Iodine-131 Thyroid Research (Early '50s);
Additional Calcium Metabolism Studies on Elderly Subjects (Early '50s) |
| FISHER: |
Also during this period of time, you started doing some
iodine-131 measurements in thyroids52 in conjunction with the
medical school. Do you want to describe some of this work? |
| MALETSKOS: |
The iodine work started probably about the time I got to MIT
as a freshman. That was one of the first things that the [Radioactivity Center]
did [in the biomedical field]. They made iodine-128 by just bombarding it with
[a] neutron53 source and use that in conjunction with people at
Mass[achusetts] General Hospital to see how the iodine is handled [by rabbits]
and how you could use it. |
| FISHER: |
And who did this? |
| MALETSKOS: |
A fellow by the name of Saul Hertz. |
| FISHER: |
Was he in the medical school? |
| FISHER: |
I think he had an appointment at the Harvard Medical School
[and] at Mass General, and somebody told him, "Go see Evans and see what
you can do." Evans had developed contacts through the radium work because
we had physicians from the Mass General who would look at patients from a
medical standpoint, the radium subjects, [for example,] and the message could
have gotten through that way.
So they started in the early days to do
whatever they could, but remember iodine-128 has a couple of hours or something
like that for a half-life [(25 minutes)]; you couldn't do very much with it
[before it's gone]. And so, you had to wait until the cyclotron came around [to
develop longer-lived isotopes of iodine] and they tried to do some [work but]
didn't do very much. And eventually 131I came along [with a half-life of 8.05
days]; and there was a lot of work that was done with 131I. We had to develop
the techniques for measuring it, the same thing all over again. [It was] a brand
new ball game with a new radionuclide, and an awful lot of work went on with all
those studies.54 |
| FISHER: |
Do you remember what the source of the iodine-131 was? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes, 131I—every radioactive material that you couldn't produce on the
cyclotron came from Oak Ridge,55 in those days, through the AEC.
That's why you had to go through the equivalent of a human use committee at
[the] Washington Headquarters of AEC to get approved in the first place.
Then you got permission by [submitting a] separate application, to get the
radioactivity from the Oak Ridge National Lab [(ORNL)],56 [which]
sent [it] to you; they wouldn't give it to you unless you had all the right
facilities in the first place and you demonstrated your expertise that you knew
how to standardize and do all the various things that were required. We didn't
have any trouble [at] the Radioactivity Center because we were developing
the techniques. But this was a general program throughout the country. |
| FISHER: |
What were the major isotopes being produced in the early '50s at the
Radioactivity Center? |
| MALETSKOS: |
By the cyclotron, we were making zinc-[65], and we started to do a lot of
work on leukocytes57 at the Harvard Medical School. I don't know if
they're in there, as such; and there was some cobalt work, I had to develop
techniques for cobalt, but they never developed [into much research]. |
| FISHER: |
Cobalt-57? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes, it would have to be cobalt-57. But eventually cobalt-60 was used,
once I developed the techniques for doing cobalt. |
| FISHER: |
In 1956, you were third author on an interesting paper, and the title is "Studies
in Calcium Metabolism: The Fate of Intravenously Injected Radiocalcium in Human
Beings."58 First author is Bronner, second author is— |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes, he was the doctoral candidate that did the absorption studies. |
| FISHER: |
Right. Do you remember the injection of human subjects with calcium? |
| MALETSKOS: |
These were the older people and the Fernald School. |
| GOURLEY: |
Older students or— |
| MALETSKOS: |
—they were not students, but the [organization] was called a school. |
| FISHER: |
Older patients, subjects, mental patients? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes, mental patients, subjects. |
| GOURLEY: |
I just wanted to be sure it wasn't elderly people. |
| MALETSKOS: |
While that was in progress—because there was a whole series of test
meals, you know, it took a period of about a year or two to do the whole
absorption experiment. I was involved in studying calcium metabolism because
[it] was the analog for radium. [It metabolized in the same way.]
The
Nutrition Department was interested in the metabolism of calcium, because it was
something that [they] had to know how to handle and everything else, and a lot
of work was being done on bones and teeth [because of the radium dial-painter
studies]. While I working with animals, the Department of Nutrition decided, "Well,
we better see what we can do about studying the metabolism of calcium by actual
injection [into human beings]." And so that's the consequence of that
paper. |
| FISHER: |
In the 1990s, readers may not be familiar with what the rationale would
have been for choosing mental patients as subjects of a metabolism study,
particularly one where the activity was injected intravenously. Can you recall
how those subjects were chosen? |
| MALETSKOS: |
No, again because I [was] not actively involved in that part of it. There
are different ways to look at it. People can look at it [(the use of these
subjects)], read it in a bad way. Let me put it in context. Once you find the
source [of people to participate in an experiment], then you tend to go back to
the source because you've already done all the [lengthy administrative]
machinery leading up to getting the permission to use people who are involved in
that organization.
So, I'm sure that sort of thing was playing in[to
the decision to] go back to the Fernald School to get other subjects. Because in
all of these experiments, you have to have control of the subjects. You just
can't let them walk around; you have to collect 100 percent of the excretions,
you have to see that they're eating properly, and all this kind of thing[,
including the maintenance of a stable metabolism]. Unless you do it that way,
you're not going to have a good experiment.
Ideally, you put them in a
clinical research center; but there was no research center of that kind around.
MIT was designing one and building one, but it wasn't available [then]; so
[instead] you go to a place where you could control the people. I know that even
with researchers themselves, who might have been subjects in other places ([I
know] because I've talked to them), they failed even on their own to go collect
that particular sample, just because they were in a rush. You can't afford to
lose samples if you're [going] to collect and [account for] 100 percent of the
radioactivity out of the body that went into the body.
So that's
probably why we went back there [to Fernald], and the concepts [involved] were
identical: nothing was going to be seriously done to these people, they were
just going to be injected and we were going to collect samples. We had the
experience of doing [experiments] with little kids, then these were older
people, and therefore if you're going to give them about the same
[radioactivity] per kilogram of body weight, the dosimetry would be identical. |
| FISHER: |
Did you go to the school to collect samples? |
| MALETSKOS: |
The samples were taken by the people [from] the Nutrition Department; they
took them and they "digested" them. We ended up getting a clean
solution, and we took over from there to make our samples for measurement. We
precipitated59 them as the carbonate [for] urine, feces, blood, and
the original aliquot. |
| FISHER: |
What has become of Felix Bronner? |
| MALETSKOS: |
He is [a professor] emeritus, I believe, at the University of Connecticut
and he's still there, or at least he's associated with them in some fashion. |
|
|
Iodine-131 Research and the Fernald School (Early to
Mid '50s) |
| FISHER: |
Interesting. We'd like to move into the area of iodine with the Fernald
School. |
| MALETSKOS: |
This was a situation in which the Director of Research, Clemens Benda,60
had a theory [about] people with myotonic dystrophica.61 |
| FISHER: |
What is that? |
| MALETSKOS: |
It describes the symptoms [in which] you cannot relax your muscles. But
it's a very complicated disease that involves brain, muscles, body, and
everything else. These people don't live very long, and it's a very tough thing
to see them with it. Everything they do is peculiar because they can't relax
their muscles; they shake when they walk—it's a peculiar walk because they
can [contract muscles] in one direction easily but they can't do the relaxing
part of the muscle.
[Benda] felt, on the basis of a lot of previous
work, that this was probably related, mainly, to a deficient thyroid, because
pathological studies of the thyroid indicated that it was not a normal thyroid.
So when [radioactive] iodine came around and you could make measurements of the
metabolism of the thyroid, you say now, "Here is another opportunity to see
what we can [do]."
Now this is a medical problem, [and to start
finding a solution, you] start with a physician who is in charge of these
people, just like you would do today. You go to your physician, you got
something wrong with your thyroid, or you feel shot [(fatigued)] or you're
hyperactive or whatever it is, and your physician suspects that there is
something wrong with your thyroid, and now you're going to get a tracer dose of
radioactive [iodine]. |
| FISHER: |
As a diagnostic? |
| MALETSKOS: |
As a diagnostic, exactly. |
| FISHER: |
What was the outcome of this? |
| MALETSKOS: |
He [(Benda)] came to the Radioactivity Center because he knew [us by
reputation]. He was involved in all the original planning of the previous
experiments, because that was one of his responsibilities, and he was the one
who was arranging all the permissions and what-have-you.
He said, "What
can you do?" I said, "You're coming about at the right time: we've
just finished developing a device that has a circle of sensitivity that is large
instead of very small, so that subjects won't have to sit stiffly for the
[entire] counting time, [however long] it might be. And, it would be ideal for
your people [with myotonic dystrophica] because they can't sit still, and this
[device] is going to go over to the Beth Israel Hospital [in Boston]."
[An earlier version of this device used] four G-M [(Geiger-Müller)]
counters set up in four quadrants, [but the] sensitivity wasn't very [high] with
the G-M counters. [In the newer version,] we had converted to sodium iodide
crystals [as the detectors], and by adjusting the controls and so forth, you
could get a plateau, where you'd have a large region of [equal] sensitivity and
high sensitivity, because it's now a sodium iodide crystal instead of a G-M
counter. [The crystal was equally sensitive from center to edge.] It was
described in the paper as the first time.
The news media made a big
deal that we were experimenting on these guys [in developing] brand-new
equipment; they implied that [the new equipment] didn't work. Everything was
done in the proper fashion and, I didn't know what had gone on in terms of what
he did for informed consent. |
| FISHER: |
When you say "he," was this Benda? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes, Benda. But you know in a diagnostic situation, outside of telling the
subject that you're going to get this [material], which you did, you don't need
to go through the informed-consent process in a really formal way. |
| FISHER: |
Benda's initials were C.E. |
| MALETSKOS: |
Clemens E. Benda. When the task force that was set up in Massachusetts to
review what had gone on back there, they found out that everything was done
perfectly for this experiment. He went, not only through us, he went through the
AEC and all that [regulatory] part of it; that part was done correctly.
But he [also] went to the Department of Mental Health, to the Advisory Committee
on Research or whatever it was called, and he had to go before them, and they
gave him permission to [do] this so that Massachusetts was giving permission for
him to [do] this. Then all these people got excited about the fact that this was
bad[ly] done and this, until they found these things [(proper procedures) were
followed,] that shut them up.
And the doses that were given were 50
microcuries [of iodine-131], as I remember, [to] a subject because we didn't
know what to expect. We didn't know what to expect with the hyperthyroid
[situation] when the standard dose was already 100 microcuries, so we gave half
of it instead of the regular one. We wanted to be sure that we gave enough,
because you don't want to reuse a subject unnecessarily, and this [was a case of
being] blind on the disease that you don't know what the thyroid is going to be
doing. |
| FISHER: |
This was before you had good imaging capabilities: you simply counted the
activity in the thyroid. |
| MALETSKOS: |
That's correct. That was the standard way to do thyroid diagnosis. You
measure how much [radioiodine] went in—we called it the uptake—and it
was an uptake [at] 24 hours and maybe at 48 hours. That gave you enough
information on the basis of the previous other studies of patients that had both
normal thyroids, hypothyroids,62 and hyperthyroids,63and
so you knew where people would normally fall [in the distribution curves]. |
| FISHER: |
It was a range of normals in-between "hypo" [(too little)] and "hyper"
[(too much)]. |
| MALETSKOS: |
That's correct. |
| FISHER: |
Simply by a number of counts. |
| MALETSKOS: |
That's correct. And it turned out in this particular case, everything was
done according to Hoyle64 by today's standards, let alone back
[then]. It really bothers me [about] people [when they] make a big noise before
they know the facts; they didn't find the equivalent [permissions sought] for
the calcium-45 studies. |
| FISHER: |
When you say equivalent you mean [what]? |
| MALETSKOS: |
All these informed consents and everything else and the approval from the
Massachusetts State and everything else. All this record business was not found;
whether it existed or not, I don't know. And if it didn't exist before, I don't
know what made them do it [correctly] out of the clear blue sky for the 131I
study. They tracked it down, and there is nobody who can say a word about it now
on the basis of what I've seen [from the Massachusetts report]. Everybody was
worried that these were high doses and everything else; it was half of
the standard dose back in those days. |
| FISHER: |
Were these patients with myotonic dystrophica found to have abnormal
thyroids? |
| MALETSKOS: |
It turns out that even though pathologically you see lots of colloid,65
and you would normally suspect that they were highly hypothyroid. They turned
out to be metabolically, from a radioactive standpoint. Therefore from the
standpoint of the actual development of thyroxine66and everything
else, that they were absolutely normal. From that standpoint, if [the] thyroid
is a problem [with this disease] it's not obvious from the radioactivity
studies. |
| FISHER: |
That's interesting. |
| MALETSKOS: |
It is fantastically interesting; and that was the beginning of a change
in philosophy as to what the roots of the disease are. Clemens is one of the big
sponsors of the concept of thyroid at that time; he wrote a lot about it, and
there were other people, too, that agreed with him, but not everybody.
This was an opportunity, it was the right thing to do from his standpoint, when
the radioactivity became available and all the research had been done, so that
you would know what the result would mean. So it isn't a case that you were
experimenting with these people: this is a straight—as you said earlier, a
straight diagnostic test. And, it should not have even been classified as being
experiments on human beings; it wasn't an experiment, it was a diagnostic test. |
| FISHER: |
Was the iodine-131 from Oak Ridge? |
|
|
Robley Evans's Role in Experiment Oversight and
Funding Information |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes; and all that paperwork is perfect. The [Massachusetts investigators]
found all that, and I knew it was perfect because Evans wouldn't sign his name
to anything that was not perfect. |
| FISHER: |
Did Robley Evans have management oversight over such things as which type
of experiments were appropriate versus those that may not have been considered
appropriate? Did he make [those types of] decisions? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes, from two standpoints. One is: no matter what the experiment was, it
had to be a collaboration between equals. The Radioactivity Center was not a
service organization, and the experiment had to be something [done] on the basis
of what your knowledge was at the time you started, that it was really going to
make a contribution and that it could be done. And he [(Evans)] had management
control during the execution as well on his part of it. |
| FISHER: |
Even back in the '50s, he was a very respected scientist. |
| MALETSKOS: |
That's correct, even before that. He was like a mecca: If you were
involved in something that you thought was going to involve radioactivity, you
considered coming over there [(to the Radioactivity Center)] to learn. You could
be coming over there and be a temporary fellow or the equivalent of it or
something like that. You could get your hands dirty working with people right
beside the working people and you were treated as a worker, only you weren't
getting paid; you were just contributing.
You were learning, and you
would be given more and more responsibility; and eventually, after you stayed
there for six months or something like that, you would have a pretty good grasp
of what it involved, and you could probably go back and—with a little bit
of extra help from somebody else—get yourself going. Alternatively, you'd
come in with a nice interesting problem and the problem would be a joint problem
between that person's organization and the Radioactivity Center at MIT. |
| FISHER: |
During the early '50s, what fraction of the Radioactivity Center's funding
came directly from the AEC? Was it most of it? |
| MALETSKOS: |
No; I don't know, but I would say probably half. |
| FISHER: |
And the other half coming from grants or— |
| MALETSKOS: |
There was the Office of Naval Research, and I don't know when ONR went out
[of business]. Then there were other grants and all that kind of stuff. And
there were specific grants to do specific research for graduate students, and
all this kind of stuff. |
| FISHER: |
Did the medical schools provide support for their own studies for the
Radioactivity Center? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes, if it was a joint [study] with a group from a medical school, the
medical school supported its own experimenters through whatever funding they
had; some of it could be directly from the AEC as well, if it involved
radioactivity. But that would be because of a separate application.
Even in those days you didn't just do the diagnostic tests: you had to go
through all the formalities, as well. You had to be able to establish to the AEC
that you had the capability of doing this work: doing it safely, and also
knowing that either you could standardize the radioactivity yourself, or you had
a source of standardization that would be acceptable. You just couldn't just say
[that by having the correct aliquot of the starting solution] you probably got
the right activity. |
|
|
Experiment Safety Protocols, Clarified (1950s) |
| GOURLEY: |
We've gone through some of the layman's terms of what the purpose of and
what has been learned from some of these studies. [For example,] the muscle
disorder study showed that the thyroid wasn't involved. We started out the
discussions with the blood preservation: Increase the preservation from one week
to three, I think you said, but, I didn't quite follow, in layman's terms, what
was learned from the infant study and the pregnant women. I know it had
something to do with the red blood-cell volume. Could you elaborate on why
that's important? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Blood volume changes with time [during] a pregnancy. Also, the woman is
starting to provide all kind of nutrients for that child. You'd want to know
eventually by a hematocrit sample, if you're suspicious that there may be a
problem with blood volume. |
| GOURLEY: |
What problem with blood volume? |
| MALETSKOS: |
I don't know; I'm not an obstetrician. I can't tell you what to look for,
I'm sorry. What you want to know is whether there was a sufficient blood volume.
Remember, the woman's body is completely changing in [her] metabolism to support
this child, and it[, itself,] has an increased circulation, which means you have
got to "fill the pipes" [with blood] and you got to be able to
generate enough materials to fill the pipes. But you can't fill the pipes only
with just plasma: you've got to have enough red cells there to carry oxygen. So,
you've got to know that.
Now you don't go around taking a woman apart
to find out how much blood volumes she has. The only thing you could do is
measure [the] hematocrit. So in the end what we did was determine what the body
hematocrit was from these measurements and related it to the venous hematocrit.
I can measure [that] hematocrit, which is the ratio of red cells [in] the whole
body, to the whole blood volume. And so you know what's going [on] on that
basis, and if it's out of line, it could be out of line both ways, it can be
[because you don't have] enough [blood,] or [because] you've got too much, and
then you've got too [much] pressure. |
| GOURLEY: |
Was there any way to diagnose this at all before these studies? |
| MALETSKOS: |
No: you just hoped—you could diagnose only the plasma. Remember, I
said by the dye [(tracer)] technique, this experiment is identical, only it is
nonradioactive: it's just an ordinary dye, a blue dye. The other one is a
radioactive material. You can't you see the radioactivity [with the naked eye],
but you can measure it. But the concept is identical in both.
[To do
this technique,] you get some material, you dilute it, you measure the dilution,
and you can calculate what the [whole blood] volume is. And so, once you've done
the experiment on a few women, (these were normal women, as far as everybody
knew), then you could relate [your findings to] the hematocrit that you could
get from an ordinary blood sample. [That is done the same] way you draw blood
from a person under normal circumstances and relate it to what it may be going
on in that woman if you're suspicious of something going on.
You also
learn how fast they [(the pregnant women)] come back to normal [blood volume
levels], because we follow[ed] them after birth. And that's important to know,
too, because you may have problems; I don't know all the problems you could run
into [because I'm not an ob/gyn]. So that experiment provided the information
that the obstetricians wanted to know, relative to blood changes.
That
was the definitive [experiment]. I don't know that it's ever been done again. It
was done well; it was done with sufficient accuracy and well-executed, and
well-analyzed, and well-described; and there it is for posterity. Keep in mind,
what I'm saying right now is [that] everybody takes radioactivity for granted
from the medical standpoint. (You go into the hospital and a doctor says you got
to have a tracer or dose of this, you usually say, "Yes.") You don't
think about [it], you don't bat an eyelash.
You [could] do that
because this work was done back in those days; that's why I said it's a
tremendous era, an unbelievable era of having such a potent new tool and used so
well over this period of time, irrespective of what you hear in the newspaper.
There very well may be some bad instances, but there [are] always bad instances,
[in] everything, and you can't make generalizations from a few to the whole
thing.
And the gain, and the results, and the information that we've
gotten is just totally unbelievable, and [it] spread through all science,
through all medicine throughout the whole world. And not only at the
Radioactivity Center. The Radioactivity Center was one of the stars in this;
work was going on [at] Berkeley and maybe two or three other places. The
Radioactivity Center came [as one of the] first because [starting in 1942] they
even had the cyclotron [right there at MIT] to use directly for this sort of
stuff. |
| GOURLEY: |
You mentioned bad instances and, you know there has been this whole big
uproar in the media and Massachusetts. Can you think of some examples where you
saw some work and you thought, "Gee," [and] you kind of shook your
head and said, "No, no, no, that was [conducted in the] wrong [manner]?" |
| MALETSKOS: |
No, [in] my personal involvement, I have not seen anything done
incorrectly. |
| GOURLEY: |
With others? Others' work? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Again, it's all hearsay. You can talk about it; [but] I'm not ready to. I
have a talk that I give, and I mentioned some of these things, and there are
instances where some of them look bad, and are not bad, once you
look at them. Also, it depends on who's looking. If it's [Energy Secretary]
Hazel O'Leary looking, everything is bad. That's on the record [for the
transcript of this interview] on purpose, and, I'll say it that way. |
| FISHER: |
Costa, do you recall the amounts of radionuclides chosen for ingestion or
injection at a level that was low enough that were considered not harmful, yet
high enough that it could be measured with the equipment that you had? Were
those the basic considerations? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Yes. The rule is, you give the least amount of radioactivity that you can,
but you don't want to make it so low that you [ruin] the experiment and use
radioactivity on somebody unnecessarily. You have to be able to measure it, so
it cannot be the least—the least is zero—and then you don't have an
experiment. It has to be enough so that you can do the experiment well. Once you
try to aim for that, then you ask yourself, "Can my sensitivity do it right
now?" [("Can my instruments measure such a low amount of radioactivity
accurately?")] And there were instances where we said, "No, we can't
do that now, we've got to work more on it."
When we come to that
big experiment on the absorption of radium and mesothorium, we didn't know that
we could do that; I didn't know that I could do that safely. I had to go through
a tremendous amount of work ahead of time to find out where I stood, and then
eventually, by doing the experiments—even on dogs—to find out if the
system worked. And [if] my ideas worked, [then it] was possible to say, "Maybe
now we can do it on human beings, and we could do it safely, and it can stand
[up against] anybody's scrutiny that's going to be involved in reviewing this
experiment before we do it."
That's a good classic example of
taking a long time to do the job well. But there were many people who would come
in and say, "We want to do this and we want to do that." And the
answer would be a flat "No, because you could do it by other
[nonradioactive] methods just as well, and we'll give you two suggestions."
A lot of people went right out the door just rapidly [in a huff] that way.
For other people, we would study it, because it looked like an interesting thing
to do, and find out either you could do it [or not]. If we had the time we would
get involved, and if we didn't have the time we'd say, "You could do it,
but you'll have to go someplace else." Or if it looked like it could do it
and it was really worth doing, then [it] was worthwhile spending time to get the
sensitivity [of the instruments] down low. And so you got it low enough so you
could make sure that the dose was low enough. |
| FISHER: |
What you're saying then is that there was a driving philosophy within the
Radioactivity Center that when radioactive [materials] were used in humans, [the
amounts used] would be as low as possible for radiation protection? |
| MALETSKOS: |
It was two-sided; when you're using human beings, what you've said is
correct. The general [thinking] was to use as little as possible, in general,
because you can get contaminated; and why get contaminated with a lot of
material instead of a little material, if something should go wrong? Evans
deserves great credit for maintaining that philosophy from the very, very, very
beginning: "We do everything well; we do it with as low a dose as we can;
and we do it with minimum difficulties to anybody that is involved, especially
by human subjects." That is carried through with all his students and all
the people having been involved with him. |
| FISHER: |
On the studies involving pregnancy and fetuses, do you recall discussions
on radiation safety aspects of protecting the fetus? |
| MALETSKOS: |
What we did was try to get the lowest amount to the mother and see what we
could guess with whatever knowledge was there, at the time, as to how much
radioactivity would get into the fetus and what the dosage would be to the
fetus. |
| FISHER: |
Was there any concern about the effects of low-level radiation on the
developing embryo/fetus? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Not with the knowledge you have now, but with the knowledge that we had
back then. If we had decided that we wouldn't want the fetus to get this amount
of radiation, whatever the radiation dose was calculated—(I don't even have
the slightest idea what the numbers are right now)—if we had decided that
the fetus was going to get too much, the experiment would not have been done. We
would have worked our way around and tried to get higher sensitivity [in our
instruments], or something else. It would not have been done until it [(safety
to the developing fetus)] was adequate. |
| FISHER: |
And what was the basis that you had for deciding whether a certain value
of administered activity was safe or unsafe? What standard did you compare
against at the time? |
| MALETSKOS: |
In the early phases, only background [radiation. At] the time we were
doing some of these experiments, more work had been done. We had changed from
the Roentgen to the REP (Roentgen equivalent physical) [as our measure of
absorbed dose to tissue], and so we knew a little bit more and therefore we
could use whatever information we had. And you didn't do anything differently
then, than you do now: you used what information you had [in] the best way that
you could to make a judgment. It was, if you want to call it, the best-informed
judgment you could make at the time. It certainly was discussed and it was
certainly considered, and it was certainly an option not to do [the experiment]. |
| FISHER: |
Were you part of those discussions? |
| MALETSKOS: |
Sure. Every time I was involved in an active fashion and it was a starting
[(new)] experiment—yes: as a matter of fact, you brought in everybody you
could. You wanted to make the best decision possible, and it would be [made] at
different levels. It might start with me, for example, and then go to somebodyelse, and eventually it would work its way up to Evans. Certainly for people
in-house, it would go through the whole routine that we could talk about it,
review it at MIT.
It was not a simple thing. MIT is great in many
respects, in terms of taking care of people, whether they were employees or
anything like that; we had the first human use committee ever at MIT. |
| FISHER: |
About what time? |
| MALETSKOS: |
I don't remember. It was between mid to late '60s. I forgot— |
| FISHER: |
About the middle '60s, '67. The first human subjects committee at Oak
Ridge was about 1965 or '67. |
| MALETSKOS: |
They [may] have been close, but [I] remember it being the first one, but I
can't prove that. I could find out, but I just don't happen to know. Are you
finished with your layman's terms? |
| GOURLEY: |
Yes, you explained that nicely. |
