wrote that one up pretty thoroughly.
|
| SIPE:
|
Were you involved in 1958 with Kelley?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes, I was involved in the Kelley case, but you
were mostly involved in the Kelley case.
|
| SIPE:
|
That was at Los Alamos, where you had gone back to
do some studies and autopsies on the Kelley case in 1958.
|
| FISHER:
|
Ann, were you at Los Alamos at this time?
|
| SIPE:
|
No. They're still covering a lot of the Los Alamos
stuff.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I've written so many of these articles.
|
| SIPE:
|
This was part of our radiation accident registry,
which I helped him put together after he came here. Maybe it would come to pass
as an organization registry.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Kelley was in Los Alamos and he was working on an
extraction drum that had triethyl phosphate in it. The phosphate solution was
agitated by a propeller, which took it down so that plutonium could be extracted
from the various aprons, rubber gloves, masks, and the crockery that was used in
the DP West. Then there was another fellow, named Rod Day, who was in the next
laboratory working in a glove box27 and Kelley and company, this occurred on a New
Year's Eve.
|
| SIPE:
|
Yes it was. December 30. |
| FISHER:
|
December 30, 1958. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
They were having a party there at Los Alamos.
After the party was over, then they went in and each went to his job to do some
last-of-the-year analyses and recovery. It was at that time that Kelley punched
the button. I've always thought, though I've never heard, maybe you have, that
the propeller was wired wrong. So instead of the blades moving the stuff down,
the propeller was fixed in such a way that the phosphate which was riding on the
surface of the water was brought together as the propeller sucked the fluid
down, dragged the fluid in, and caught this mass of plutonium in there. This guy
was irradiated and he died at Los Alamos Medical Center. Rod Day apparently was
irradiated by walking past the tank in question.
|
| SIPE:
|
He ran out. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Kelley thought he had been hit by acid, because he
felt that his skin was burned. It was injured by alpha radiation.
|
| SIPE:
| Did you do autopsies on him?
|
| FISHER:
|
Was that a criticality accident?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes, it was. |
| ANDERS:
|
And Day got injured because right after it
happened, he walked by?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes, the apparatus was radioactive and it
contained radioactive material.
|
