|
|
| FISHER:
|
We want to talk about all the work you've done at
Oak Ridge from 1963 on.
|
| ANDERS:
|
1963 on. We talked a little bit about how you came
to Oak Ridge, why you came to Oak Ridge, and I guess we could start with the
medical research that you began in the medical program you began working in when
you started here at Oak Ridge.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I talked about the radioisotope program. And about
how I was competitive with Dr. Lowell Edwards and his metastases of cancer and
how I worked with Ralph Kniseley. I guess the great thing was that what we did,
we got built this large what we called the LETBI [Low Exposure Total Body
Irradiator] facility. Ann Sipe was the woman that became the actual day-to-day,
hour-to-hour manager of the facility. I was sort of the doctor representative. I
don't know what you'd call me.
|
| SIPE:
|
We used to call him co-investigator. It sounded
really terrible. But that's what the lower echelon called you. Everybody. You
were investigating.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
The LETBI facility was an interesting one. This is
where the major part of my research took place. It took place in a room where we
had a console that measured the time that the person was in this room and being
irradiated. The person that lived in this room was in a sea of radiation, much
like that Heubline had made up years and years ago using xray tubes. But
we used cobalt60. We used cobalt60 in an array around the ceiling,
whereby a person in this area got a pretty uniform dose of radiation. We had a
dose meter there. This thing sort of measured the amount of radiation. What he
was not supposed to do with a patient was, he [(the patient)] was not supposed
to get more radiation than we had said that he was supposed to get in a number
of days. Days times 24 times [the exposure rate] was what the radiation dose
was. We kept track of his radiation exposure. We found and what we had actually
designed was a door that made these sources go back in the place so it didn't
irradiate the patient unless the patient was in the room with the door closed.
We didn't have any trouble with this, except for women patients. Women would
always go to the bathroom together. Men would always go separately. We could
have as many as two persons in this room at a time. So we had to keep track of
the women.
|
| SIPE:
|
Yes. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
The interesting thing was that as we watched, and
we had remote-control cameras and the like so we could see. The person who was
going to be irradiated would usually have arthritis or difficulty untying his
shoes, or taking off his pants or getting into bed. If he got down in bed where
he was sleeping all night, he had to roll out and climb the wall to stand and
get up. It was terribly difficult for him to do. After he had been irradiated
for a couple of weeks, and I do mean a couple of weeks, he would now be able to
walk when—he had a double cane when he walked in. Now he would be able to give
me the canes as he left. Now he would be able to get out of bed without having
to fall out on the floor, roll on the floor, crawl up the walls. His arthritis
would be gone.
|
| FISHER:
|
Could you describe the types of diseases that were
being treated by the low-dose-rate facility?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
We usually treated diseases that involved the
lymphatic system39. We had chronic lymphatic disease. We had acute lymphatic
disease and we had various kinds of myelogenous40 diseases and the like.
|
| FISHER:
|
It would include both leukemia and lymphoma.
|
| SIPE:
|
We had the chronic granulocytic leukemias41. We had
the lymphomas42 and lymphosarcomas43 and then the polycythemia veras44 and
thrombocythemia45.
|
| FISHER:
|
Polycythemia veras. Any Hodgkin's disease?
|
| SIPE:
| No, we didn't have any Hodgkin's disease. There
was a very large lymphocarcinoma46. This is out of the book. I can read it right
out. I won't go from memory. This is your book. Everything was in a chronic
state when we had them there, the leukemias. They were never in the acute state;
they were always in the chronic state. There were criteria that were set up for
this. In fact, sometimes even if blood pictures changed, when they decided they
were going to have them in there, it would be stopped on the morning that they
were going to start their treatments.
|
| FISHER:
|
Do you remember the protocols that were developed
for these patients? What were the total body radiation doses that you wanted to
achieve and what were the upper limits on those?
|
| SIPE:
|
LETBI strived for 250 rads in a period of eight
days.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Ann knows more about it than I do.
|
| FISHER:
|
250 rads? |
| SIPE:
|
Over a period of eight days. Five R per hour,
approximately 20 hours a day.
|
| FISHER:
|
Five rad per hour. |
| SIPE:
|
1.5. |
| FISHER:
|
1.5 rad per hour. |
| SIPE:
|
They had been doing this in METBI. That was the
primary whole body counter. There had been some fractionated and protractive
treatment, but not that much.
|
| FISHER:
|
So 250— |
| SIPE:
|
—was the tops. |
| FISHER:
|
—was the highest level. |
| SIPE:
|
We did some 100s and some 150s, but 250 was the
top in LETBI.
|
| FISHER:
|
What was the rationale for the medium dose rate
versus the low-dose-rate selection? Do you remember which worked best and why?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
It seems like the ones that worked best in the
METBI were the younger persons. The older persons went better in the LETBI
facility.
|
| SIPE:
|
Yes, I'm not questioning that. When METBI was
there, I think [treatment choice] also had to do with the blood work, the
picture, the acute state, the chronic state. One of the things that the Heubline
treatment promoted was the hospitals all over the United States had been doing
this way before LETBI had started. Giving small doses daily. Now this is an
uneducated lady here. But learning from him, one of the things was it would
attack the bone marrow and keep it from going into an acute state. If the white
cells started climbing, the red blood cells a little bit everyday would try to
keep a level picture. It also [made it] so that they [patients] could move
around, they could stay in this area, and go out and visit and walk. Side
effects weren't bad either. They didn't have the side effects they did from the
1.5 R per minute. The comfort of the patient was one of the things that they
were really striving for.
|
| FISHER:
|
The low dose rate at 1.5 R per hour resulted in
fewer side effects?
|
| SIPE:
|
The only people that ever complained of having
nausea were people who had treatments in the METBI, the portal treatments, like
to the spleen. There would be people who would tell us they could smell it. They
would get nauseated going on the elevator, even going down stairs. There were
only about three of those, but they had no side effects, nausea, vomiting,
dizziness. They would get a little bit tired, the dormancy. We'd take them out.
We'd get them out of there. The room was like a hotel room. They had their own
television, and the paper, food, and [they could] come out and look outside or
go outside and sit. They really were just hospitalized, so to speak, but still
getting treatment. They had much fewer side effects than the ones who had it
downstairs that we had noticed.
|
| FISHER:
|
Do you remember the year of the first full body
irradiations?
|
| SIPE:
|
Where? |
| FISHER:
|
Here at the Medical Division?
|
| SIPE:
|
That would have been before I came here in the
fifties. That would have been in 1953 or '54.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
There was a physician here on the staff whose name
was Frank Comas. Frank Comas was in charge of radiation treatments. He had with
him at the time Brucer who was here, he had with him a large focusing type of
gamma camera. What would you call those things that he had downstairs?
|
| FISHER:
|
You mean the teletherapy room.
|
| SIPE:
|
He had that. He called it a "red menace."
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Right. He was a good guy. He still is over there
at the University of Tennessee. You should be able to talk to him.
|
| SIPE:
|
It was cesium137 teletherapy. They put that
in '55. I wasn't here. But 1960 approximately is when METBI was built, the
middle exposure, the moderate exposure. Then we went in 1967 in LETBI. Dr. Comas
was at UT [University of Tennessee]. He also possibly has retired. When I had my
surgery in January he was supposed to retire by August [1994].
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I didn't know that. |
| FISHER:
|
So 250 rad either over a short period or a longer
period. Twenty days?
|
| SIPE:
|
No, eight days. That was in the LETBI unit. In the
METBI unit, they usually had, I don't know what the top was, I don't remember,
although we have it in our history. They would have, sometimes they would have
lower dosages. It's according to the child or the size. It was according to the
disease. I think they would have it anywhere from possibly 50 R up to a little
over 300. I think the maximum was 350 at one time. They usually stayed around
100 in METBI. Now in LETBI, we had a group of one hundred, one hundred and
fifty, and two-fifty in LETBI.
|
| FISHER:
|
Do you remember the reason, Dr. Lushbaugh, for
choosing 100, 150, or 250 R per treatment? Do you remember the protocol or the
rationale why a certain dose level was chosen?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I think that the controlling reason was that the
radiation dose was, and you didn't want to kill anybody. It's still pretty well
unknown that 400 rads total body radiation is going to kill you; actually, if
you had half of that, this was considered the therapeutic level. In the usual
treatment of cancers, the daily dose to a cancer is about 200 rads. We were
trying to prolong the time period it took to get such a dose into a person. And
to be able to see some kind of an effect on a tumor.
|
| SIPE:
|
A lot of times these people had so many other
treatments that they had other treatments in METBI, and one of the things, too,
is that their cancers, their blood dyscrasias47 would advance. Some of the times,
knowing that something else did not bring it down to the level they wanted to
keep it, sometimes they would try a little bit more. It is a known fact that all
of those would reach a peak and then go over the blast process into acute stages
and then you had to take on another type of treatment, which would not be
radiation.
|
| FISHER:
|
Blood counts were taken fairly often?
|
| SIPE:
|
Every day, blood counts were taken and the all of
their history was known at staff meetings. The blood work. I did graphs for Dr.
Lushbaugh. All the graphs distinguish between METBI and later [LETBI] and are
the comparisons of where the blood stage was, where the bone marrows that were
done. They did bone marrows before every treatment. If they decided it's a
possibility to give them 100 in LETBI, a bone marrow was done the day before and
then so many days after to see the nadir time and all the different things that
would happen. In the meantime, also watching their blood picture to see if they
got to a point where that might be doing some damage. They were watched over
daily on that type of thing so the patient and his disease came first. It wasn't
that their treatments were continued out, just to get an ending. Sometimes we've
stopped because "something has happened here."
|
| FISHER:
|
Was there antibiotic support as well?
|
| SIPE:
|
If it was called for and needed, they got it. Some
of the patients, some of the women would have some bladder infections. If
something happened and it raised it's ugly head, then they would stop.
|
| FISHER:
|
Do you remember the comparison in therapy success
between the METBI and the LETBI, in retrospect?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I was biased, of course. I always thought that the
LETBI was much more effective than the METBI. The thing was, that in the METBI
facility, it bordered on the amount of radiation that a person could stand in a
day. And so you had nausea and vomiting and systemic reactions. Where you rarely
had those things, if at all, in the LETBI facility.
|
| FISHER:
|
So there were fewer complications with nausea in
the LETBI and you could still deliver the same total dose.
|
| SIPE:
|
Just over a longer period of time. I think also,you have a big psychological side here with the patients who are getting
different kinds of treatment. They gave much support to each other. In the
hospital, in the regular hospitals, it was always, "I've just talked to a
patient three doors down and they're being given such and such, why don't you
try that on me?" Although the patients did not pull that much here, there was
such support and if someone was getting sick in METBI, everybody knew it. Then
when LETBI started, it was like, "Let me try LETBI." There was such a
psychological point of people in LETBI because they had one person, they were
not a 20-patient hospital. Back there they were the only thing existing. Their
every need, they're talking to their people, coming back at night. I've been
here at two o'clock in the morning, where if there's something bothering them,
I'll come right back up here. Although the nurses have a TV camera and could
watch on a oscilloscope their heartbeat to make sure. They were watching over
them in the nurses' station. They had so much care back there. It was such a
hotel to go to. So the psychological factor also helped, I think sometime. I
think that helped on nausea.
|
| FISHER:
|
You were able to treat as much as two at once in
the same facilities.
|
| SIPE:
|
They didn't do that often, but, did that some.
Some of the gentlemen, and Dr. Lushbaugh always came to meet them. We'd sit
around and talk about it. They would come and sit with me for a little while.
We'd go inside and sit for a little while, so by the time they started their
treatment, they knew exactly how it worked. I never left unless I told them. Dr.
Lushbaugh would sit with them for me to come home. Dr. Ricks did. When one was a
preacher and one had a wife who couldn't drive. There was a thing about having
treatment for eight hours and tending to their business. They wanted to do that.
They were still in the chronic state of their disease. They had a big round
table, the physicians, Dr. Lushbaugh, doing comparison of their blood work.
These gentleman had probably five or six treatments in LETBI and METBI also.
They had other treatments in METBI as other things changed. Or they had METBI
before LETBI. So they were able to go home. They were still leading the normal
life which was so important too, on that side of it, without the nausea and
whatnot.
|
| FISHER:
|
What other facilities around the country were
attempting the same types of procedures on lymphoma and leukemia?
|
| SIPE:
|
That part he'll have to answer, I don't know.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
This is just a list of retrospective studies.
That's not the answer to your question.
|
| SIPE:
|
That's not the answer you want. But I was giving
that to the question they're going to ask in a minute. City of Hope was doing a
study on leukemia.
|
| FISHER:
|
This wasn't the only facility in the country doing
low-dose-rate whole body irradiations, was it?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
No. |
| SIPE:
|
No, these were two. Princess Margaret [Hospital]
in Canada was doing a lot of those. Veterans Hospital was giving five R every
day to veterans.
|
| FISHER:
|
Which veterans? |
| SIPE:
|
It would be a VA Hospital in New Orleans. I did
have at one time different hospitals, like Indiana and University of Arkansas.
|
| FISHER:
|
What was the most unique thing about ORINS in
terms of treatment of leukemia and lymphoma patients?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I guess from the patients' point of view, it
didn't cost them anything.
|
| FISHER:
|
Who covered the cost? |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
The AEC. |
| FISHER:
|
Were they able to be treated because they belonged
to the AEC family? Were they employees at Oak Ridge or members of the community
or referrals?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
This was the area cancer hospital. If you had some
kind of cancer and cancer of the blood was one of them, you were sent to this
hospital.
|
| FISHER:
|
Because it was a regional cancer facility.
|
| SIPE:
|
In 1946, when they first had their meeting and the
isotope study became so prominent to people and isotopes per se that had been
used so many years in the thirties. Right down the street they had ORNL [Oak
Ridge National Laboratory] with isotopes. It was a meeting place that was close
to isotopes and the expertise of the people involved. That's one of the reasons
that they thought this would be a good place to start this. The Army was leaving
and they were able to get the EB1 building. This was all the Oak Ridge Hospital
in the old days. In '48, they acquired it. That was a basic reason, because of
the isotopes that could be made, going in to peacetime.
|
| FISHER:
|
I seem to recall that Dr. Saenger was always doing
these. Was it the same time, or did he come on later?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
His regime was different. He didn't have a room,
for instance. He had the usual radiation oncology room, which had a big source
that could give doses. He would have oncologists who would look at the source or
graph of its radioactivity and be able to tell how much radioactivity would come
out. So they planned for a certain thing to be looked at in a certain way and
delivered radiation to it for a certain length of time. Not total body
irradiation.
|
| FISHER:
|
Was it a gamma source in a well?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes. |
| FISHER:
|
Or was it a teletherapy machine that they
converted into whole body irradiation.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I don't really know. All I know is that I have
seen their printouts of the therapeutic arrays that they were going to have. I
know that Saenger and I went on many occasions to Columbus, Ohio, where they had
some kind of a radiation physicist who was moonlighting and trying to develop
into a hospital physicist, a medical physicist. He apparently used the wrong
graph paper and he depreciated this source. The hospital there didn't know that
they were having any trouble, until one day the radiation therapist said that
never in his life had he ever used roentgens, that were so strong. This is a
quite well-known debacle. I don't know what his name is nowadays. Saenger could
tell you.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I forget the name of the hospital.
|
| SIPE:
|
Yes, Riverside. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Riverside Hospital. |
| FISHER:
|
Were these total body irradiations?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
No, they were focused irradiations. The
radiologist who complained about this was the head man, and he complained that
he was getting many kinds of dermatitises48, ulcerations49, and untoward radiation
effects that he didn't expect to get.
|
| FISHER:
|
Because the actual dose rates were higher than
calculated.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
You're exactly right. |
| SIPE:
|
Sometimes on purpose, sometimes because of neglect
of the machinery, too.
|
| FISHER:
|
Was Dr. Saenger treating patients for leukemia and
lymphoma?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I don't think so. Mostly his were inoperable
cancers of solid organs.
|
| FISHER:
|
Using a directed beam. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes. |
| SIPE:
|
(pulls out a photograph) Let me show you
how they did the dosimetry work. Because of it being the room, they even
arranged the furniture. There was one other. (pointing to the photograph)
This is where the place is, with the couch, the door, the TV. It gave exactly,
they went in and every inch of that place was totally controlled, exactly what
was going to come in. Here's the patient. That wasn't the patient, that was a
student. This is it. This is the control. Here are your sources. Then the door
that opened and shut into the bathroom. It computerized all the information. It
was just a nice little room. Here's the console. I have one here where they have
every bit. Cutaway, electrodes. Tom Barkett was doing the study of how much
radiation was hitting every bit of that place. I'm doing the dosimetry work,
which was done for months and months and months. It was in really great control.
I've got it here somewhere.
|
|
But anyway. Another thing that stood out. You
asked him what was remarkable about the people being treated here. They were
from all around this area, but they also came in from other areas. When they
started, we had people in Washington that would call, and their mother was in
here or their children in here. M.D. Anderson in 1951 took the cobalt-60
therapy and put it into their beams, the teletherapy machine. M.D. Anderson
wanted it. Dr. Lushbaugh had brought a child here from New Mexico.
|
|
One of the things was that the whole town
supported the place. Because they had above-average intelligence here also. We
had so many Ph.D.s, medical doctors, etc. One of the things that was so great.
When a doctor tells you there is no hope, there is one place. It's experimental
to a point, but there's a lot of promise there. Somebody walks through the door
that is half dead, limp, and in two days' time that child is running down the
hall, eating. A mother has hope to live, to raise her children. We did have
cures here.
|
|
We had to talk to them, not too long ago when all
these wonderful things started happening. I have kept up with quite a few
through the years anyway. I've also kept up with the ones who didn't make up but
were given extended lifetime. Ten years, 13 years. One case of acute lymphocytic
leukemia who would in six weeks be gone, [lasted] three and a half years, which
was unbelievable at that time. The word "experimental" also sort of put a thorn
in my side, because really and truly even today when you are watching
television, reading newspapers, magazines, or anything that you get, they are
still doing the same thing that we did. M.D. Anderson, St. Jude, and they're
still doing the same things that we did then. The laminar flow, the clean areas
that we started here. The laminar flow that cleaned it completely bacteria free
as much as possible is being used with these severely acute leukemic children.
But what they're doing also is taking their bone marrow and freezing it now.
Where before, in times of those days, they didn't know to do that. They were
taking it from a child, a spouse, or whatever. So, everything that was done,
nobody screaming, but the same thing is being done now that was being done then.
|
|
|
|
| FISHER:
|
It's been widely reported that the therapy
performed here was not effective in treating cancer. Could you comment on that?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I don't know what you mean when you say it's
widely reported.
|
| FISHER:
|
Well, you read in articles and magazines or you
hear on some of these retrospective news programs, for example "60 Minutes,"
that the therapy was not effective in the cancer treatment. I wonder if you'd
take this opportunity to describe the effectiveness of the treatment as you saw
it as the principal physician in charge. Go ahead and comment as much as you
want.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
When I've commented on some things that Ann has
said here, one of the things is experimental treatment. Experimental treatment
says to me, and I've got a Ph.D. in experimental pathology, is that somewhere or
other you had controls. Well, you don't have any controls. Actually, your
controls are your experience. What we found was that we were able to treat
people with various kinds of malignancies of the lymphatic and bone marrow
systems that worked very well. They worked much better than if you tried to do
it in another way.
|
| FISHER:
|
Like with chemotherapy. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes. |
| FISHER:
|
Do you remember the available chemotherapies in
the 1950s and sixties?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
The only chemotherapeutic agent that I really know
anything about is the nitrogen mustards that I already told you about.
|
| SIPE:
|
Cytotoxin50 was one. It's still being used even in
arthritic patients. I don't remember.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
This is a field where you have to work in it
everyday. Things are happening everyday. The names are changing. People are
writing papers and you can't expect people not to claim that their treatment and
their way of doing it is better than anybody else's way of doing it. We weren't
trying to do that. We were trying to be as objective as we could be. Where it
said that we used people as guinea pigs, this is not so. When a person came to
this place, they usually came because of a physician. A physician referred him
to this place and a physician told him what the reasons were and why he was
being sent here. We had, for instance, a radiologist over at the medical center
here next door to us, who used to say that a person who had a lymphoma or a
cancer of the lung, he needed a little bit more ionization than his mediastinum51.
|
| SIPE:
|
Dr. Ball? |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes. That's tough to comment about that. Because
you have somebody that's mouthing jargon and you've got your [tape-recording]
machine on, so I can't really tell you what it is. I got a rock the other day
that had "SHIT" on it and I got it for my 31st wedding anniversary. I put it out
in my rock garden, by the way. A lot of people are saying this. Like people say,
"Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that?" Well, how do you do it? How do
you evaluate the things? What we saw here was that when people came to us with
their problems and they came to us with their various leukemias, and they were
treated by us in a certain way, then our LETBI facility really did its job. It
did its job in the kind of a way that returned these people to life. They had
hope where they didn't have hope before and they were able to do their job,
living everyday, which was very, very important to them. And it was very
important to us.
|
| FISHER:
|
In medical terminology, then, you achieved some
long-term remissions.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes, we did. The thing that has happened is this.
Roger [Anders] should know about this. The other day, Dr. Bill Bibb gave a
seminar here at the Medical Sciences Division, or whatever it's called nowadays.
He told for the first time the truth about a matter that I knew was the truth at
the time it was said. Up until that time, this was our bone marrow program.
There was a program in which we tried to replace abnormal bone marrow that had
abnormal genetic defects with normal bone marrow that was going to respond in a
different way. We had ways that were not well understood. One of the things I
was going to say was that—
|
| SIPE:
|
—something Bill Bibb said. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
We made bone marrow injections when our bone
marrow program was not something that you could be proud of. Our bone marrows
apparently didn't take. A review committee that was gotten together by the AEC
to review our program came down, and they came over here and they said that Dr.
Gould Andrews was practicing a kind of medicine which was not well founded and
it was unethical. The reason why it was unethical was that he was giving total
body doses for the radiation that were so small. The reason was that he knew
that the bone marrow might fail. Actually, the truth of the matter was that the
AEC and your department was figuring up the cost and found that treating these
people was too costly for AEC's programs, and so they had to shut down the
clinical facilities because clinical medicine was becoming too costly for them.
This almost broke Dr. Andrews's heart to have this kind of comment made about
him. He left shortly after that.
|
| ANDERS:
|
Was this the AEC's Advisory Committee on Biology
and Medicine that was making this comment, or some other part of the AEC?
|
| FISHER:
|
Reviewers or what? |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I don't know. All I know is that I knew one
person.
|
| SIPE:
|
I think it was 1973. I think that was the big
review.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
That was the time when I was left with largely an
area in the LETBI facility and no furnace to keep this place warm during the
winter time.
|
| SIPE:
|
You had a lot of expertise in one little building.
You asked something on the treatments done in other areas. Daily, weekly,
nightly, the hematologists, your physicians, your cytogeneticist, your
radiotherapist, they constantly were in contact all over the world. They were
all in the meetings speaking, "I just spoke to Dr. So-and-So and this is
something that has really been improved, such and such." And then they talked to
someone. They were always constantly sharing. When people would talk about
people coming in here being guinea pigs, it's like the people on this side. This
is what the media was doing, and even our forefathers at DOE. It never seemed
like if you happened to be on the left side of the room you were going to get
one treatment, you on the right [side] would get something else.
|
|
We had a young man that came here and worked under
Dr. Lushbaugh named Dr. Guilimo Casteneda from Mexico City. Dr. Casteneda was a
physician studying with this group because of his activities in Mexico. The one
thing he always complained about is they took too long to decide what treatment
would be best. They had these people here because in Mexico within twelve hours.
I said, "What about bone marrows, what about such and such?" He said, "Oh, no."
I said, "That's what makes this place special." Every patient was an individual,
and if you had five acute leukemic or chronic granulocytic52 leukemia, every one
was going to be different. Everything was searched and looked. Because I was
doing blood graphs and they were looking at the blood graphs and they were
constantly trying to compare. Now this guy has too much of a T cell53
something. And this one has some other thing. A lot of stuff I'd have to
get my dictionary out or corner him. Everybody was such an individual that the
treatments were just for them. That's even what made this place more special.
|
| FISHER:
|
You're saying that the therapy was customized to
the degree possible for each individual.
|
| SIPE:
|
Yes, indeed. I would swear to that. I really feel
that strongly. Like I say, not as one of the higher upper echelon and the
knowledge of such a person, but you could listen and you could watch. A lot of
times there could be possibly other experimentation using isotopes. The scans
that were done to look and see what this treatment had done. To look at a liver,
to look at a pancreas, to look at a spleen, to look at anything. We've had
children come in here with aplastic anemia54 that now are mothers. We had one girl
who came in here. What did she have? She had two little babies, her husband left
her. She's well. She was at death's door. They worked on her, and still they're
having to work on her periodically, but she's a grandmother. There were so many
good things that came out of this.
|
| FISHER:
|
There are quite a few long-term survivors of the
therapy program.
|
| SIPE:
|
Oh, yes. There was an acute leukemia patient, and
he is alive, working at Grovers in Knoxville.
|
| FISHER:
|
From some of the things that we've read, there
were no survivors, you get that.
|
| SIPE:
|
Survivors of what now? |
| FISHER:
|
Of the therapy program. |
| SIPE:
|
That's not true. |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
People are always correct when they make
statements like that because you can't live forever. So you have to measure
things in a certain kind of way.
|
| SIPE:
|
Marshall Brucer said something about radiation
aging, or something. You do live to get older. There's something he had in one
of his books that was so neat. It is. We have some that are living. We have many
spouses of mothers and fathers who still swear by the program. If they had to do
it over again, because it gave their child extra hope.
|
| FISHER:
|
Marrow transplantation techniques were developed
in the middle fifties, and you say you attempted some bone marrow
transplantation here during the sixties.
|
| SIPE:
|
We did four. |
| FISHER:
|
You did four. |
| SIPE:
|
We had plates. I think it was really early
seventies. There were four.
|
| FISHER:
|
Four cases with marrow transplantation. Did you
want to comment anymore on bone marrow?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I don't know. I can't check out your figures
because my brain is too soft for that. I think that everybody should be truthful
about these things. I think the truth of the matter is that the people in this
area benefitted from these programs. Like this man who brought these chairs in.
His mother is the mother of a child that I am said to have brought with me from
Los Alamos. I didn't bring that child from Los Alamos. She talks the same way.
|
| SIPE:
|
He gave a talk at East Tennessee.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
That mother brought that child with leukemia from
Los Alamos where I was trying to treat that child with leukemia with a bone
marrow transplant. We had irradiated that child and we had given it a bone
marrow transplant from that boy that walked in here with these chairs. Did you
know that?
|
| SIPE:
|
No, I didn't know that. But you didn't bring him
here, but she came here because you were here. That's what I meant.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
The other day, when my wife and I were trying to
give away one more truck. We had to give an affidavit to the county that we were
giving it without selling it so there was no tax involved.
|
| FISHER:
|
You were giving away a truck?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes. We did. That woman actually cried, broke down
in the county clerk's office and cried when she saw my wife and me. We were the
people who took care of her child. That child died.
|
| SIPE:
|
That's okay. He had about a year and a half.
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Our treatment of that child was a failure. But
because that child was a failure, we had other children that lived.
|
| SIPE:
|
He was also given about eighteen months to two
years, when with acute lymphocytic leukemia it lasts two weeks or six weeks.
They often brought them in here and they died before they could do anything.
|
| FISHER:
|
What did you do medically to improve your therapy
over time, based on results?
|
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
I would say that medically, we actually stayed up
with the medical times and that we benefitted from the other papers that were
written. Where I talked about Warthin and Wellerd, and the radiomimetic drugs.
That was a very important paper. For them to write. It was very important for me
to have read it, because I didn't know what radiomimetic meant. Radiation was
unique. Yet, I think that using radiation can be done knowledgeably in a way
that you can produce a radiomimetic effect. And also you can use chemicals in
such a way that you can produce by chemotherapy as a radiation effect. Today
persons on chemotherapy—my daughter is 43 years of age. She's got 44- and
45-year-old friends supposedly dying with various kinds of cancer. They're on
chemotherapy, they're on radiation therapy, they're on all sorts of kinds of
therapy, and they're living. People are making progress and medicine is making
progress. Medicine is making progress in the treatment. In a place like this
where every day you come in and you work and work and work 12 hours a day,
trying to stay up with all the things, reading all in the beautiful library.
It's awful when you retire.
|
| FISHER:
|
It's tough to be out of it? |
| LUSHBAUGH:
|
Yes, it is tough to be out of it, it really is.
|
