From South Dakota to University of Chicago (1950) to Los Alamos (1956)

It was a real godsend to have [Dr. Moxon] find [me a spot]. It wasn't just for me: He did this for all the kids that worked for him. He would give them several options. Such-and-Such a school with So-and-So. Always these major professors in [other] institutions had either assistantships or some other arrangement for allowing a person to work in a laboratory and pay for their education. That happened to me.

He said that I could either go to the University of Wisconsin on a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Fellowship, or I could go to the University of Chicago and work at the Tox[icity] Lab¹ for money. (laughter) I was not very sophisticated in those days. I looked at that University of Chicago "for money" offer and figured that was the good one. It turned out that the Wisconsin offer was the good one. The stipend there was beer money; everything was paid for. Either one of them was a perfect opportunity. And the McArdle Memorial Cancer Institute at the University of Wisconsin has been a spectacular place over time, in terms of its scientific reputation.

But the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Chicago wasn't peanuts, either. I worked for Dr. Kenneth Dubois and Dr. E.M.K. Geiling. It's interesting that the director of the Toxicity Laboratory at the time was [Dr.] Franklin MacLean, who had been in the [Manhattan Engineer District's and Atomic Energy Commission's] Santa Fe Area Office during the time immediately after the war years and the early testing period. By the time I got to Chicago in [the] 1950-to-'51 time frame, he was just back from that job and back on the University of Chicago faculty again.

We knew quite a bit about what was going on down here, and the Tox Lab had very close ties with the Met Lab.² Argonne³ had not yet moved out to Lamont[, Illinois]. They were still on the University of Chicago campus. That was sort of a big family where everybody, even the graduate students, knew everybody else. The formalisms of an academic environment were clearly there, but we knew a lot of the people who were major players. Zirkle,⁴ for example, [Harvey Patt],⁵ and Austin Brues.⁶ I actually worked next to John Thompson, who later had a successful career at Argonne. He was in the laboratory at the same time I was. That whole community, the radiation community at that time, was pretty tight. They were a close-knit bunch.

This was all brand new. There was a great deal of interest, enthusiasm, curiosity, [and] anxiety to exploit this new technique. If you think about it in terms of what we know today in biology and medicine, the fraction that we would know without the nuclear components is pretty small. We exploited it mightily in terms of unraveling biochemical pathways.

A lot of the biology and a lot of the medicine that we know is because of work that was done in the two decades immediately after World War II. The pathways were already open. The cyclotrons⁷ had done that in the 1930s. The concept was already well-established, but the tools weren't there. Then, all of a sudden, all of the products of operating a reactor and the possibility of getting them out and using isotopic variants of bodily components or radioactively labeled⁸ compounds, normal metabolites,⁹just exploded the whole understanding of what was then called biochemistry. That was essentially the thing we were fascinated with.

Outlining the Agenda for Radiation Research (Early '50s)

The concerns in those days were, really, "Were we going to be attacked by the Russians?" Civil defense was a big deal. That shows up in some of the studies that we've been looking at here.

There was a molecular [level]—we didn't call it molecular at the time, that word didn't become fashionable for another five or ten years. But we were interested in radiation effects at the molecular level. [We] were looking at enzyme systems. Then there was another gang that was looking at the effects on cells and organs, thinking that the fundamental effects of radiation were due to organ failure. Muller's [drosophila] fruit flies were already well-known to everybody [as tools to study genetic effects of radiation]. All of this [was done] before [James D.] Watson and [Francis H.C.] Crick [explained DNA chemistry]. That was 1953, and this was before that time.

MET Lab Research in the Metabolism of Radionuclides

Choosing a Career at Los Alamos (1956)

The Laboratory at that time had a very benign research policy. Today we prepare formal research proposals, we have them internally reviewed, critiqued, [and] if they pass that, eventually they—I forget what they call them now. They were called 189s²⁵ when I last [worked] with them. They were the formal proposals to the AEC for funding. We didn't write [189s] until almost 1970. The other [National] Laboratories did, but we didn't.

Nuclear Weapons Fallout Studies (1946–54)

But you see, the questions as far as the effects of fallout were concerned were not geared to the kinds of work that people were doing at the time. The acute [nuclear weapons] effects work that marks the end of the war in the early '50s didn't match what Willard Libby wanted to do with the Sunshine Program.³¹[The purpose of Project Sunshine] was to find out exactly what the world [contamination as a result of atmospheric nuclear weapon testing up to that time] looked like and what the potential effects, presumably [from] strontium-90, would be. Was there going to be a catastrophic increase in the amount of osteogenic sarcoma³² in kids?

Strontium is metabolized like calcium. You have a certain amount of it in bone. You have malignant transformation and most likely a bone tumor. Since all kids were being exposed to strontium-90 from fallout, this had to be a concern.

Then there was the group that said, "This can't be a concern in a vacuum. It has to have some kind of a quantitative understanding associated with it. How much fallout have we dumped? What is the concentration of this fallout on the land surfaces? What is the contamination [of the] food chain? How fast is it going into people, with special emphasis on the very young, because they are the ones that are laying [bone] down at the fastest rate?" That whole business, the next generation of radiation effects, the early carcinogenesis³³studies which were not terribly successful, [are examples of studies resulting from that group's concern].

The Radiobiology Group's Research Project Approval Process

Langham operated under the directorial constraints, but he was insulated a little bit, in that he was doing biology and the Lab was run by physicists, and physicists are notoriously—how can I say this, I don't want to use a pejorative word. They [were] not in direct, understanding contact all the time about what biological interests are.

Mission of the Los Alamos Biomedical Group in the 1950s

But all of these guys had a dual role. They [did research] work [that] people said was like [playing] pinochle in the fire house: What [they] were really here for was to be a part of a team in the event that the bell rang.⁴³That was partially true. We all had disaster responsibilities as well as programmatic research responsibility.

I was going to go back a little bit and show you how this apparent carte blanche that Langham had, developed into a very cohesive and remarkably astute program. The scintillation counters are an example of that.

Ernie Anderson⁴⁴ designed [a] counter big enough to hold a person, and [that] could [achieve] extremely low-level [radionuclide] detection. There was a stampede [to do new research with this instrument]. That counter was dedicated on Bastille Day[, July 14,] in 1956. It opened this whole area of clinical diagnosis and of the development of new diagnostic methods, mostly by Lushbaugh.

Participation as a Subject in Human Radiation Studies

One of the counters that we had was a small animal counter that was built just like the big scintillation counter and had roughly the same sensitivity.⁶¹ [If] you [placed] your arm in the [counter], it would count your arm while your liver got rid of the rose bengal, and that was the liver function test. It was Tamplin's test,⁶² but done with a radiolabel that made it much more sensitive and much more precise. It was marvelous.

Measuring Iodine-131 Uptake in Children (Circa 1963)

People have to realize that the sensitivity of these instruments was exquisite. The resolution was very good. The hazard from radiation was essentially nonexistent.⁶⁸ Therefore, we felt that there was no [danger]; we would never put our kids in harm's way.

If we had any thoughts at all that there was any hazard associated with this, the first thing we would have to do is move from Los Alamos. Because Los Alamos [residents, at 7,500 feet elevation,] live with the natural background [radiation] on an annual basis in the order of [350] millirem.⁶⁹ What we are talking about in this particular study was a very small fraction of that as the total dose of that iodine before it either disappeared metabolically or simply disappeared through physical decay.

AEC Authorization of the Use of Human Subjects (1956)

AEC and Military Differ on the Use of Human Subjects

Dr. Lushbaugh's Diagnostic Use of Radioisotopes (1956–63)

AEC Procedure for Authorizing the Use of Radioactive Materials on Humans (Late '40s Onward)

Use of Humans to Calibrate a Whole-Body Counter;Study of Iron-59 Metabolism

Postmortem Assistance Following the SL-1 Reactor Accident (1961)

The calculated doses for each procedure were very carefully surveyed by a monitoring team that was also there. They would calculate how much time you could spend in that intense radiation field to accomplish each of the activities, and then you would retreat to a shielded position and think about what you were going to do next. Nobody stood around in that radiation field.

Contribution to Cell Biology Research

A lot of the understanding of cell growth and division dates from that time. That's the work of a lot of people. Ernie Anderson, George Bell, Ron [Walters], Paul Kraemer, Marv Van Dilla. We had a big gang of people. Van Dilla and Mullaney, in parallel, ran the development of the instrumentation.

Leadership of the Los Alamos Divisions and Groups Following the 1974 Reorganization

The Research Culture at Los Alamos During the "Golden Age" (Circa 1955–60)

But back when we were working, the only way you could tell the difference between night and day was whether the lights were on.¹⁰⁹ The people worked around the clock, and they worked in an almost driven mode. And yet, I've never seen enthusiasm and excitement and the sense of urgency and mission replicated that was existent during that mid-'50s to very early '60s time frame.

Relationship Between the Health Division and the Weapons Design Division

George LeRoy from the University of Chicago was the biomedical director at Operation Greenhouse and [Wright] Langham was his assistant. Much of the work that was done [in the Pacific], and the preliminary work that provided the baseline for it was conducted here.

The continental series starting with Ranger¹¹⁴ [became] more and more sophisticated as you move forward, too. The idea of involving troops start[ed] with Buster-Jangle¹¹⁵ and then Tumbler-Snapper,¹¹⁶ Upshot-Knothole,¹¹⁷Teapot,¹¹⁸ and on up the line.

But the question that you asked originally, "What's the relationship between H and J?" J is largely a physics operation. It has to do with what makes bombs go off. It has to do with how they're designed, what the design parameters would provide in terms of information of the kind that permits the design people to go back and redesign for improvement.

The biomedical problems were twofold. There was the [radiation] effects problem, and th[at] was done, in the test series, exclusively (I can't emphasize that enough) with animal models, with two exceptions, both introduced by defense community entities.

The relationship between J Division and the Health [(H)] Division was that J Division was overall responsible for the weapons tests.

In the Pacific tests, th[ere] was a joint task force where the AEC and the military departments [shared] responsibilities. In the continental tests, starting with Ranger, this was done differently. Los Alamos had a much larger role to play in terms of overall logistical responsibility in the continental tests than they did in the Pacific tests. That doesn't diminish their responsibilities in the Pacific tests, but all of the Pacific tests were done by a joint task force. And in the continental tests, the AEC assumed responsibility for those tests and everybody else piggybacked on top of that fundamental responsibility.

So there is a thread that goes through from early times, where Los Alamos had virtually entire responsibility for health and safety. Then, the military started to involve their people beyond Buster Jangle, which incidentally [annoyed] Tom Shipman here because he had th[e] whole responsibility dumped in his lap at a very late time, when it was very, very difficult to acquire enough competent people to assume the extra health and safety responsibilities that [the] combined Buster and Jangle tests [required]. You see, in the early times, Los Alamos had a pretty good handle on everything. That is, Los Alamos H Division in health and safety, and also in describing what's going to happen in the biomedical tests.

The first of the Pacific tests, [Greenhouse], [that] did have a major biomedical component, had a director from the University of Chicago, George LeRoy. Much of the preliminary [investigation] was done here. Baselines were [established] here [and at] Oak Ridge. The whole AEC community participated in those tests. The whole AEC community representatives largely were responsible for defining what the test program looked like from the standpoint of experimental design, what biological questions were asked, what biological questions were answered, what test object would be involved, would it be mice [or] would it be something else[, etc.]

Then, as the military started using the continental tests as a familiarization tool for units—combat regiment-sized groups of people, five thousand [troops at a time]—the health and safety headaches had to be spread out, and military responsibility for health and safety started. But at the same time, there were military experiments that were proposed, and some of those were disallowed by the screening committee, and there got to be some real confrontations.

The committee actually fell apart [but] then was reconstituted by Shields Warren and stayed as a committee. I've identified all of the players on that screening committee. They looked at both AEC and DoD [(Department of Defense)] [studies]. [The committee included] representatives of both and looked at the AEC and DoD experiments and decided which ones would be conducted.

It's within this framework that I mentioned that exchange between Tyler and Fields, suggesting that the flash blindness studies were something that the AEC disapproved of, and if they were going to proceed, they needed some assurance that responsibility would be assumed by the military.

That is a thumbnail sketch of how experiments were included in tests. It's a question of comparative examination [and] evaluation: "Is this an important question, is it more important than that one?" Because, there are a limited number of things that can be done [in a given weapon test], when you stop to think that most of what's going on out there has to do with bomb building, not biomedical experiments.

With those two exceptions—the flash blindness and the psychological impact on troops on the ground—[human subjects have] never been involved in weapons tests. There was some problem about interpretation here, I realize, but the guys flying airplanes are asking questions about crew performance. They're asking questions about dose. They're asking questions about things that have to do largely with the occupational exposure of people in that environment.

In other words, it's much easier to look at radiation doses on people by other techniques, than it is by shooting off a bomb. It's a terrible way to do experiments.

If you just think about that for a minute, the idea that there is [a] ghoulish, sinister effort on somebody's part just doesn't wash, simply because the kinds of answers that you get are so unsatisfactory. You do the best you can to see how much dose you gave to somebody. But it's an occupational record, not an attempt to do something to him that will cause some anguish at a later time. The whole notion is really one that I know is quite popular in some quarters, but if you know anything at all about experimental design, it's such a rotten way to do experiments that you'd abandon it and go to something else.

Now, so much for the Health Division and the health community responsibility for examining the experimental package that went into these [nuclear weapon] tests. Almost everything of a biomedical nature, you can examine within the test planning records under Item 4.0. [For example,] 4.1 would be such and such; 4.1A or 4.2 [would be such and such]. These will all be biomedical experiments. In the case of the flash blindness, that shows up as a four-point experiment in the planning documents, so it's easy to track.

The things that might be harder to track, but still have no evidence of human involvement, are the civil defense activities that were also starting to be included, by the mid '50s. These are experiments on structures: If you get bombed, what happens [to buildings, bridges, et al.] in a structural sense? What happens in the biological sense as you move out away from ground zero?¹¹⁹These were designed and conducted largely [as] a civil defense responsibility. It involved other contractors as the people that had responsibility.

Overpressure, [is] one of the [hazards] that is of immediate concern. Can somebody stand overpressures [of] about 2 psi for a protracted period, for example.¹²⁰ These experiments were conducted largely on [human]-sized animal models; goats, sheep, pigs, that sort of thing. Organ damage was well-defined, from an overpressure standpoint. You can infer, I think pretty readily, what the shrapnel and flying debris kinds of problems are.

Health Division Biomedical Responsibilities and Nuclear Testing

There was some hint in the early '60s Rover experiments,¹²⁴ [and] the Kiwi reactors,¹²⁵ that there might have been some exposure to thermal neutrons during the stem flights.¹²⁶ The dosimeters that suggest this never did more than hint at it. There w[as] never any definitive information that this had actually happened. But it set people to scurrying to devise methods so that if you did have thermal neutron exposure, you could find it.

Dr. Wright Langham's Postwar Studies of Plutonium

The example would be if a nuclear-powered rocket aborted on takeoff, or if one of the Explorer vehicles¹³¹ that carried plutonium power supplies aboard burned up on launch and rained down particles. This was essentially where [John] Gofman¹³² and [Arthur] Tamplin¹³³ and [Tom] Cochran [of the Natural Resources Defense Council] got their idea that one of these particles of plutonium embedded in the lung would be far more carcinogenic than diffuse exposure to plutonium. That was from the time of that first enunciation, the so-called "hot particle" project.

Of course, we had all of the potential astronauts up here. We ran them through the human counter and did all of the tests on them that were supplemental to the kinds of things that Loveless did to them down in Albuquerque. All of the Apollo guys and all of the Mercury guys were subjected to [that test battery].

Public Misperceptions of Radiation

Most people don't realize that much of the radiation experimentation that has been done, has been done in situations where the quantity of additional radiation either was less than, or approximated the amount of, natural radiation that they are exposed to anyway. Many people, I'm sure, feel that if it weren't for mad scientists they wouldn't be exposed to radiation at all. That, of course, is not true.

Particularly here in the west, we live on granite rock outcroppings that seep radon all the time. Because of the way annual doses are computed, it doesn't sound like much, but if you compute the lung dose due to radon every year, just from inhalation and living in a fairly tight house, it exceeds the natural background by almost an order of magnitude. It's three to five rem to the lungs.

Researchers' Use of Human Counters

Lushbaugh was, by far, the most vigorous in terms of the program that he was interested in. He was a very active and very curious guy, with a broad range of interests: essentially unbridled curiosity, very undisciplined in that regard, and interested in everything.

Harry Foreman was interested primarily in the treatment of radiation exposures with actinide elements by using chelating agents. EDTA [(ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid)] and DTPA [(diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid)] were his principal interests, and he wanted to know if you could remove deposited doses by treating patients with chelating agents.

Protocol for the Use of Human Subjects

Once Shipman had this guidance, it came to Langham, and from Langham to the people [in the Radiobiology Group] who were interested in doing research on human volunteers using isotopic tracers, either for diagnosis or for metabolic studies. The ground rules were the same. As a matter of fact, that one set of ground rules has been in existence, superimposed on virtually everything else that has come on since.

The salient features of that exchange were that the patients would be true volunteers, understanding what the study was about, [and] that the doses were bona fide tracer doses—that is, on the order of a fiftieth of the maximum permissible level, or otherwise defined, but [as a] rule of thumb, a microcurie or less with short-lived isotopes. For example, strontium-90 [(half-life: 29 years)] would never be given to a human volunteer, under any circumstance. You would go to a metabolic surrogate for strontium[-90], [such as] strontium-85 with a much shorter half-life [(65 days)]. And actually, volunteers here in the protection [studies] did get some strontium-85.

Incidentally, Harry later became the first chairman of the Institutional Review Board. [The studies that were done at Los Alamos were programs that spanned years.]

Providing Patients for Dr. Lushbaugh's Research

Then, after enough of them had been accumulated, such as it's done even in teaching hospitals with rarer diseases that you don't see all the time, [he would] write a clinical paper on method development or some facet of modification of an existing technique. Whatever it happened to be.

Over the years that he worked here, he must have done diagnostic procedures on close to four hundred patients. Of that number, maybe ten percent were given either partial or total support through his little five-thousand-dollar slush fund. It was done on a completely different scale from the sorts of things you envision when you think of a clinical trial soliciting for volunteers in a teaching hospital today. Although it's described with the same words—the dimensions, the intention, the whole flavor—the activity differed from the business of hunting up patients as volunteers in a study, like [the way] happens today, [where] you can see ads in the newspapers. This [use of printed ads] never happened; it was strictly by word of mouth within the medical community.

He [(Lushbaugh)] was widely known and well-respected by the medical profession in the region—[a] region extending from Denver to El Paso. He got patients, on occasion, from distant sources and paid for them out of this little fund.