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Oral Histories

Health Physicist Constantine J. Maletskos, Ph.D.

Foreword

Short Biography

Early Education and Career (1920 to Mid '50s)

Early Dosimetry Research (1940s to 1960)

Radium Dial Painter Research (Early '50s–60s)

Fernald School Calcium Metabolism Studies (1948 to Early '50s)

Iodine-131 Thyroid Research (Early '50s); Additional Calcium Metabolism Studies on Elderly Subjects (Early '50s)

Iodine-131 Research and the Fernald School (Early to Mid '50s)

Robley Evans's Role in Experiment Oversight and Funding Information

Experiment Safety Protocols, Clarified (1950s)

Radium and Thorium Ingestion by Human Subjects (Late '50s to Early '60s)

Volunteer Inducements and Informed-Consent Procedures

Cesium-132 Research on Humans (Mid '60s)

Radium Burden Examination of Radium Dial Painters (Mid '50s to 1985)

Other Radionuclide Research

Personal Anecdotes

Research as a Private Consultant and Additional Publications (1972–95)

Comments on Human Radiation ExperimentsationControversy

First Knowledge of Plutonium Injections

Thoughts on the Use of "Disadvantaged" Populations in Human Radiation Experimentsation

Career Highlights

Work With Manomet Bird Observatory (1975–95)

Additional Comments on Human Radiation Experimentation Controversy and Closing Comments

Radium and Thorium Ingestion by Human Subjects (Late '50s to Early '60s)

FISHER: You were concerned about the gastrointestinal absorption of radium and thorium in the late '50s, early '60s, and you prepared some materials for human ingestion. Can you talk about the ingestion of radium and mesothorium ingestion by human subjects?
MALETSKOS: Okay, [but] tell me if this is too detailed as I go along.

We were interested in it long before that [experiment]. We were interested in what—we finally realized that we couldn't pay attention to radium-226, which is what we thought was the only radium [that] was in the body, but actually [there's] radium-228, as well. That was known way back, even back in the days when Harrison Martland, the medical examiner of New Jersey[, where some of the dial painters worked]—he knew about that and I'm sure even Evans knew about [it], but we had forgot about it. What started the whole thing was is that in the group of patients that we had at that time.
GOURLEY: These were dial painters?
MALETSKOS: These are the people who got radium in them however they got it, that we were studying. They fell into two groups: people who got very sick and people who didn't get very sick. And [populations] don't [usually] do that, [divide into two groups of] people, [one of which is] ten times more sick for the same thing at the same stage.

So we decided that there had to be some other agent or something was going on; we didn't know what it was. We went through all kinds of theories where they [(the less-sick group)] did more exercise and their bones were better, or bone metabolism turned over67 [more], and all this sort of thing.

Finally, after trying a million things, we find that, somebody recalled that there was radium-228 in there. Radium-228 had a short half-life [(6.7 years)] as opposed to the long half-life of radium[-226 (1,620 years)]: it [(radium-228)] died away quickly, and we would not measure in our usual measurements what [amount of this] radium is in the body. Therefore, we did not know what that radiation dose was; it could be quite high. [So] we did not know the effect of the radium-228 contain[ing] thorium-228, which is its first progeny [(daughter isotope)] in the [watch dial] paint itself.

So, if you ate that paint68 or got it into you as radiothor and the thorium itself was absorbed well, then you got a dose from the thorium[-228] and its daughters that you would never be able to measure [because] its half-life [(1.91 years)] was even shorter than the radium-228. Then thorium-228 would build in from radium-228 as you metabolize radium, but that you could account [for] because you knew that was part of the radium-228, and you could measure that.

That initial dose represented a long, big dose. If you couldn't measure that, then we [would] not be able to use half of our subjects, which is a real loss because you don't have that many subjects to start with. So it was important to find out, and we knew way back then that we had to eventually do an experiment. Well, we talked about it, we talked about how we might do it, but you know it was planned in stages over quite a number of years, and then it fell to me to be the one to set it up.

Now what we had to do, the end experiment had to be an experiment in human beings. We didn't want to know it in animals because we wouldn't trust [the result], it had no bearing directly.69 We were doing it [(the experiment)] in human beings and [planned to] give them mock radium paint, because this is where the bulk of the mesothorium [(radium-228)] and thorium-228 would come from. We would give them short-lived radionuclides of the long-lived counterparts. We chose thorium-234 [(half-life: 24.1 days)] for the thorium and radium-224 [(half-life: 3.64 days)] for the radium.

Then we had to determine how to prepare these things; we had to determine how we were going to do the experiment to make these, and actually then try them out—through a lot of physics and chemistry experiments, first trials, and that sort of thing. Then a whole rehearsal with dogs, and then finally make a decision as to what is allowed to give [the human subjects] and this sort of thing. Then [you had to] go through the whole routine of informed consent and choice of subjects and everything else; and then actually execute the experiment.

The first thing you had to do [was decide if] you could even get the radionuclides, because you don't go out and buy these; you don't get [them] from the AEC. These are naturally occurring radionuclides and there is only one way to get them: to find some natural source that has them in them and in enough quantities so that you can do something with them. It was very fortunate Robley Evans had a vial of [thorium-228], which we could milk to get the [radium-224].

The development of that procedure was long. We had to develop iron exchange procedures for separating it and everything else and getting it into final pure form. That, in itself, took a while. But the [thorium-234] was a tough one, because the only [adequate] source of [thorium-234] that we had was uranium slag, which comes from the melting of uranium, which is the material that floats to the surface and then hardens, and it contains the bulk, if not all, of the thorium-234 [that is in uranium]. But, that's [not a pure metal but] an oxide, absolutely nearly insoluble to start with. This was available to us from the [Army's] Watertown [(Massachusetts)] Arsenal, which was making all kinds of natural uranium and depleted uranium configurations of it for military purposes or whatever they [did]. They may have even been making the bullets [(depleted uranium projectiles are used for penetrating battle armor)] for the missiles for example, for all I know.

So, we started off with that. I developed some ideas and I got a radiochemist Ph.D. student on the job and we worked, and worked, and worked, and saw that we were going to be successful on that. So now we knew we could go to the next step.

Now, remember: we were going to be doing an experiment, a major experiment on human beings at the Institute, which is not a medical school. My decision was, everything was going to be done according to Hoyle and beyond, all the way through [to the completion of the experiment,] so that there would be no arguments about how we do it.

We would have to use only our internal physicians for the actual injections, and that's all I needed. After that, the oral[-dose] part, we could give it ourselves and that sort of thing, so that would be it. The problem now was, the thorium-234 had very low-energy gamma rays and the radium-224 had a whole series of gamma rays all the way up to 2[.6] MeV [(million electron-volts)] or something. The thorium absorption, we expected from everything that we knew; and in relation to plutonium, for example, which is an actinide70 also, [it] was going to be very low, and that is what we hoped would happen. And the radium absorption was going to be very high.

The consequence of high radium absorption with lots of gamma rays and high-energy ones was to produce a gamma ray spectrum, at the lower energies of what we called the "Compton"71 part of it, so huge that we might not ever see a peak of the thorium (gamma ray) in this high background. And [so] the question was, "Is this a 'doable' experiment?"

So we started to play with whatever we could get that would be high- and low-energy and so forth, and see how we could work it out. I decided that we had a good chance of doing it, but to make these measurements on a human being, we had to do it two ways.

We wanted to do everything—the experiment could not fail from an operational standpoint. Once you started the experiment, it had to work, or else you spent a tremendous amount of time—we're talking about a year or two going down the drain if you didn't do the experiment correctly—so we made every conceivable measurement that was possible. For example, we would take all the blood samples we could take, we would take all the excretion samples we could take.

When it came down to making whole-body measurements, we would do the critical ones but we would do everything else, we would learn everything we could, because we would consider it an absorption experiment but it could also be a metabolic experiment: [it] could also be a method of verifying the methods of counting that Evans had developed—that [meter-]arc method where you could do it independently of a phantom72 and everything else, and all this sort of thing.

Everything was plan[ned], and the logistics of doing this eventually turned out to be hairy, real hairy. We developed the procedure for getting the radioactive material, and we had to get somebody that could handle that radioactive material that would check for pyrogenicities,73 so that we could inject it. It doesn't make any difference how perfect it is from the standpoint of swallowing it—you wanted it to be good [(safe enough to ingest)] anyway—but if it's good enough to inject, it would always be good enough to give it for swallowing purposes.

So, one had to develop a technique of [determining] how much radioactivity you needed when you were ready to do the experiment, so that by the time you made this material [(radium-224)], which had a short half-life [of], like, three-point-four days or whatever it is [(3.64 days)], there was enough material for you to end up doing the experiment over the period in which it was being tested for; whether it [contained] pyrogens74 in it or not, which takes about ten days at somebody else's laboratory.

This is a process that has to be done for anything that you put in the human body, so that you don't give people fever or infection or anything else. You had to filter it to get the bacteria out and show that there were no bacteria. And you had to do tests in rabbits and see if you give rabbits fever or not. And it takes a while to follow them and so forth. This is a fixed period: whether you like it or not, it's the last thing you do before you do the experiments. So we went through all [those] techniques and found that [they] could work and so forth.

In the meantime, we were developing measuring methods. What we wanted to do was to measure what is in the body in such a way, right from the very beginning, when most of the material was still in the stomach. So the question was, "How much of the body could you get separated from the stomach by shielding [all areas but the stomach from gamma rays]?" [The] shielding had to be huge, which means big in size, because the [radium-224] gamma rays were so potent.

So we developed what we called the skull-and-crossbones technique, where you force the upper part of the body over a huge shield at the [correct] angles so that what was in the stomach would not be seen by the detector, which would be up here. (holds up his hand, palm-down) You put the bulk of your body, which is your arms, your head and your neck; [the bulk of the radioactivity was] going to go to the bones, so you could measure them this way. You surrounded the [sodium iodide] crystal [detector with shielding] at the crucial [moment of] measurement. We did mockup experiments and we did it with the dogs and all this kind of stuff to show that, "It could work, therefore, now we were ready."

[We] also made sure we didn't have to process excretion samples, so we had be sure that the sensitivity [was adequate] for measuring excretion samples that all had to be diluted to the same volume, which I think was a liter [(about 1.06 quarts)] or something like that. We could measure whatever was coming out [in] the excretion adequately enough over a period of time, as well. All those things were done on the basis of just assumptions of what the absorption might be and what we then thought we knew about the metabolism of either one, which wasn't very much, certainly, in the early period after administration. We're talking about a five-year period to do the experiment.

During this time, as we decided that we could see that we were going to do the experiment, we started developing the concept of, "What are we going to do about our subjects? How are we going to get our subjects? What are we going to tell them?" And then eventually, "What kind of a document do they sign?" And also, "What kind of a review process do we want so this whole experiment would be approved by whatever system that was going to be developed?"

We decided—we had used, [during] the radium studies, as reference control subjects, people that came from a place that was then called the Age Center of New England. This was a voluntary organization that had been put together to study aging. It was made of a collection of the most vital old people I had ever seen in my life. I remember telling my wife, "Boy, I'd like to be like that when I grow old!" because these people had the right attitude in life and that's why they were there, because they had the right attitude in life. But the object was that they were supposed to be [used for] studying aging and without the introduction [of substances into them or doing anything to them]. You talk about them, or you might do some medical tests on them, or you might draw blood, but you never would give them anything. And that's what we used them for [at] first[: as control subjects].

We took [about] 120 of them that would be representative people that fell into the category of the radium cohort, in terms of all the variables that are involved, from a health standpoint and size and all that kind of thing. [Then] we measured them for the normal amount of radioactivity in them and for the status of all their bones, in terms of x rays; they got the equivalent of whole-body x-ray measurements. That was the only insult to them, if you want to look at it that way. It's not an insult, but they got [via diagnostic and imaging procedures] what radium subjects were getting [by injection] every time [the elderly people's radioactivity and bones] were measured, which was frequent. And that was all calculated out, and it turned out to be an acceptable value for a one-shot [evaluation]. Those people were separate; they were part of the radium toxicity experiment.

Now we went back to this group of people [who were running the Age Center] and said, "We would like to do this kind of experiment, but we would like to introduce radioactivity into these people. But we don't ask you, as the organization, to do this; we ask you as an organization to ask your people, because these people are [already] volunteering [for medical studies] and, therefore, would be likely to volunteer for this kind of experiment. Once they knew what the situation was, would they volunteer on their own?

"So you [as administrator of the Age Center of New England] have two decisions to make: 'Do you want your organization to get involved in this sort of thing?' And, if so, 'Do you want to ask the people that are a part of your organization to do this?'"

So that was a separate decision they had to make on their own. We told them, "Go talk to your legal people and everything else and make your decision." It isn't the case that we grabbed—to hear Congressman [Edward] Markey talk about it,75 we just picked them off the street and jabbed them with the first needle we had. We went through that routine, and they decided that they could do that, that it would not be out of line from what they [had been] put together for. Therefore, they could do that and therefore, they could announce to them if [our need and ask if there were any] volunteers. And there was no problem—there were volunteers.

Volunteer Inducements and Informed-Consent Procedures

GOURLEY: Was there any sort of stipend or inducement or—
MALETSKOS: Yes, we'll go through that. I don't know, there was a small stipend for them because they were doing it, but it was—by today's standards, we'd call it trivial. Another thing is that they [(the elderly subjects)] were going to get one health investigation to be sure that they were the right subjects for us, and they would know their health status better than they ever knew it [before]. So they would get a tremendous physical, and that would be a gain for them, as well. And [just] to participate—their other gain would be the gain to humanity: that if we [could use all the subjects in the radium cohort] we would be able to make a better analysis of our radium data and therefore, we would be able to set better standards and would know better what radiation does to [permit to] people, and at what levels, and so forth.

So, that's the usual routine you have now, and it's the usual routine you had then; it was no different. Nothing [was] different except it was being done without all the regulations that you now have that are spelled out; it was being done by people who wanted to do the job right in the first place. Irrespective of what the regulations are, matter of fact, we had to develop the regulations, there was no informed-consent form in those days.

So now I had to do two things. I had to develop some kind of presentation for these people so that they would understand so that they could truly volunteer and become part of this whole thing. From the Institute's [(MIT's)] standpoint, I had to develop a whole informed-consent procedure, because none existed. Then, finally, I would have to develop a procedure for having an approval system, and that would not be really my problem. In those days we had—do you know the name Harriet Hardy, Dr. Harriet Hardy?76 She was the head of occupational medicine. She was the first person that was the head of occupational medicine [at the Center for Radiation Studies]. It's called Environmental Medical [Service] now, but it really is occupational, but now it has to do with outside—
FISHER: MIT?
MALETSKOS: At MIT. It was one of the first occupational [medicine programs], if not the first, in academic circles. She was [a] very good person to be the first one. She not only had [access to] the [university] presidency—the president brought her in, so that she could get things done when they needed to be done—she was [a leader] in her field and an equivalent of another Evans, [in] that she wanted him to do the thing very well and "it's going to be done right."

So the machinery would be that the proposal would be funneled to her for review from every aspect. The other proposal would go to the organization to tell them exactly what these people are going to be getting into, so that they make their final decisions. See, a lot of this stuff [had been] done by word of mouth, but now we had the formalizing of all this sort of thing. This is a lot of work alone, as well as the execution of the experiment. It took me about a year to get what we ended up calling a "waiver," but it should have been called an informed consent, but that was the way it was set up, which does [in one page] what an informed consent form now does in [many] pages.

The nitty-gritty stuff, they got directly from me. They got it several different ways: the formal proposal went to the Age Center of New England and they gave their formal approval so we could [proceed]. Then they asked for volunteers, and they had a bunch volunteer. [At our request,] they got more than we were going to use because we wanted to be sure we had enough when we finished, because we gave them the option of dropping out at all times; this was the first time that I know that option was offered, for that matter. I can't prove that, but I just don't know. And one person did drop out, even later on as we just started the experiment—not started—but just as we were starting.

And I got them together, and I described this whole experiment in great detail as to what was going to be done. I had a physician on the team, and that person came along with me and helped me [by answering] questions [from the elderly residents] that I could not directly answer myself. So they got a first-class picture of what was going to happen to them, how they were going to be treated, [and] what facilities they were going to go in.

Then we took them to the laboratory and everything else. They saw the whole-body counter, they saw the kind of positions they had to get in [to be counted]. They had to tell us whether they could get in these [cramped devices], because we were going to verify the meter-arc method and they had to get into a sideways position, this way (holds his hand straight out, palm facing to one side) and then in the reverse fashion. They would have to lie there for a half-hour, at least, for each of those positions, and if they felt that they couldn't do it—[they] had to be able to do this, and they had to be able to do it on a repetitive basis, and we're going to do this on a day-to-day [basis], and then [the interval between countings] would get further and further separated, and so forth. So physically, they had to be able to do these things, as well as mentally.

I talked to them individually. They went back and thought about it. I don't know if they all came back, but most of them came back, got an individual treatment [(personalized care and attention)] all over again. Then they went up to Harriet Hardy and got a treatment from her and anybody else that she might have wanted and so forth. Then they would get a final treatment before they signed the informed consent, but they didn't sign it at that final time: they'd go home and think about it for two or three more days and talk to anybody [they'd] want, [their] physician, lawyer, or anything like that. [We] gave them all the options to be sure that they were right. And then they signed. Now that's about as good as you could get back in those days, and you can't do any better now, except you have internal review boards77 to see to it that it's done right, [while] we were doing it ourselves.

The approval of the process went all the way up. Harriet Hardy held the proposal a long time; I know she took it to the people in the [MIT] Medical Department. She had one person in the Medical Department who was going to do the injections, [the] fellow that I mentioned previously, who was authorized [by] AEC to do these sort of things for himself, as well as a member of the MIT medical consulting staff. Everything came down [from a higher authority].

I had to make my presentation to Harriet Hardy's formal group that was going to do the final formal reviewing, and I was asked questions. It was just like a doctor's exam, for practical purposes. It lasted for hours just to do it well, and everyone wanted to be satisfied about every nitpicking thing; particularly, the dose to the GI [(gastrointestinal)] tract [and] why could it be low because you had so many alpha particles [already] there [passing through the GI tract from ingestion], and all this sort of thing.

This is long before ICRP78 had ever came out with any standards for [ingested radionuclides and] the gastrointestinal tract. I, in effect, developed for myself all the information to be able to show that [the dosimetry] would work.
FISHER: [You didn't have any knowledge of the fraction absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract into the blood.] But you wanted to determine [it], and you didn't have a GI tract model, so you had to estimate [the absorption factor].
MALETSKOS: That's right, I had to do all that kind of stuff on my own and be able to defend it with references and the whole works. [In addition, there was] the waiver development. I worked with the lawyers and so forth, and it went up and down a number of times. It kept changing, and I said, "You can't do that, you can't get away with that!"
FISHER: What were they trying to do?
MALETSKOS: Well, this is the way lawyers work: When I first went there, I went to Harriet Hardy and said, "[There are no ICRP protocols for GI irradiation;] what do I do?" And, she says "Let me get in touch with the president just to make sure the president knows what's going on." I was told to go see the Institute's lawyer at the law firm, and I explained all this stuff [(the uncertainties that we faced in determining a safe GI dose)], and he said, "We'll take care of it."

After a while, something [(some document)] came trickling down back to me which said, "You're allowed to do any damn thing you"—he didn't say it in words of that nature, but, "You're allowed to any damn thing you want—and MIT is not responsible." I said, "That's not going to work." That's why it took a year, and that was because everybody, except the lawyers, were intelligent enough to know what was going on and, therefore, [to know] what you really needed.

I got what I wanted in the end, that it would be as much [as possible] under [the] control of the subject. If I were to go back [and do it again]—I haven't seen [the records of the way we arrived at those doses] for a long, long time, of course—I would probably do it a thousand times better. But that was it at that time.

So we got that permission, and we were ready to go, and we did the experiment. And we found [what] the absorption [was]. The final writeup on this was 100 pages in the progress report and describes all kinds of information that we learned. I told you in the beginning we had to do it once on human beings: we were going to learn everything there was to learn.

We found out that the absorption of radium was around 20 percent, even from paint, which was supposedly nearly insoluble material, and [0.02 percent] from thorium, which was really a soluble material, in terms of thorium sulphate[, a highly insoluble form of thorium, used for comparison to thorium oxide solubility]. The absorption was like about a thousandth of the radium. So as a consequence, even if a little bit of thorium got in, it would not affect the dosimetry by more than five percent and we could use everybody [in the cohort].
FISHER: How many subjects participated in the ingestion studies?
MALETSKOS: The experiment was done, first of all, with injections in about three each, male and female.
FISHER: Three injections [per subject, for both] male and female [subjects, over a span of a few days?
MALETSKOS: Yes. We could look at [the protocol]: there's a table in the report. I'm just guessing right now, but I know [the injections were] by threes. Sometimes we couldn't get three, so we went by two; but they were [done by] threes because [that way,] if two [data points] are together [and] one is off, at least you know [that] it [(rate of the radium or thorium excretion)] wasn't going in one direction, it was going to keep going that way.

Then we did [an experiment]—this is very interesting—that was for [the] radium and thorium [sets of] injections, two injections. Then we did one each of the combination, [using] the mock radium paint, to see if we really could do the measurements we claimed we could do. It was there that we found out that we didn't need to give that much radioactivity for one of them [(radium or thorium) to get a satisfactory set of data]; I've forgotten [which one] that was. Here we made a [dose] correction in a downward direction right in the middle of the experiment because that's the way to go [if you want to protect people] and it's there, and you could see it happening. So the people who followed [(came after)] these first two [subjects] got a lot less of whatever one it was, and we had three of each in the—as far as I could tell.

All these people had to be cleared by the Medical Department from the medical standpoint because we had a string of things [(reactions)] that [would not be medically] allowed, [reactions whose likelihood was] quite astronomical[ly] low but whose causative agencies would nonetheless not be permitted] because you couldn't take any chances.

And we had one person that was off [(low)] by a factor of ten on absorption. We couldn't figure out why; it was not anomalous [(statistically suspect)] because everything checked for that person. All the excretions checked with what was left in the body and what was measured in the body and everything else. And somebody, I was giving a talk and I said "Anybody knows it is brilliant!" and Roy Albert79 from New York University said "Have you checked for achlorhydria?" I said, "Oh, no."

Achlorhydria means that you don't have any hydrochloric acid in your stomach, and therefore you don't digest things the way you do if you do have it. So that person didn't get a factor of ten in[to the body]. That person was officially discarded, because we went back and made a test for achlorhydria and [sure enough,] the person had it. Therefore, we were in a position to say, "We will not use this"; otherwise, we would have had to use it [in our results]; you couldn't throw it out. Now [given that we knew why the data were off] we could throw it out.
FISHER: In other words, the absorption was about a tenth of what you expected?
MALETSKOS: Yes, that's right, let's say for the radium or something like that. Remember I told you people don't differ by a factor of ten.
FISHER: Interesting. So this involved both oral ingestion and—
MALETSKOS: —intravenous.
FISHER: —intravenous injections.
MALETSKOS: By the way, the radium had to be given in the pill form, because you couldn't give the radium paint, which was in a powdery material, and I didn't want to mix it up with their binder because it would just complicate things even further. You had to make sure that the pill literally got into the stomach. So I made a test with a dummy pill and I was going to do it myself, but the physician that was working for me said, "Don't do it, because you've had enough [imaging substances ingested into your system]. Let me be the guinea pig."

So we went down to the x-ray facility [in the] Medical Department and gave him a drink of water and the paint contained silver sulfide as the activating agent, so that you could see it easily with an x ray. We took the x ray where we thought we could see it, but by golly, we couldn't see it!

What had happened was, the pill—he drank a lot of water but it stuck in his esophagus, the one place where the water wasn't going. We finally found it up over here. (points to his throat) So that meant that we had to make the pills slippery in the mouth before they started and make the person drink enough [water] to make sure that it got down inside and it did work out all right.
FISHER: But that [simple pill] experiment was not [with] radioactive [materials].
MALETSKOS: That was not radioactive, sure, naturally. You don't need the radioactivity to prove that.
FISHER: It's important for the readers to know.
MALETSKOS: This [(the thorium study)] is the experiment that Congressman Edward Markey [(D-Mass)] put in his 1986 report, [an experiment] that he claims that was a bad job because we were doing it on [human] guinea pigs because we gave so much radioactivity. He made these statements, without he or anybody from his team or anyone else ever contacting anybody at the Radioactivity Center that I know of and, especially, not contacting me, the guy that was responsible for the whole experiment.

What they didn't know is that when you give a short-lived material it could be higher [in radiation dose] than the amount that you are allowed annually because it's going to decay away rapidly if you're using the standard for the [short-lived] material. That's the mistake they made. Of course, they never corrected it; and then, when the scandal came out again [in late 1993], he said the same things all over again. We sent him a whole package of information when it [(the Markey report)] came out in 1986, saying exactly what was going on, in effect describing what I just described to you, only by documentation; we never heard from him then and we never heard [from] him till this second.

By the way, you saw the calculations that Bernie Cohen80 made on that report and in the ANS [(American Nuclear Society)] Newsletters, I think it was, where he calculates the dose for all the ones [(experiments)] that Congressman Markey discusses in there. I have a copy that I could show you. They're all, I believe, acceptable, except one is just a little bit over, and ours is acceptable by today's standards, let alone the standards back then. [They're] really acceptable, not just marginally acceptable.
GOURLEY: The records on this stuff—you had the formal proposal that you did, you had the presentation, this whole approval process that you developed over the years with the lawyers and such. Where are these records now?
MALETSKOS: They're buried in the archives, as far as I know. That's how I got a lot of these things when I made the package for Congressman Markey, [from] the archives of the Radioactivity Center, or the archives of Professor Evans himself, if they're kept separate. That's how we found them. At the time, if I needed something [it] would have been in Professor Evans's domain, I probably called him—matter of fact, one of the things says, here's a note from him that says, "We have copies, but the originals are in such-and-such place." He sent me a copy, and I just used the copy. It took long enough to dig out from the archives all the information for him anyway; [the archivist] wasn't going to spend any more time on it than necessary.
GOURLEY: So you have copies of most of these things.
MALETSKOS: Yes—well, everything [that] is in the archives.
GOURLEY: Yes, because if you had sent the originals, that would be something that we would be very interested in getting copies of for our records to just ensure that we're complete.

When you went to the Age Center of New England, what was the original size of the [group of] elderly folks that [you] presented this to [and said,] "We'd like some volunteers?"
MALETSKOS: I don't remember; I'm guessing twice as many as we would have needed for the experiment, just to be prepared to not have to go through that whole procedure all over again. They knew that we were going to select from them, first of all, those that really wanted to participate once they heard [what we wanted to do]; secondly, ones that fitted in best with what we were able to do. For example, we wanted to have equal numbers of male and female [control subjects]. If all the males volunteered and the females didn't, we would not have been in good shape; there is no point to the experiment. You've got to have both sexes in there to do the job correctly.
GOURLEY: What was the average age?
MALETSKOS: They were at least 60 [years old] and they went up to 80, I believe. I could tell you something that gives you an idea of what their attitude was like. I don't know if you remember, but at that time, the Russians had put [the] Sputnik [earth-orbiting satellite] up in the air [in 1957] and there were people [(cosmonauts)] flying around, somebody up in that capsule [in space] up there flying around. When they [(the elderly subjects)] went into the whole-body counter that was their capsule, their attitude was, "Boy, we're participating in an [important] experiment, we're actively involved in it, and they trust us and we trust them, and this experiment is being done by both of us." You can't get a better mental attitude than that.
GOURLEY: We want to be sure and take a look at that ANS Newsletter on the dosimetry, because that's something really—
MALETSKOS: That's an independent calculation.
GOURLEY: Right, that is really interesting. We certainly want copies of that.

The other thing you mentioned [was the] the pill, and you wanted to make sure that it went down into the stomach, but they had said not to self-experiment; we have seen with other researchers that they self-experimented. Was that [(self-experimentation)] something that you did?
MALETSKOS: Not in terms of taking radioactivity. I made that decision because otherwise I'd be doing it maybe more that I should and I would be making my own decisions. But in terms of just swallowing an empty pill, it wasn't any particular problem. I also participated in experiments, every step that those people had to go through, I went through myself, just to be sure that when I was telling them it was "doable" and they would not get hurt. We were doing things that nobody had ever done in measurements, in body configurations [(for whole-body counting)] that nobody had used before, and I had to be sure that we could do it. So I became the guinea pig for that, but I don't consider that anything serious.
GOURLEY: Why did one person drop out?
MALETSKOS: The person decided that he didn't want to do it [(the experiment)]; we didn't ask why. We told him that you have that right and all you have to say is "I want to drop out."
FISHER: You "sham-exposed" them, without taking either an injection or—
MALETSKOS: Yes, I went in and sat in all the positions.
FISHER: And tested all the configurations.
MALETSKOS: Yes, if I remember correctly I probably sat there like the [subjects] just to be sure over a period of time. You may feel fine for the first ten minutes, but if it's a 30-minute run in an awkward position, it may turn out to be not comfortable, and therefore, you should be prepared to modify.
FISHER: Was there a funding sponsor for this work?
MALETSKOS: This was the progeny of the AEC. What was it at the time? It was ERDA.81
FISHER: Well ERDA was in the early '70s, so it had to be one before.
MALETSKOS: Then it's the AEC.
FISHER: So it would have been the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1960s?
MALETSKOS: Yes, they knew about it because we were talking about it; they knew we had to do it since way back.
FISHER: Do you remember who the authorizing officials were at AEC during that time?
MALETSKOS: No, I don't remember. I don't remember whether there was a formality for it, because they [(radium-228, thorium-228, or its derivative, thorium-234)] were naturally occurring material. It was a formality in the sense that they knew we were going to do it, but not in terms of getting permission to do it, in a formal fashion, as if it were radioactive material from the Atomic Energy Commission itself.
FISHER: So you don't remember who the [AEC] contacts were?
MALETSKOS: I don't know, right offhand. I think by that time Paul Aebersold,82 who had run the Human Use Committee [and] would probably run it, had already left. I remember S. Allan Lough83 being involved in some earlier things, so that he may have been still involved. I don't think he was the final authority, if there was one. I just don't remember that.
FISHER: Was there any thought as to the suitability of these elderly subjects, because they were older? Was there a slight risk that the latent period84 was long enough that it would not affect them? Did that consideration ever come up?
MALETSKOS: Sure, because the people that you'd like to do [the experiment] with would be 19-year-old girls. They were the ones that were getting the bulk of [the radium ingestion, in the watch-dial paint booths]; obviously, you're not going to do the experiment on them.

Well, then, do you ask the next question, "To whom do you do it?" Well, in an absorption experiment, you know, as people get [older] the absorption changes a little bit, so it's not best to use the elderly people. We felt there was no justification for using anybody younger than these elderly people [in case the exposure might lead to cancer decades later]. So that was the way that we went. In terms of any potential health effects, it had to be near zilch: they were getting such low amounts of material.

But on the other hand, if there were going to be any problems, you brought up the subject that hopefully, the radiation they were going to get, if they were going to get—if all these agents acted the same way, it would be a bone cancer, or a cancer of the sinuses. The latent period is so long that they weren't going to ever get it [because as elderly people, they were already nearing the end of their natural life span].
FISHER: When you talked to these subjects, did you explain to them there were these late effects?
MALETSKOS: Sure, absolutely, that was the purpose. They were not only told what they were going to do and why and all this sort of thing, they were told what we thought the risks were at the time. Absolutely, that was the main reason, that was more the reason to bring them in; you still had to let them know what the rest of it was. Even though I was the one that was responsible, I think that was done about as well as you could ever do. [Because the subjects had to maintain uncomfortable body postures for long periods while being counted,] it was a very tough experiment, as you've heard; it wasn't done in five minutes; it was an awful lot of things that had to work, and could have failed at any step, because we just wouldn't be able to do it. It was real tight all the way.
FISHER: Incidentally, did you attend the Alta Conference85 that was put on by the University of Utah on radium and thorium?
MALETSKOS: I've attended some of them, but I don't remember the Alta one.
FISHER: Maybe 1972, '73, or '74?
MALETSKOS: Was it in '74? Because I gave a paper on it. There is a paper in there, a short version of the metabolism of radium and thorium.
FISHER: Did you go to Salt Lake and up to Alta [Ski Resort] to attend that conference?
MALETSKOS: Yes, I would have gone.
FISHER: (smiling) Do you remember a young projectionist who ran the slide projector that day?
MALETSKOS: By the name of Darrell Fisher? No, I don't.

(laughter)
FISHER: He was there and he heard your paper and [young Fisher] probably didn't realize until many years after[ward] the quality of scientist you were.
MALETSKOS: You haven't said whether I'm good or bad, though.
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