Oral Histories
|
|
DOE Openness: Human Radiation Experiments: Roadmap to the Project Oral Histories |
|
      
|
||
|
Oral Histories
Health Physicist William J. Bair, Ph.D. Biochemist Waldo E. Cohn, Ph.D. Dr. Patricia Wallace Durbin, Ph.D. Radiologist Hymer L. Friedell, M.D., Ph.D. Health Physicist Carl C. Gamertsfelder, Ph.D. Dr. John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D.
Radiation Biologist Marvin Goldman, Ph.D.
Hematologist Karl F. Hubner, M.D.
Oral History of Radiologist Henry I. Kohn, M.D., Ph.D.
Medical Physicist Katherine L. Lathrop and Physician Paul V. Harper
Pathologist Clarence Lushbaugh, M.D.
Health Physicist Constantine J. Maletskos, Ph.D.
Radiologist Earl R. Miller, M.D.
Health Physicist Karl Z. Morgan, Ph.D.
Physiologist Nello Pace, Ph.D.
Cell Biologist Don Francis Petersen, Ph.D.
Radiobiologist Chet Richmond, Ph.D.
Physician James S. Robertson, M.D., Ph.D.
Biophysicist Robert E. Rowland, Ph.D.
Biophysicist Cornelius A. Tobias, Ph.D.
Biochemist John Randolph Totter, Ph.D.
Oncologist Helen Vodopick, M.D.
Donner Lab Administrator Baird G. Whaley
|
DOE/EH-0468 HUMAN RADIATION STUDIES:
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Educational Background; Early Involvement in Radiation Research | |
| GOURLEY: | Hello, it's December 22, 1994. Lori Hefner and Karoline Gourley are here speaking with Dr. Marvin Goldman for the purposes of preparing an oral history. Welcome. |
| GOLDMAN: | Welcome, good morning. Your letter to me said you wanted to focus on my work at the [Davis] Radiobiology Laboratory when it was an AEC1 project, and my own work on bone-seeking radionuclides2 and other information. You must have a format you like to follow, so I'll let you lead off. |
| HEFNER: | How did you become interested in science? What is your background and education? |
| GOLDMAN: | I was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and went to public schools
there. I went to a very fine high school, Erazmus Hall High School, which was
founded by the Dutch in the 1600s. It was probably the biggest high school in
America; I think it had 8,000 students when I was there. As a consequence, each
year [there were] about 2,000 classmates, [and there was] an honors system, and
I got into some of the honors programs and got turned on in science. New York
State at that time had (I guess today still has) a Regent's system where there
is an established statewide curriculum, which everyone in the state must follow.
This high school completed the [required Regent's] curriculum in the first month
of the term, and then we went on to do other things.
So when I got to college, I kind of slept through the first year or two, since I'd had the material all before, only with better teachers. It was the end of the Depression, and [many of] the high school teachers had Ph.D.s. It was a totally different era than what we have today. I only now realize now what a fortunate happenstance that was, because public schools cover a wide range and this wasn't a special science school or anything. It just had very high-quality, very competitive student body. Then I went on to Adelphi College (as it was known at the time). It's now Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. My family had [little] money. I was the first to go to college. I was studying pre-med at the time. I was a youngster who was now competing with the entire demobilization of the American [Armed Forces at] the end of the Second [World] War, so there were a lot of guys ahead of me in line to get into med school and schools hadn't built up yet. It was still pre-war establishment. I didn't get in, [but] I [did get] into graduate school at the University of Maryland. I [received] a fellowship there and I was doing Aviation Physiology. I was going to be an expert on breathing and respiration, and learn about hyperbaric [(high-pressure)] and hypobaric [(low-pressure)] [atmospheres] and submarines and airplanes. There was a lot of money from the Office of Naval Research for this sort of work. One day a guy asks me, "You're finishing up your Master's; now what are you going to do?" I said, "I don't know, maybe take a year off and decide where I'm going." I was being romanced by the Office of Naval Research to go to Groton, Connecticut, where there is a big submarine school and research program, and I could see myself maybe going in that direction. They said, "Why don't you go over to the NIH [(National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland)]?" I was at College Park, Maryland, and it was little bus ride over. This was 1951, and I went into the NIH and they said, "We'd like someone who knows about breathing to come and do a project with us for a year." I said, "What's it about?" They said, "We're not going to tell you what it's about but it will be very interesting." The next thing I knew I was on a train on my way to Las Vegas, Nevada, and I went out to the Las Vegas test site.3 Sure enough, they wanted someone who knew about breathing because they were about to [test] the [atomic] bombs in the series called Buster-Jangle,4 and this was the first set of tests in America to study the effects of radiation on animals as a prelude to trying to figure out what would happen if there was, God forbid, a nuclear war. The earliest tests had to do with, "Does the bomb work?" and so forth. So I was involved in tethering animals in [radial arcs] around ground zero.5 The bomb would go off and then I'd hurry in there, suited up like a Martian, to rescue the animals and bring them back to be studied. It wasn't an idea of killing them [with radiation]; rather it was to find out what happened. The doses were poorly known. They hadn't invented the word "rad6 yet. It was called "REP," the Roentgen equivalent physical.7 It was a precursor [between] Roentgen8 to rad. I learned how to do a [procedure] called autoradiography,9 which is to take radioactive tissue and lie it on a [photographic emulsion] which is layered on a microscope slide. As tissue radioactivity decays, it exposes the film underneath, and by developing this, you can see the tissue on top and then focus on radioactivity underneath and see where it was. This technique had not yet been [well]-established. It was heady time because you'd go in the lab every Monday and [could] publish a paper every Friday if they'd let you declassify it. There was no textbook. Nothing was known. Everything was by the seat of your pants; good fundamental science, but there really wasn't any textbook. So I did these autoradiographs and discovered something which we now call "hot particles.10 I found [a] plutonium hot particle in the lung of an animal, and that was the first autoradiograph of a hot particle. [There's] been a big brouhaha ever since about them and what their efficiency, effectiveness, carcinogenicity11 is. I went in to see my boss at the NIH. I was working in Building 2 of the NIH campus and worked for a [scientist] named Dr. Neil in the Laboratory for Physical Biology of the National Institute for Arthritic and Metabolic Diseases. That's where they put it. The [scientist] in charge of this project was named Howard Andrews. Howard Andrews was a pioneer in radiation biology. He and Ralph Lapp had written the textbook that was available at the time. |
| GOURLEY: | So you worked with Howard Andrews? |
| GOLDMAN: | For him. I was one of his [team] running around in a white
coat doing the work. And Howard Andrews was in charge of this overall program,
and under him was a public health officer, who was really a physiologist,12 and his name was Falconer Smith. Falconer
Smith hired me on. Dennis Boddy, myself, and Falconer were the team.
I still remember vividly Project 2.7 of the Buster- Jangle series. We had our own little corner out in the desert to do our thing. We were going to find out about the metabolism of radionuclides from fallout data, data which didn't [yet] exist; there were no data. The early [information was], they knew about gamma rays13 and neutron14 doses and thermal yields,15 but this ["radiopharmacy"] was the second level of importance. We found the decay [(biological clearance)] of the material as it was excreted from the animals; and then, at periodic intervals, we'd sacrifice the animals and autopsy them and see what the distribution [in tissues] was. There was no whole-body counter16 or anything like that, yet. And so, by radiochemical analysis you can reconstruct what the animals had [absorbed], and that's what we did. They [(radiation researchers)] would collaborate on ground and air sampling. (A lot of this is written up in our reports.) That got me into it. I said, "You know, this is a heck of a lot better than sitting in a centrifuge,17 or in a hypobaric chamber,18 pre- simulating high-altitude and undersea environments. How do I get more training in this?" I liked the idea that every time I asked a question, they said "Go into the lab and get the answer, because it isn't in writing yet." The fellow who taught me autoradiography was a [scientist] named [Herman] Yagoda, who was famous for cosmic-ray19 physics. He would send balloons up very high-miles up-with packages of [black and white print] film to record cosmic rays and [determine whether they came] down. He developed this special film and got the [cosmic- ray] tracks [recorded on the film]. That's where it [(the work in radiography)] was-there was no application in biology-so he taught me how to make [film] developer. I mean, I had to go back, like George Eastman [of Eastman-Kodak film fame], and mix the different chemicals to this, because you couldn't buy it [(the developer)] off- the-[shelf]. The film had to be very clean: you didn't want background radiation [to have already partially exposed it]. I [made] an arrangement where I would get Ilford film flown in twice a week in a diplomatic pouch from London (this was a British film company), because Kodak didn't make thick emulsions that would allow you to [do] this [kind of highly sensitive particle track recording]. It was very fascinating [as] we got it all together. Falconer Smith said he had a good friend named [J.] Newell Stannard20 who was setting up a program [at the University of] Rochester, [in Rochester,] New York, and if I was interested, he was sure he could make an appropriate phone call and something could happen. So, Marvin Goldman finds himself making this phone call on Friday, and on Monday, I'm in Rochester, New York with a fellowship and a scholarship and I am one of the first "guinea pigs" in the radiological fellowship program of the AEC. I was the third person from Rochester to get a Ph.D. in Radiation Biology. The first was Bill Bair;21 he was Newell Stannard's student. The second was Robert Thomas,21 who I'm sure you have spoken to; and I [believe I] was the third. They debugged the system on those two and it was easier [for me]. I worked at Rochester from 1952 until 1957. I got my Ph.D. in Radiation Biology and Biophysics [at the University of Rochester] and I worked in [the] Laboratory of Radiation Toxicology, working on radionuclides. It was a very interesting experience. (Of course, you never know these things at the time.) We had a fantastic faculty, and the AEC was paying for this, and it was one of the three centers for advanced training. I [had gone] through the standard health physics fellowship program of one year with a summer at Brookhaven [National] Laboratory [in Upton, New York]23 and they asked me to come back [to Rochester] and enroll for an advanced degree, rather than [stop at the level of] a health physicist, [a master's-level program]; it seemed like a good thing to do. Things were heating up on the Cold War front, to make a terrible pun, and so it looked like an area that was going to be well-funded. We were starting to talk about civilian nuclear energy and this whole business about biophysical research was fascinating to me. I've had a good background at Adelphi in Biology and a good background in Physical Sciences and Physiology at Maryland, and they filled in my lack in Physics at Rochester. It was a heady time. I built one the first heart-lung machines24 and studied the effects of radiation and hormones on lymphocytes25 [from the] spleen,26 which I took out of dogs. I learned to be a dog surgeon. I built this heart-lung machine, which didn't exist either, and they now use them all over the world, but this was all made by hand. I built pumps and a lung with a coil of plastic tubing and then took blood from the dog and cross-matched it, put the spleen in so that other organ influences wouldn't be [present]. [The question was] whether lymphocytes, which are sensitive to radiation [and] which [appears in the bloodstream] after a dose of radiation, are being formed in response to radiation, or are they just being released because they're stored [in tissues]. This is where we were in 1951, so that was my [dissertation]. Cortisone27 had just been invented and it, too, had a lymphocytic effect: it kills lymphocytes. So I found out about the combined effects of radiation and chemicals. There's a whole lot of interest today in people downwind from various atomic sites, as to whether there's a synergistic28 effect in being exposed to small doses of radiation and small doses of chemicals and whether the consequences are larger than the sum of the two. Of course, I didn't know that [at the time], but I did know that I got my thesis done and approved. Newell Stannard was my senior advisor. I worked for a man named Larry Tuttle. Larry Tuttle was a biochemist who came from the University of California at Berkeley.29 [I also] had a lot of guidance from the other professors. It was a very collegial atmosphere. We were all their academic children. Every professor helped everyone else. This wasn't an era where competition for grants made more enemies than friends. People worked together. If you had a problem you walked down [the hall] and talked to someone in this lab or that lab, and the three of you got together and invented a whole new technique. You didn't have to fill out any 189s30 or 5120s and all these other [DOE] worksheets. This was a good experience for me. Tuttle was interested in radioactivity. He had done some work on plants with [phosphorus]-32 and I was getting interested in radioactivity. I learned a lot about it the hard way at the Nevada Test Site and I was learning more in a more orderly way. I was very interested in the long-term effects of radiation-these are called stochastic [(random)] health effects and not deterministic. These are not effects where increasing doses show you increasing damage, which is how radiation was described in those days [according to the "linearity model"].31 And I have to tell you-because I think it's important for what you're doing-that I probably had some of the most premier educators in the world teaching me. They were all [at the] cutting edge. I can still remember sitting in the classroom listening to people talking about the reparable and irreparable injuries from radiation. Everything was taught in toxicologic32 terms. You received a dose of radiation and then you recovered from it and what ["injury"] was left over was unrecovered: it was measured in terms of life shortening. There was never any mention that this was a risk for cancer. It was all in terms of organ injury and organ repair and response. As a result, there was this impression of a threshold and that small doses of radiation, if they had no clinical manifestation, really were innocuous. Therefore, you had respect for it[s hazards], but it wasn't a problem. This was before we started taking about linearity and that all risk was proportion[al to] dose. It's rather interesting that today we seem to be moving back a little that way, because there is no scientific support for linearity, although it [may be] good prudent philosophy [in regard] to regulation to assume that every dose has a proportional risk. But the biology [today] seems to show that, [with] very small doses, there is no evidence that there is any risk.33 What is not repaired is apparently not passed on to future cell generations, which [might] then rise up and become a tumor 25 years later. That debate will go on for some time, until molecular biology34 peels out some of the answers to the sequence of steps between initiating events and conclusions. It's probable that the risk follows not a straight line, but an S-shape curve, and [at] the low dose is a [concave] slope that is so shallow [that] it is close to no [really positive] slope, and therefore looks like a threshold. After certain dosage, if [the dose gets] even higher it's sort of "overkill": the molecular lesions have already been done, and adding more damage doesn't do any more [to increase the] risk, so it looks like [the radiation is] less efficient per dose at high levels. [At that point, the now-convex risk curve levels off.] This follows almost every other toxicologic database, and there is no reason why radiation has to be uniquely different. Our tools, one of which is called epidemiology,35 are too crude to ever, by sheer mass of numbers, find these things out. So we are going to have to find out the molecular story through the Human Genome Project36 or something like that. Adding another 10,000 people to an epidemiological study [does not improve] a thing we call the signal-to-noise ratio-just kills you. You have to go up a factor of ten in [your sample] number for every factor-of- two [increase in] precision [in] standard statistics.37 |
Brookhaven Acquaintances and Early Hospital Research (Circa 1952) | |
| GOURLEY: | You had mentioned that while you were at Rochester you spent a summer at Brookhaven [National Laboratory]- |
| GOLDMAN: | The program there was a year of formal class training [at Rochester] and a
summer of field training in Health Physics, which was held at the Brookhaven
Laboratory. We'd run around the [nuclear] reactor38
and the cyclotron39-it was the "Cosmotron"
in those days-and learn how to do field measurements, and that is what the
summer fellowship was. It was a 12-month fellowship: 9 months in Rochester and 3
months in Brookhaven.
The buildings are still there and still not air- conditioned. These were delightfully historic barracks, which were residue of World War I. Brookhaven was Camp Upton in the First [World] War, and that's how it started. I remember: that was the summer I was engaged to get married, so I remember it clearly. In any event, that was the Brookhaven work. I didn't do any work with [any of] the human studies that were going on at Brookhaven. |
| GOURLEY: | Did you know any of the people involved? |
| GOLDMAN: | Yes. I know Victor Bond,40 Robert
Conard;41 Eugene Cronkite42 and Fred Cowan were the head health
physicists there. I still have dealings with [Bond].
There were other things going on. I was strictly one of the kids learning health physics, and so we went around and did class exercises, such as calibrate instruments and go out and do a field trip. My triumph of the summer was discovering that the "sky shine" from the cyclotron, went up and hit the ceiling and it bounced down right into the lap of the operator, and [pointing out] that they should move the [concrete] blocks around so that it shielded him [better]. That was really interesting. As I got closer to the operator, the dose went up. I was closest to the shielding but it was bouncing off the back shielding, so we learn about a thing which we now call "sky shine," which was interesting. |
| GOURLEY: | What happened to the operator? |
| GOLDMAN: | It is in the records there. I don't remember. Now, I should tell you that when I finished the project at NIH, and before I went up to Rochester, I went up for an interview, but the school year started in September; I had the summer free. I'd finished my NIH [work in] April [1952]. I went back up to New York. I got a job with the City Department of Hospitals, and I was now a walking expert on Geiger counters43 and radiation, because I knew how to turn a Geiger [counter] on. I was trained briefly at the Francis Delefield Hospital in New York under a fellow named Carl Braestrup. He's a [famous] pioneer in this business. And I was then sent out to Bellevue Hospital and to Kings County Hospital, which at the time, I was told it was the largest hospital in the world. Everything was big in Brooklyn [at Franklin Delefield Hospital]. It had 4,000 beds. I was assigned to the isotope unit. We were diagnosing people with thyroid44 problems, using radioiodine.45 In those days we used to call it an "atomic cocktail." I can remember, it was 50 microcuries46 in a little square bottle, and we'd give it to [patients] in a paper cup and they'd drink it; and 24 hours later they'd come back [to be counted47]. I had a rig where I set up this very crude [radiation counting system]. I'd put a test [radioiodine] dose in and calibrate it; that's [the] 100 percent [standard]. Then I'd put the detector the same distance from the [patient's] thyroid gland and count that and get the relative uptake48 [(the percentage of ingested iodine that had found its way to the thyroid)]. Fifty microcuries is a [large] dose of radioiodine. But that's what you [needed] when you had crude [(insensitive)] counters. We'd count for, I think it was five minutes, or two minutes, or one minute; I don't remember. I worked for a doctor named Aza Friedman; he was Chief Endocrinologist.49 We [did a variety] of things with radioisotopes. Well, one time we got in a load of gold-198, which is a very, very energetic beta emitter.50 I remember helping to use an air tank to move the syringe. We had to build a [remote] rig, because you couldn't hold the syringe; it would burn your fingers. We injected this into a woman who was dying of cancer. She was so [distended] with the ascites51 cells that we were going to [inject] this into her peritoneal fluid52 and slosh it around and kill the cells and maybe give her a little relief. That was a big-dose experiment. [(It didn't work.)] I don't remember how many millicuries;53 it was a lot of radiation. Another thing was that [patients] suffering from congestive heart failure, who were really almost terminal, were thought could possibly be helped by reducing their metabolic rate, putting less strain on their feeble heart. They certainly were not [strong enough to be] candidates for surgery, so we were going to do "radiation surgery": we were going to burn out the thyroid gland with radioiodine in large doses. I can remember giving a few millicuries-not microcuries-millicurie doses to some of these patients who were very, very ill. I would frequently [return] the next morning, when the patient wasn't in [his] bed. I [would] have to go find [him] in the morgue and put a red [radiation-hazard] tag on [him] because he was so radioactive. There were no [radiation] precautions like we [have] today. I'd have to track them down. I'd go into the morgue with my Geiger counter. We [didn't] know where he [was]. I'd find him-(makes a noise like an active Geiger counter)-"Yeah, that's him: he's in that drawer!" But this is 8-day iodine54; it's not long-lived. |
| GOURLEY: | This is 131I. |
| GOLDMAN: | Yes. But it's an energetic beta emitter. It emits a 350-kilovolt55 gamma ray, so it's easy to detect.
Another [patient] was a criminally insane dentist who was dying of thyroid metastasis56 to his brain, which [may have] made him crazy, and he had committed some crimes. I had to go in with some armed police to scan this guy. I was sitting there, carefully going over his head with a Geiger counter, recording at each position where the radioiodine had gone, so we'd see where the tumor [had grown]. No one had invented a scanner yet.57 We were hoping to kill thyroid metastases with radioiodine. You can't go in and surgically remove these. What we didn't know at the time was the metastatic thyroid tissue doesn't [always] metabolize [or absorb] iodine as well as normal [or "functional" thyroid tissue]. So the uptake was poor, but these were things we had to do. These [were] large doses of radiation given to patients. [I don't] know whether there was an informed- consent form. Who knows whether anyone wrote anything [about patient consent]? Who knows? |
| GOURLEY: | This was what-1951? |
| GOLDMAN: | Summer of 195[2]. Maybe Rosslyn Yalow58 has some information on that, but- |
| HEFNER: | Could [you] comment also, given that this gentleman was a prisoner- right? This dentist, at this point. |
| GOLDMAN: | He was in the hospital. He was medically terminal; [that] was his [main] problem, and I think he was at Bellevue or Francis Delefield Hospital; I don't remember which. But they asked me to come up and do this. I think he had committed a crime, and when they examined him, they found out he had cancer, and it had gone to his brain. I don't remember any details. My impression was that they thought that's why he had committed the crime, because his brain had [been affected by the cancer]. He wasn't a prisoner on whom they were doing studies, like [in] Oregon59 and Washington.60 This [patient] was dying; he wasn't sick. |
Vulnerable Populations and Acceptable Risks | |
| HEFNER: | It leads me to ask you the question: There has been such a controversy about vulnerable populations-for example, minority groups, children, prisoners, state mental hospitals, [the] mental[ly] retarded, etc. Would you comment on that? |
| GOLDMAN: | I not only commented on it, I wrote an article in the Health Physics Newsletter. I'm President of the Society this year. I have to write an article every month. And, I think two or three months ago I wrote one and I gave it to Mark Goodman61 or one of [the staff] in your office in Washington. |
| GOURLEY: | That would be the Advisory Committee [on Human Radiation Experiments]. |
| GOLDMAN: | Yes.
I said basically that in those days, the feeling was that [there] really were safe doses of radiation. The studies that we were talking about, at least with the Fernald School,62 were not radiation experiments. Very clearly, they were not radiation experiments. They were called "tracer studies." There is a distinct difference. It's not just semantics, it's a whole mindset. In a tracer study you're just tracing an element, whether it's calcium to see how it goes [to bone] and how it's absorbed [from] different foods in children or anything else. It was not to see the effects of radiation, and it was at the lowest level consistent with the sensitivity of the detection instruments used in the study.63 That's something [which] in my opinion [adds confusion] in the way I've seen the publicity on this issue. I call this the "gee whiz" era: "Gee whiz, we can now put carbon-1464 into milk and see how it goes and makes bones and we can now find out [how] iron gets into red cells and how they're formed, etc." You could never do those things with stable chemicals. So those "gee whiz" [radioactive labels]65 were tracing the metabolic path ways of all of these elements or labeled compounds that get [metabolically] broken down and [are synthesized to] reappear in other forms. Hevesy66 in the '40s wrote a book called, Biological Indicators [on this technique], which later became radiation tracers or radiotracers [technology]. |
| HEFNER: | I've noticed through this controversy the past year that there's a great deal of difference between [the] scientific community and the general population, and you're saying that these tracer studies were from this "gee whiz" era of just trying to track these. |
| GOLDMAN: | There was never any intent [for the radiotracers] to do harm, and there was
never any knowledge in the medical literature that harm would be a consequence.
What we knew about was that high doses of radiation damaged tissues and when you
damaged tissues you had problems, but these [tracer studies] were not considered
high doses. They were considered a dosage of an innocuous tracer (the same as
taking an aspirin); it was really considered that way. When you add that to the
environment in which there was-not an official acknowledgment of [a risk]
threshold, but there was a feeling: "You can [then] understand this."
Now, I know a lot about the history of radiobiology, and I'm sure you've already
interviewed Newell Stannard, who is the walking encyclopedia on this.
Or have you not? |
| GOURLEY: | I don't think there is a plan to talk to him. I think that they thought he'd written everything he had to say. |
| GOLDMAN: | Well, I think that was a big mistake, because what he's written in his volume is a careful archivist thing, but what he remembers is a goldmine for things that are not written [down]. |
| GOURLEY: | I'll certainly pass that on. |
| GOLDMAN: | I've mentioned it more than once and they've given me the same thing-"Well, we've got this mighty tome of his"-but that was just plain archivist. |
| HEFNER: | Good, that's great advice. |
| GOLDMAN: | And it's really very important, because he was intimate to all of these discussions, which are not written up. And his neurons are still functioning quite well. So, I would [ask] him. |
| HEFNER: | Would you also comment on- |
| GOLDMAN: | Let me add more to this. There was [information] in the literature because
we knew about the radium dial painters [who, earlier in the century, had
ingested small amounts of radium as they tipped their brushes with their lips
while painting], didn't we? [Also] we knew about the uranium miners. What we
knew about the uranium miners and dial painters is that they got cancer when the
doses were "incandescent" [(that is, very high)]. The smallest alpha
[particle]67 dose that caused the bone
cancer in the ladies that did the brush tipping with their lips (because that's
the work I worked on in the animal model); the smallest dose was a thousand
rads, and when you multiply this by [what we call the] quality factor, it's
20,000 rem68-that's not a tracer dose. A
tracer dose is not a rem [dose], it's sometimes not even a millirem69 [dose].
You and I are walking around getting a third of a rem a year [of background radiation] just from natural sources [and] from what's in us.70 What comes down from [the sun and cosmos] above and [the earth] below, it's all natural. So the idea of [the] study where you weren't [getting exposed to] the equivalent of more than 50 percent of background having any kind of a consequence was never raised. To this day, I don't think there's any support for that. But then we say, "Well, what about the sensitive subsets of the population?"-[for] the young, fetus, mentally retarded. [Well,] if you look at what sensitivity means, it's usually [only] a factor of two [increased radiosensitivity]. We're not talking about a thousandfold or a millionfold difference. Maybe 20 percent or 30 percent, but at worst a 100 percent difference between the average and the most sensitive. It's just the nature of biology that you can't be too far away or you don't [survive as] part of the species .The second thing that I wanted to point out is that scientists knew that life evolved on this planet, [an axiom] which is almost [so universally accepted as to be considered] a religion-this planet started [out] as radioactive; and [they knew] that whatever life has evolved to now, has made it through an evolution in which the [radiation] background was much more hostile with regard to [natural] radiation [levels]. The radioactivity of the planet is [decreasing], despite the best efforts of the Russians and the Americans to turn the tide the other way [(with weapons testing)]. So, almost all of the lead, on this planet [originally was] uranium (billions of years ago); [lead is] the end product of the decay. Any life form that could make it through that has [developed] some kind of quality control system that doesn't allow small doses of radiation to wipe it out. Because if it gets wiped out, it [cannot survive]. So by a kind of idiot reasoning, I have always felt that we are very hearty, in view of this history. This is what we were taught about places like the Massif of France,71 places in China, and Kerala Coast [on the Arabian Sea] in India. The geology [there] is such that the background radiation [from uranium and thorium in the ground] is ten times higher than background here. People live there and have for millennia. There [were] some really careful epidemiology studies done. They have not shown a [radiation-related] difference [in cancer rates]. There was once this big brouhaha about increas[ed levels of mongolism72 in the children along the Kerala Coast. The monazite73sands [cause a high background because they] are very high in uranium. It turns out that the control [study] group was different [(lower)] than any control group in the world, and the so-called exposed group [showed] the same [mongolism level] as any other normal group on the planet. In any event, you've got this "background game," you've got the evolutionary story and the few bits of clinical information that were available in the early '50s. The [studies] said that when doses were really big-such that you saw clinical injury-you then were at risk for subsequent health effects. I have, somewhere in my library, which I can find-maybe you can find-is a 1950 addition of the Atomic Energy Commission's book called the Effects of Atomic Weapons. It came out periodically during the civil defense era. [It contains nothing] under the biological effects of radiation about cancer, except at the very end of discussing the terrible clinical situation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,74 with all kinds of gory photographs and a lot of clinical acute-radiation stuff. Then, in the end, it said, "Of course, there may be a risk for low-level latent health effects.75 The epidemiology out of Japan had not yet started. That program [was] begun in 1950-five years after the war ended. It wasn't until another five years [passed], maybe 1955, [when] we first started to get this story about radiation-induced leukemia risks related to distance from the ground zero and then the world started getting really interested. This was [in] 1956 or 1957. Of course, the "retrospectroscope76 always has "20/20 hindsight" in it, and you don't think everybody in [this] business knew immediately [(about the hazards of radioactivity)]. Although we have annual meetings at the Radiation Research Society, my Health Physics Society started in 1956. We started talking about this, and at that point, the fallout77 scare was getting terribly heavily emphasized. We had problems [and] concerns about atmospheric weapons testing. [Weapons were] getting bigger and bigger, and more and more [testing] on the Russian and American side [with resultant] fallout. From fallout studies we get a lot more of the "gee whiz" metabolism [information]. Then we found [out] about strontium[, a major component of fallout that is particularly threatening to children].78 It was dropping out of the sky from American and Russian bombs[, atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons]. I was involved in that. When I was at Rochester doing my thesis, one of the projects that we had was to learn about radiostrontium. We had a [small] study on a few monkeys, because monkeys are more like people than [are] inbred rats. My lectures in radiation to the students are that you can prove anything with a rodent. We have "designer mice." You want a mouse that only gets lymphoma?79 I've got a strain [for that]. You want a mouse that will never get any lymphoma? I've got a strain [for that]. You want a leukemia80 model? You use RF[-strain mice]. These are terribly inbred animals that don't give you an accurate picture of the risk to a hybrid species such as people, but it does give you a tool to study leukemia, or lymphoma or, bone cancer, or lung cancer, etc. But that's all they do; these animals aren't [genetically] "complete." There is some DNA surrounded by fur, but they are really not complete animals. You have to be very careful, because I can show you a whole battery of mouse studies, each strain of which got the same dose, the same treatment, and one [strain] goes up through the roof [with effects] and one goes along if nothing has happened. So this is really important. They said, "Let's try to do this thing with some monkeys." I was younger and faster then, so I was catching the monkeys and we would intubate81 the esophagus82 and squirt some strontium into their tummies and then catch the feces, which was usually thrown at you by the monkeys. When I think back on it, if I'd been a radiation safety officer, I would have closed the place down. We were dealing with not-insignificant doses. Some of those monkeys lived for a long time. They were [sacrificed], and I got some of them out here and I gave some of them to Pat Durbin.83 She and I have worked together for many years on this. I had built, at Davis, a whole-body counter. One of the first in the world. We could measure bremsstrahlung.84 We invented a trick to measure beta particles [using] the whole-body counts. In any event, we were doing the strontium-90 work at Rochester as a part of [the AEC] program. There was another laboratory where we were studying polonium85 by injection in rodents. These were parts of this radiation toxicology program of my section of that department. While I was off doing my thing, a strange thing [was reported], called DNA,86 which had just been [discovered] by somebody named Crick.87 In those days you labeled [DNA] with phosphorus, because they hadn't [yet] invented carbon-14 labeling. I wanted to see, [with] phosphorus labeling of the lymphocytes, whether they were formed because the [tissue was irradiated], in which case they would be radioactive, or whether they were sequestered and just released because of the radiation, in which case they would not have incorporated [phosphorus-32] because they weren't dividing. [At the time,] that was really cutting-edge science. But [at the University of Rochester] I learned all about radioactivity in this experience over the years at the lab. I helped design some of the studies. I would go down and talk to George Casarett, Newell Stannard, John Hursh, and [biophysicist] Bill [(William F.] Bale, [who] were all pioneers in this [radioactivity science]. |
Research at the University of Rochester (1952-57) | |
| GOURLEY: | What work did you do with Bale? I've seen his name on some items. |
| GOLDMAN: | Oh, Bale was one of the original radon88
physicists at Rochester. It used to be [called] the Atomic Energy Projector
(AEP). In fact, I have a story that I guess that we could put down now. When I
got there, the fellowship hadn't quite caught up to me, I got there so fast.
They wanted me to eat. I had a scholarship, but I didn't have any [living
expense] money, so they got a job for me as night watchman at [the] lab, which
was fantastic. I had the 4:00 [p.m.]-to-12:00 [a.m.] shift. No distractions: no
women, no television, no beer, no nothing-just study. I had to do rounds and go
through all the atomic energy projects at night. The cockroaches were as big as
mice in that place because there was a lot of mouse food. I was [working with]
85-year-olds, who were looking through coffin catalogues. I had to do rounds for
a half-hour and then I had to guard the desk for a half-hour. Suddenly Marvin's
grade point average became straight A. I got nothing lower than an A; in fact, I
got nothing lower than an A thereafter. It was a good disciplinary thing,
because I decided that looking at coffin catalogs was what happened if you
didn't study. I also learned a lot about the labs.
I learned that Kurt Altman always left the faucets running and you'd frequently go in and it would be a flood in the biochemistry lab, tubing would be [found] broken. It was a [fascinating] time. So that was Rochester. |
| GOURLEY: | Your were there when the plutonium injections happened, too? |
| GOLDMAN: | No, I think they were [earlier]. They were in the '40s or early '50s. But if they were going on roughly the time I was there, I was not aware of them at the time, as a student. |
| HEFNER: | When did that information hit the student population? When does that come into the literature? |
| GOLDMAN: | It was after I was a student. It was at least a decade later. It had been
written up. We had a very fine laboratory library, and there was the MDCCC
series,89 the whole Manhattan [Engineer]
District90 world that published [the wartime
research in] a series of volumes. We used those as textbooks.
There was [also a] constant profusion of these paperbound reports from all the labs about [their research]. I'm sure that amongst them was Pat Durbin's [work] on measuring some of the plutonium. I think a lot of that [work] was classified early on, because of the "P" word. When I was doing the [work] at the Nevada Test Site, what we dealt with was something called "Product," that was the "P" word, not plutonium. It was classified. Now I had Q clearance91-I've [had] it since then-but I didn't have a "need to know," as they called it. It [(the plutonium injection experimentation)] was going on-I knew you'd ask me that. I really racked my brains out. Was I really aware of any of this? No. Did I have any of this presented in my classes? No. I don't remember that. |
| HEFNER: | Newell Stannard never discussed it? |
| GOLDMAN: | I think there were a couple of seminars. We had a very good seminar series about once a week on interesting topics. My memory isn't that great that I could tell you that there was a seminar on the plutonium series. That is something I'd [suggest you] ask Newell. I encouraged him to write an article about that. |
| HEFNER: | Did he have a response? |
| GOLDMAN: | Well, you just encourage him; you don't wait for a response. You just do this in a ploddingly careful way. But I keep telling Newell, "The clock's ticking, we've got to get [as much recorded as possible]!" [I think] he'd like to do this. |
| GOURLEY: | He's done a lot of interviews with a lot of other people. |
| GOLDMAN: | Yes. But [it] is usually, "When did you stop beating you wife?"
kind of questions [designed to prove him guilty of something]. I think if you
just gave him free rein to-
We have a Newell Standard Annual Lectureship that we created in our society. I introduced him to the last one and videotaped the whole thing. Then he gave a talk for about an hour, which we also videoed. George Anastas at Sacramento State [University] has some copies of it. I don't know whether your archives has it. It was already professionally done. It was done this last year; it might be interesting to look at that. |
| HEFNER: | You mentioned that there were two other training sites that AEC had established. |
| GOLDMAN: | There was an instant need, with the advent of the atomic era, to have a
[supply] of radiation protection people. There weren't many. They were all
[recruited] from some other area-industrial hygienist, medical technicians, or
whatever. And they were given basic training. Or, like myself, a bunch of kids
out of school with good physical[-science] and biological background. There was
one [program] at Vanderbilt [University in Nashville] with a marriage to a
summer [field] program at Oak Ridge [National Laboratory (ORNL)].92 There was one at Rochester with a tie-in to
Brookhaven, and there was one at the University of Washington with a tie-in to
Hanford.93 They would study under Herb
Parker94 at the Hanford Laboratory and under
K.Z. Morgan95 at Oak Ridge. And under Fred
Cowan at Brookhaven [National Laboratory]. These were some of the health physics
"scoutmasters" during those early programs. Since then, other programs
have evolved at different universities, but this was really unique, in that the
AEC set up the Laboratories at the universities.
One of the problems today is that the need for health physicists isn't going to be met. Although there may be a few fellowships for students, there are no inducements for the professors who will train the students. So, if the professors can't get a professorial training grant, if there is nothing [from] the department to do it, why should they bother? Even though the students come funded, there is no program. University departments won't [support] a program [alone]. I'm not suggesting that we need three programs, but you sure need to do something about the seed corn [(training young scientists in the various fields)], because some of us [old-timers] are getting tired of going around putting out fires. It's a serious problem. I don't mean to use your tape to proselytize, but it is one of the things I, as President of the Society, am looking at [in] the crystal ball down the road. Whatever you think of decontamination and decommissioning of all the DOE sites, it isn't going to happen in five years. It's going to be [more like] 30 or 50 [years]. It's going to be [run by] a whole generation [of] people who are merely going to be looking at regs [(regulations)] and DOE orders and not know what they're doing. And you're going to get into all kinds of difficulty.96 You've got the whole [spectrum] of the nuclear business and who are the people that are going to prevent accidents from happening? You've got the demilitarization of the whole nuclear navy, which is going to go on. All of these are specialty areas (possibly help with overseas places). There's probably a constant need, although the matrix that we're dealing with is continually changing. |
Relationship With Newell Stannard and Stafford Warren (1952-57) | |
| HEFNER: | Does this pretty well cover your Rochester days? Maybe we shouldn't leave this without you describing your relationship with Newell Stannard. |
| GOLDMAN: | Well, he was sort of the white-haired father. He was the Associate Dean for
students. So, any of us who had any problems would go talk to Newell or "Rosebud"-Rose
Sternberg was his secretary, and she was the "mama" for the group.
We'd have 30 students a year going through this program with the usual problems
of very young men. She was very sweet about always helping. I remember she
helped me get a house. He[, Stannard,] taught courses. He had set [up] an alpha laboratory, which [was for] an inhalation toxicology program. One of the first in the country, at Rochester. I was peripherally involved in that. He wasn't my personal major advisor, although I looked to him to get more advice than I could get from [the others]. As I said, we were all one big family. There weren't that many graduate students. There was constant processing of these 30 health physicists, but then you had the cadre of [senior] graduate students, who help run laboratories. I worked with another pioneer, named Leon Miller. He is an M.D. at Rochester, who was doing [work] on liver perfusion,97 learning about how the liver detoxifies compounds and how it produces certain enzymes. He taught me a lot about this perfusion technique, he was doing it on little mice. Harry [(Henry A.)] Blair was the director of the whole program. He had more of a cosmic view of the radiation scene at the time. He was the one who was pursuing this business of the reparable and irreparable [cell] damage. I can still see the curve on the blackboard that he would draw [-the "Henry Blair curve."] There was one other man there that was doing a study on fruit flies-his name was Robert Baxter-[who] passed away a couple of years ago. He probably had more experiments than [have been reported on in] any five other theses. He had volumes. He would do a study where each data point had a thousand individuals. He was studying the [effects of] fractionation98of radiation on fruit flies' survival. So, I remember the molasses odor, with all of the fly food that he had prepared. When you have 5 million flies in vials, it's a lot of odor. He would anesthetize them with ether, which could blow up the place, but at the time I didn't know that. There was the aroma of a mixture of ether and molasses in that lab that was hard to describe. These were things that were going on. What was happening on the medical side of the house, I don't remember. The dean of the school was a Nobel Prize winner named George Whipple. George Whipple had discovered [vitamin] B12, I think. There were things going on-the radiation atomic energy project was part of Strong Memorial Hospital [in Rochester]. [It] was part of the medical [complex] and was a mile away from the main Rochester University campus. |
| HEFNER: | Am I incorrect in thinking that Stafford Warren99 was also- |
| GOLDMAN: | Yes. Stafford Warren was there. [He] went out and set up a duplicate
program at UCLA,100 called the Laboratory
for Radiation Biology. That's Rochester ["Expanded"].
I got an offer to stay on [at Rochester] for a year as a post doc [(postdoctoral research fellow)]. After finishing my thesis, I stayed on and did the strontium-90 project full-time and tried to put [(add)] some scientific planning. As I mentioned earlier, the concern was getting worse and worse about the burden of radioactivity from increasingly larger and more frequent atmospheric weapons testing. We were measuring strontium-90 milk everywhere and they were [reporting it in] something called "Sunshine Units.101 |
Participation in "Project Sunshine" and Move to the University of California, Davis (Mid 1950s to 1958) | |
| GOURLEY: | So, you were part of Project Sunshine?102 |
| GOLDMAN: | I'm one of the "papas" of that. And so, the AEC decided to
embark, in the mid '50s, on a study in long-lived animals to find out what the
low-level effects are of plutonium, americium,103
of a whole bunch of actinides.104 And [so
they thought], "By the way, let's look into strontium because of the
fallout." They set up this battery of "dog laboratories," that
you've heard about. One of them at Lovelace in Albuquerque, at the Lovelace
Foundation, which is called the Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute.105 [Another dog laboratory performed]
plutonium inhalation studies at Hanford [and was] run by Bill Bair,106 [and there was also] a group of injection
studies on radium and plutonium in dogs at the University at Utah under [Tom
Dougherty]. Later, a study of ingestion of radioactivity in dogs at [the
University of California at] Davis, where I went.
So it's now 1958, and [my] wife is pregnant, and it's time to think about making a living and getting a career. I got an offer to go out and work with Bill Bair, my friend from Rochester, who had gone a year before to set up the program at Hanford. [He wants to know,] "Would I like to go out and work with General Electric?107 I decided I didn't want to work for General Electric [because it] looked like a company town and I did not have a company mentality. And then they said, "Well, they're also setting up this program at the veterinary school in Davis at the University." I said, "Well, that sounds interesting. Why don't I go down there?" So, I went down and took a look at that and they offered me [a job when they learned that I knew] about strontium: "We'd like you to come here, we're going to offer you $7,000." I said, "But they are offering me $10,000 at Hanford." "But we are not allowed to do that." I said, "Well, you'll have to get somebody else." And, not having read all these books on how you get a job, so I said, "Why don't you look into it?" And, I went home and they called and said, "We can match that." I said, "Fine, I'll be there December 1." So, on December 1, 1958, I came out to Davis with my wife and our newborn child, and it took her six weeks to stop crying, because the campus at Davis was a [small agricultural] experiment station with 4,000 acres and 3,000 students. When I told my relatives back in New York that I had finally found a University that had more acres than students, they just rolled over laughing. Davis now has 25,000 students, just a few thousand smaller than Berkeley-in those days it was interesting. There was this whole program to set up. I was in Fat City. I was hired as a radiation biophysicist at the University of California at Davis. I was to be the scientist to do this. There was a veterinarian there who knew about dogs, whose name was A.C. Andersen. And A.C. Andersen was the first head of this [study], called the Atomic Energy Project at Davis, which I later directed. Andersen, in 1951, had been given an Atomic Energy [Commssion] contract, which was gotten by the dean of the veterinarian school, named George Hart, to discover the consequences on life span of [exposing] beagle dogs with a single dose of radiation or [with] fractionated doses. We were just becoming aware that there was something more than radiation dose: it was the quality of the dose;108 there is a dose rate [effect (how the animal is affected by the length of time over which a given dose is administered)]; and these sorts of things. And so, that study was already ongoing. [In 1957,] on our [graduation] celebration national tour of the country that my wife and I did after I got my degree, before I started a post doc, we stopped off (having heard about this Davis Project) [to] visit [Andersen and his project] in July in Davis, when it was about 110 degrees and air conditioning hadn't [arrived] yet. My wife said, as we drove away to visit San Francisco for the first time, "Boy, am I glad you don't work here!" Little did she know. When she was in the labor room [with our first child, I told] her, "Finish up-we're about to go to Davis!" Anyhow, the project was all about x[- ray] irradiation, and Andersen knew about beagles and dog [reproduction]. He knew [less] about [internal] radiation. So I was going to be the radiation person. |
Participation in Beagle Studies at the University of California at Davis (1958-60s) | |
| GOURLEY: | Just briefly for the tape, why beagles? |
| GOLDMAN: | Why beagles? Well, we knew that we were dealing with late effects of radiation. So you'd want animals that were going to be there later. And, dogs are there longer than are mice (long- lived). |
| GOURLEY: | Right. |
| GOLDMAN: | Secondly, we wanted an animal that had humanlike diseases. And the diseases
of rodents aren't parallel to those of humans, especially the diseases of old
age.
The other reason for beagles was that it was the only dog breed that was tractable, that didn't eat you out of house and home, that were not vicious, and that had a very large, wide genetic pool. All of the other specialty breeds, if you go back two or three generations, you're dealing with the same sire or dam. So you have an inbreeding problem. Or, you're dealing with a situation where [there] are certain diseases that are unique to particular inbred dogs. So [our feeling was,] "Let's get something that is as outbred as we can, that is parallel to people." We then designed this study. The AEC put together an advisory committee; I think Stafford Warren might have been on it originally. But the ones I remember were Wright Langham109 from Los Alamos [Scientific Laboratory],110 Austin Brues111 from Argonne Laboratory,112 Harry Blair from [the University of] Rochester, and Robley Evans113 from MIT [(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)]. Robley Evans is the pioneer that did a lot of the original radium work. Radium was the radioactivity benchmark for the planet. There was no other database. [Data from] the uranium miners wasn't really [about] deposited radi[oactivity]. So much as it was, inhaling radioactivity and exhaling it, but it wasn't so much the deposition. The radium dial painter is definitely [a deposition problem;] the radium behaved like calcium, went into bone and [ir]radiated osteoblasts114 and caused osteosarcomas.115 [There was] a program of bomb building and nuclear powerplant design, and [the United States was] going to be dealing with radioactivity. We already knew, from preliminary laboratory benchtop studies, that alpha particles are much more nasty [when] they look at a cell nucleus, then [are] beta particles [or] gamma rays.116 We didn't have it as fine-tuned as we do today. Radium emits alpha particles. So the only [information] we had on alpha particles in people [was from] radium, so we invented this [concept] called a toxicity ratio: everything is related to the equivalent effect of radium in people. They injected radium into beagle dogs at Utah and then injected the same number of microcuries [of] plutonium into beagles at Utah. The radium and plutonium went to bone, and the plutonium made bone cancers and the radium made bone cancers. The plutonium [caused cancers] four times better than radium did. Therefore, the plutonium got a toxicity factor of four. Now [(having assembled the various data)] we know about radium in people and we know about radium in dogs and we know about plutonium in dogs, and we can [then] make a proportionality [(B is to A as Y is to X)]. X is now plutonium in people, which we didn't know about. So the ratio of dog plutonium [(A)] to dog radium [(B)] is a radionuclide ratio; [and that ratio, A/B] times the ratio between dogs and people radium [(B/Y)], that's a species ratio [(A/B ÷ B/Y)]. It allows you to predict; it's a very classical toxicology [approach]. That [pair of known ratios, A/B and B/Y,] underwrote all of these programs.117 We had plutonium [beagle] inhalation [studies] at Hanford, which we could relate to uranium miner inhalation and was a little more crude because we didn't have the neat dosimetry118 that you could get with the radium, since it [(radium)] emits a very fat gamma ray which is easily counted in vivo.119 We now had this beginning of the first truly quantitative study of the effects of internal emitters. This now relates to your sensitive subpopulations in the "gee whiz" tracer studies, because this is now the basis for our understanding of the effects of radionuclides. The deficiency of having a nonhuman species and not lots of numbers is made up for by [the] fact that there is no uncertainty about the radiation dose, as there is in all these human studies (which you are doing retrospectively). So you trade off one kind of an uncertainty for another. Exactly how does a dog-year relate to a human-year, or a dog cancer relate to a human cancer? But, that's something we've now researched the hell out of over the years. And we have a very good feeling as to where that animal fits in the test's species (just as you do today). We've got a whole battery of testing every time there is a new compound [for which] you have to learn about the efficacy and carcinogenicity-you know, these "designer [test] animals," I call them. They allow you to come up with [a] pretty good [risk] estimate. Except for a few accidents or errors, like thalidomide,120 where they just picked the wrong species [on which to test its safety]. We'd done very well at it; it's a very good track record. |
| GOURLEY: | Actually, I believe it was Robley Evans [who] said that there was no correlation or that the only way you actually get data for people- |
| GOLDMAN: | The only suitable experimental animal-to study man is man. Except people
don't like to volunteer for things where there is a real uncertainty about the
risk. So what with us [(workers at Los Alamos and Hanford in particular)]
handling tons of plutonium to make [nuclear] warheads and all sorts of things,
we had to know that the workers would be protected.
All of these studies except mine, every single one of them, was an industrial-hygiene accident predictor. These were an acute sudden accident where [a] glove box122 blew up, or there was a fire, or somebody spilled something. It was an instantaneous-it wasn't eating a bit of it every morning in your breakfast cereal. But, the strontium-90 fallout thing was, indeed, one in which the doses were not achieved instantaneously, but were chronically [accumulated]. My program was the only one in which you literally fed the animals a radioactive diet from the onset of fetal ossification [(bone formation)] until [adulthood]. And, so they had a chronic level of radioactivity and we had different [exposure levels]. We studied one thousand animals, with a thousandfold range of dose from the highest to lowest. The beagle was chosen for a very significant reason, and that is the skeleton of the beagle. That mammal is very similar to the human in terms of the spongy bone and the compact bone, in terms of the bone marrow and its quality and the progenitor cells that [produce] the white cells and the red cells of the body. [There is a] very, very close tie-in, which you cannot find in rodents. This was an ideal animal [to study]. We had the earlier x-ray study as sort of a benchmark. What kind of cancers come from an x-ray dose? How does that relate to internal [radiation] emitters. Strontium-90, being an alkaline earth divalent cation,122 will only behave as does calcium and will not cause lymphoma or lung cancer because it doesn't go [and irradiate] those tissues. Now we had a new concept, partial-body radiation. Wow! Not just putting your hand in an x- ray machine, but here is something that selectively irradiates only certain tissues. Strontium-90, being a beta emitter, only irradiated within a millimeter [or so] of where the atoms resided. I kept saying, "But the strontium emits energetic beta particles which go both ways, it's going into the bone and it's going where else, into the bone marrow!" We were very shocked (although I had predicted this) to find that the high doses of radiostrontium also caused leukemia. |
| GOURLEY: | Because of the red cells. |
| GOLDMAN: | No, not red cells. White cells. Red cells are not involved in leukemia. Red
cells are involved in something called polycythemia.123 Cancer of the blood is called leukemia,
and that's [from the Greek root] leuko-, it means white. So, sure
enough, we got myelogenous124 leukemia, and
guess what? Myelogenous leukemia is predominantly found where? In
Japan-Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now we had the only model in a laboratory
situation that related radiation dose to leukemia risk.
However, Japanese experience was acute exposure. The [University of California at] Davis experiences [are] any[thing] but acute: it's chronic. So now we have an ability [to address] something called dose-rate amelioration factor or dose-rate effectiveness factor125. This is really very important. The strontium that went into the bone caused osteosarcomas, similar to radium. We had run a parallel study on radium-226 in dogs, giving fractionated doses to simulate the short [radium] dosage time radium dial painters had at the time they were being exposed, which was generally a few years. These were generally young women, 15 to 22 or so, who were in these watch factories. They did all kinds of bad things with radium. There was not [anything called] industrial [hygiene]: (this was the '20s). It wasn't until [Dr. Bloom, a] dentist, noticed his [watch- dial-painting] patients' jaws falling apart. I'm sure you've got lots of information on that. Therefore, I did this [study] where [we were] going to replicate in the beagle dog exactly the canine equivalent of the human experience with dial painters at [a] young age. In this case, [dogs] between 14 and 18 months of age, would [get] eight semimonthly injections, kind of [like] a sawtooth dosage. Then you stop and follow them forever. This was just about the [dog's age] of epiphyseal126 closure of the bones, [which is equivalent to the young adult human]. There is my benchmark, and so, I would now have a beagle tie-in to the human studies. I was forced, because of this study, to always keep track of what was going on in the human radiation "studies"; even though I wasn't [directly] involved, I had to be aware of that. I became a member of the Orthopedic Research Society and I learned all [I could] about bones and bone metabolism. I designed a scanner that you could use to detect osteoporosis and all other kinds of side issues. Using the Anger camera127 at [the University of California at] Berkeley, I did the first detection of a bone cancer, using this camera and fluorine-18. |
| GOURLEY: | That was a long time later, though? |
| GOLDMAN: | 1970. That was exciting. Back in the 1960s we started building this thing
[(cancer detection instrument)]. I had [to] design a radioactive waste treatment
plant because I'm feeding radioactivity into the dogs and they don't just hang
onto it: they excreted 98 percent of it; only 2 percent was retained. What are
you going to do with all this radioactive poop?
So, we had to design the "radioactive poop machine," which is scientifically called an "Imhoff tank," which is a special sewage treatment facility at Davis. It had the unique feature at the very end, after biological digestion and chemical precipitation, that [would] run of all of the liqueur or effluent out through ion-exchange128 resins, similar to water softener, which are designed to wash out all of the radiostrontium. First, you had to get rid of all the organic garbage; this was a very odiferous process. We had something about three times the size of this room-a 50,000-gallon tank, with compartments-and we got some of the sanitary engineers here at Berkeley to help us design this thing. Ed Edgerley and Warren Garrison-(I think) an engineer here. We cooked this thing up, and [Ed] actually got his engineering thesis out of it. We had a running program. The radioactivity would now all be absorbed onto the ion-exchange resins, just like your water softener absorbs calcium. The resins were encased in sacks, like socks. When they were contaminated, we would take the socks out, package them up, and send them off to Hanford for low-level waste disposal. That's how we got rid of the radioactivity. It worked. We got "ten to the fourth" (104) decontamination: we left only one out of ten thousand atoms behind. It was very, very efficient. Then, at the end, I'd have this treated fluid, which met drinking water standards at the time for radiostrontium, which I then pumped out into a leaching field next-door. You['ve] heard of the rear end [of] a fuel cycle, but this is the rear end of the dog cycle we had to take care [of]. |
| HEFNER: | The carcasses and everything also went up to Hanford? |
| GOLDMAN: | There were no carcasses yet. The dogs [were] young and they were living a
long, long time. [But] when the animals died, we would do a careful autopsy and take samples. The residuals were kept in a big walk-in freezer. We had storage for all of the animals onsite. At the very end, when the program was finished-everything was closed-the remains were all sent up to Hanford for disposal. But early on, it wasn't considered waste; it was considered biological material, which we might want to go back to when other questions arose. These animals got much better care than [First Lady] Hillary Clinton ever thought imaginable [for her proposed healthcare reforms]. This was cradle-to-the-grave, 24-hour surveillance, a staff of veterinarians, quarterly medical exams, annual physicals that were unbelievably sophisticated, even for people at the time. We had these batteries of blood tests-all kinds of good information-because we wanted to find out early indicators of late effects. We didn't find any. We also didn't find any radiation effects, except in the very highest levels. So the three lowest exposure levels, each of which was a factor of three higher [than the level just below it], these animals' life expectancy and medical history [were found to be] identical to the unexposed control. |
| GOURLEY: | Were these dogs bred at all? |
| GOLDMAN: | No. There wasn't enough money even in the rich AEC to do [a] generation
study. "Why don't you do the genetic effect?," [I suggested]. By the way, I forgot to [mention it that] back in Rochester when I was being taught, the dominant [long-term] problem to worry about was genetic effects, not somatic [effects]129 or cancer. The concept of linearity came out of H.J. Muller, who got the Nobel Prize for discovering the genetic effects of radiation in 1928. That [effect] was linear: The more dose he gave them, the more genetic effects he saw in the fruit flies. That is the origin of this thing of linearity, but it wasn't cancer. What he was really measuring [were] "initiating events." In cancer, you have an initiating event followed by a whole sequence of additional steps in the cell. Each of which has its own probability of being completed or repaired or not repaired. Therefore, it's not possible for low doses to be linear at the same slope as high doses because of this probability that each cell step is going to be in proportion to the initating events. |
Budget Concerns; Goldman's Other Radiation Research Projects (1965 to Late '60s) | |
| GOURLEY: | This is based on drosophila?130 |
| GOLDMAN: | [No,] It's based on biology.
What drosophila was measuring was only the first step. These [fruit flies] are mature animals whose genetics [(genetic determination)] is all over with. It's all in the larval stage; the cells don't divide in [mature] fruitflies. In any event, that's a whole other seminar. All these things really point to the fact that there is very little scientific support for linearity down to what I call a zero intercept, relative to what we know about. I did these studies at Davis, the program built up, and at its peak we had about a four-million-dollar-a-year program and maybe about 100 employees. I was the associate director under A.C. Andersen. They [later] brought in a fellow from Hanford by the name of Leo Bustad, who was a veterinarian. He became [lab] director in 1965, and I was his associate director. By that time the program [was] more sophisticated and the project became a radiobiology laboratory. We had built up a 25- million-dollar facility over the years. I think I calculated once [that] I personally brought in about 60 million dollars [during] my whole scientific career, which I think was a record. If you use 1950, 1960 dollars. So I felt good about that. This was a unique study because the AEC had never funded something that went on and on and on. Usually it's a two-year grant or three-year grant. These "founding fathers" would meet annually, and we would review the progress of these studies and occasionally add some subsidiary or ancillary studies to it. In their infinite wisdom, they [in effect] said, "Whatever the budget is on doing this, we realize it's not exciting and you're not writing a paper every year. The crème de la crème is going to be one master paper 20 years later, and in order to keep you from converting to vegetables, we'll sort of look the other way, and you have about ten percent of the budget to do other radiobiological things. [But] don't interfere with the sacred dogs." [In other words,] these animals were not to be used for every hairbrained idea you came up with. So we had a few extra animals that we could do studies on, including learning how to do cancer detection and a whole bunch of stuff. I had to learn about the radiostrontium in bone. I had to actually do the strontium, elemental strontium. Strontium-90 doesn't just go in by itself: it's diluted with a pool of stable, nonradioactive strontium that's in all of us. How do you measure it? There is no easy way to measure it. So I went to the geologists and they said, "Well, we can use an x-ray-diffraction fluorescent gadget." So I learned about x-ray fluorescent spectrometry.131 We bought an x-ray spectrometer and I started measuring elemental strontium. This way I could talk about the strontium-to-calcium ratio on a mass basis, as well as radioactive strontium per gram of nonradioactive calcium in bone, as a way of learning about the doses. I actually got [a] patent on how to detect strontium and correct the background interference in an x- ray fluorometer.132 That was another serendipitous thing. I went in and found out how to use something called "Bragg's Law,133 which was a fundamental piece of nuclear physics that I was taught in Rochester, to solve a biological problem. It was really nice; it worked. So hey, the AEC was so happy they gave me a dollar bill for the patent. Unfortunately, it wasn't a transistor chip.134 [There] was another sideline. I discovered that when you thermally ashed tissue, which we had to do to get the radioactivity measurements, if it was from a pre-tumor tissue and, you then ran this [thermoluminescent]135 spectrometer on it, it was different [from] normal tissue. Along about that time, we had discovered a dosimetry technique called thermoluminescent [dosimetry]-TLD. Thermoluminescence dosimeters replaced film badges136 as a means of detecting radiation. It turns out that anything that's a crystal, when irradiated, certain electrons rise up [to an excited state] in a lattice. (I'm sure you remember your physical chemistry background.) They stay there, but if you then warm up that crystal and heat it, the electron drops back to the resting state; and [in] dropping back, [it] emits light. So the light output was proportional to the input of radiation. This is the technique called TLD, and these crystals are used over and over again. You'd sit around getting dosed all-year-[long] and you put the [TLD] in a dark box with a phototube looking at it, and warm [it] up on a certain cycle. The light [is emitted in proportion to] the radiation that had gone in, and you got a very uniquely linear sensitive [response]. |
| HEFNER: | And that came from your lab? |
| GOLDMAN: | No, it came from somebody else. What I said was, "Why do have
to use lithium fluoride?," which is the crystal that's used, which is very
sensitive. It should be any crystal. So I said, "When we thermally
ashed this tumor tissue, what is left is powder, but the powder [contains]
crystals in it that are formed by the heat." So, I was irradiating the ash
from the tumor tissue and from normal tissue and then, pretending it was a
thermoluminescent dosimeter, putting it into the dark and heating it up, and
light would come out. Interestingly, the amount of light that came out was
proportional to the amount of carcinogenicity137
in the tissue, whose cancer quality had disappeared when we put it in the oven
and ashed it.
So then I had a friend of mine who was doing [a] mouse cancer study give me some blind [(coded)] tissue. I had 17 samples of tissue. I didn't know what they were, [but] he knew what they were. I ranked them all, and I came out predicting which were the cancer [samples]. I said, "Well, we all know that cancer cells concentrate calcium more than normal cells, so I must be looking at calcium salts [rather] than calcium crystals." We did an x- ray fluorimetric examination, and it wasn't calcium: it was a kind of potassium crystal that's formed in cancer cells. I said, "Hey that's exciting. Here is a way of taking a biopsy, and when it's questionable, you can do this test and find out which side it flips!" Along about that time, we had another annual report to write, so I stopped that research and went on and did something else that was new and never finished it. It's one of those Nobel Prizes that you never had a chance to do. (laughs) I really got involved in radiation hematology138 and leukemia [science], and I learned a lot about bones. I did some of the best work on it and I wrote a book in 1972. I continued to become lab director [in 1973] and in 1985 I decided I had [over] 30 years of this, and I retired. [Later, I was] recalled [to] the University system, and I've been doing [work] with the Russians ever since. And, what [were] they doing? Feeding people strontium-90 in Chelyabinsk, [an Asian city near the] Ural [Mountains and one of the Russian centers for plutonium production]. They'd been doing it since 1950, and [of course] they didn't know it [at the time and perhaps then] they didn't care. So I have now seen [a parallel] in the human studies in Russia. Unbeknown to me, they were doing in humans what I was doing in beagles. When Yuri Moskalev from Moscow came to visit me in 1960, he was taking pictures of my whole-body counter. I didn't know that when I visited Chelyabinsk in 1991 I would see my whole-body counter in this secret city, used to count people the same way I was counting beagles. And so, I have a kind of internal commitment now to reach closure, because I know about the dosimetry and all of the basics [of what] they're doing from the other end, epidemiologically.139 Of course, it wasn't a planned study [in Russia]; this was [the way] during Stalin's era. There was no retention of radioactivity [on the site]: it just went out the back door, into the stream. The stream went by the villages-the village [dairy] cattle were eating the grass that was contaminated by this [and then] feeding [the contaminated milk] to the kids. To this day, I can go up to [those] kids, who are now 50 years old, with a Geiger counter against their teeth, and it goes off-scale because of the radiostrontium that's buried in their enamel that will never [be eliminated,] and many of them have died of leukemia. And, that's where I'm going in January to continue the studies that we've been doing there. So, there is a human-study evolution here, and the DOE is involved now in a collaboration exercise called the Joint Coordinating Committee for Radiation Effects Research, which may be a [supplement to] the Hiroshima/Nagasaki [cooperative efforts] that DOE is doing-may [be] an expan[ded program]. They may add the radioactivity question, because the DOE's problems today are very much intimately involved. The problem that you're facing is primarily an ethical one. Did things get done in an unethical way, without the equivalent of informed consent, even though it wasn't codified as it is today? The docs [(doctors)] really didn't say anything to their patients or should have. There is another facet of this that says that if you're an innocent bystander living downwind from something and the AEC is spewing stuff out and you're being inadvertently exposed-this is not a designed study now, this is just unfortunately being downwind when [you] should be upwind. Do we have a[n ethical] problem there [that needs redressing]? And I don't know whether that's excluded specifically from your [DOE] mandate or not, because I think you're dealing primarily with experiments, in which there was a purposeful administration of radioactivity or radiation, rather than accidental or inadvertent. But the public perception doesn't make that distinction. |
| GOURLEY: | Yeah, you're right about that. |
| GOLDMAN: | And so, the lesson learned from this is: You're not going to be able to
compartmentalize these and keep them apart: it's all related to perception. My
upcoming article (I have to give a plug for this Health Physics Newsletter)
is that the politics of perception does not link to the science of detection. I
wrote a whole essay on that and brought this thing up. What we're learning from
these human studies, I think, is that although these studies may have wronged
people, in that they were not informed-even informally-[it] is not necessarily
true that they were harmed. If they were wronged, in my opinion the United
States owes them an apology. And, if they were harmed, which is different than
being wronged, it's possible that some kind of compensation scheme has to be
thought up. But I don't believe, and I would never support the idea of a
compensation scheme because you were wronged. So now, we're back to how do you prove harm, and back to linearity. If you got dosed, your molecules [were] disturbed, therefore you were harmed, therefore we pay. We would pay in proportion to dose and you don't have to show anything clinical[, but] I think that's ludicrous. It's not acceptable, because I could demand that God give me money for the disturbance of my DNA from cosmic radiation. It's no different-my DNA doesn't know one ionization from another. Enough philosophy; I could go on and on here. I think it's really important therefore that we do what we can to educate. I've been very disturbed that the publicity with your program has come across that we were really doing "megadeath for the kiddies" and we were really abusing, truly abusing in [a] callous manner, defenseless subsets (of the population). I know some of the work of Eugene Saenger140 is being questioned and the thing with the prisoners [in Oregon and Washington], whose testes were irradiated and they gave them a few bucks for doing it. Davis is near the [California] wine district. There is a big prison down the road called Vacaville, and some[one] who was running the Medical Research Foundation in Vacaville was [using] prisoners for different studies. I was approached in 1965 to see whether I would be interested in helping them do a study in which they would grow grapes with radioactive iron in the soil and see if the iron got into the wine. Then they could see if wine increased the absorption of iron in people who might have iron-deficiency anemia. They proposed using these prisoners by bringing them up to my whole-body counter and count the radioiron; it [( the proposed procedure)] was very noninvasive. They'd drink the wine-lousy wine, but they'd have a drink of wine and we would do this [study]. [The] Vacaville [facility] is for mentally disturbed prisoners-many of them are in there for civil, crimes not violent ones. I didn't have enough confidence that I would only get nonviolent people, and I had this vision of something going wrong and me being held hostage, or something worse happening. I also wasn't comfortable with the way they were doing the dosimetry and things. So I said, "It's very interesting and it probably would be a nice little ?gee whiz' study. Thanks, but no thanks: I'm not going to do it." And I killed it. And now they hate me-I forgot what his name was, but boy, I gave Vacaville a bad name, and there was never going to be any more studies. I understand later a man was relieved of his duties because some of the other studies had not gone well, but I don't know-this is hearsay. This is as close as I got to a "Fernald [School]-type" study. The University administration said, "Yeah, you can do that. You know you have to follow the rules." There were risks all the time. We had [Handbook 52,] which was a precursor to 10 CFR 20,141and it told about the different doses [from radioactivity intake]. The National Bureau of Standards142 Handbook 52 was the first catalog [of] radioactivity doses, and one of the things that went into ICRP143 [Publication 2 (1959)], which then got codified in the Code of Federal Regulations as 10 CFR 20, which today is still our legal guidance for the use of radioactivity. I didn't do the iron-59 study and they were promising me all kinds of control wine-I could get [it] without the iron in it-I said ?No," I think. And we were going to bring in some money to the University. There was a lot of money-I guess it was the Wine Institute, or whatever the industry group is for the wine growers. And to this day, there is still a large sentiment that consumption of a glass of red wine a day does improve the absorption of iron. There is a lot of data now to support it, not derived from prisoners, though. But that's as close as I got to being a case in your laundry list [of villians]. The other thing I did with humans with radioactivity was with their own radioactivity. During the late '60s NASA144 was going to send astronauts into deep space, and we know that if you are in a weightless environment your muscle mass decreases and you suffer from something called disuse atrophy. We also know that muscle concentrates potassium-40, and fat does not. One out of every 2,000 potassium atoms on this planet is radioactive [and has] a several-billion- year half-life. Therefore, if I put all three of us into a whole-body counter and measure body potassium, the potassium per kilogram of body weight is an indication of your muscle mass. If your surface-to-volume ratio has deteriorated the way mine has, I won't have as much potassium- 40 per kilogram of body weight as I did when I was young and I was a lifeguard. So if we have these astronaut candidates who are on a long flight and they come back with atrophy, we don't know if they are full of water or if they are full of muscle, [as] they have the same body weight. So instead of measuring skinfold fatness, you would do this: dip them in a tank and see how buoyant they are. A lot of these [are] crude tests. "Why don't we do the potassium-40 [(40K)]?," I reasoned; "it's noninvasive." I did several studies with Ed Bernauer, who was the professor of Physical Education [at UC Davis]. He got a NASA grant to do this. It was called a bed-rest study. We had one group of student volunteers who volunteered to be paid to lie around in bed for three weeks. These [students] were in the athletic department. Those were the good old days: We found that some of the students weren't [as] inactive at night as we'd hoped and that their girlfriends were visiting. It interfered with the quality of the study. That's not going to appear anywhere in print. So we had this group of ten [men] who were active athletes, and ten others who were matched as well as we could, who were asked to then sit inactively for a month, and I would count them weekly and get their 40K count and see how it would work out. But [we were doing] a radioactivity [study] in which the people brought their own radioactivity to the laboratory, and we didn't add anything: we just counted what was there and what got lost. That's probably the only study in your list that's going to show human studies on radioactivity where the investigator didn't add the radioactivity, it just [is a natural part of our bodies]. |
| GOURLEY: | Why athletes? |
| GOLDMAN: | Because they have a lot of muscle mass, and people who are astronauts are
generally not flabby AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) members;
they are people who are in their prime, pilots or military [personnel]. And
athletes have a hell of a lot of 40K-they've got a lot of muscle mass-and an
athlete who goes out of training drops off the peak more quickly than someone
like me, who's sedentary and who doesn't have that much potassium to lose to
begin with. The [potassium-40] signal-to-noise ratio would be less ideal, so
that's why they did that. [We found no real 40K loss effect of bed rest.] I also did some studies in which children who had Duchenne dystrophy, which is a kind of muscle disintegration disease, were brought in, and we [would] count their 40K and see how it related to other children, who didn't have it. These were unique studies, in that no radioactivity is administered to the patient: the patient's natural potassium is the indicator that you're looking at, and it's noninvasive testing. I'd put a little speaker in the whole-body counter-you know, you've seen them, it's a big iron box-you close the door and the kid would get scared, so we had a light in there and a little television set and we'd play cartoons for them and have music. These counts were long, maybe half an hour or an hour to get a significant [count] level. So those were about the only human studies I really ever did. Either looking at the natural radioactivity, participating in a planned administration study that didn't happen, or relating the animal studies that I was doing to the human data that was not available. |
Involvement With Army Nerve Agent Toxicology Research (Early '70s) | |
| HEFNER: | In reviewing some of the literature about you, it also appears that you worked at some time with the Army on Dugway [Proving Grounds]145-nerve agents? |
| GOLDMAN: | No. |
| HEFNER: | Help me out here. |
| GOLDMAN: | I had a big laboratory and we had some very sophisticated cell toxicology
models, so toward the end, when the radiation studies were in their final
stages, there wasn't any administration [of radioactivity] going on-just minding
the store, doing the autopsies when necessary. We got into some in vitro146 studies and test tube studies, using cells
and culture.
Again, back to this carcinogenicity thing, we were looking at genetic toxicology in vitro. Remember now, the AEC had become ERDA [in the early '70s], and ERDA had become DOE [in 1977], and DOE had now gotten diversified into, guess- what-fossil energy [(coal, oil, and natural gas)]-and we had this big thing during the '70s of an increased interest in alternative energy sources, whereas the origin of this [Laboratory] was atomic energy. We got interested in coal fly ash and some other things that had a parallel carcinogenetic potential to what we were doing in radiation. So we developed this whole battery of in vitro tests, where you take salmonella147 or you take bugs and you put them in a petri dish148 and then you add some coal dust or some other things and see how many of them mutate. This is a standard battery of these test. We had perfected this during that brief era when [ERDA] was interested in finding out whether other energy sources had long-term health effects. This was at the time [of the] Arab oil embargo and oil was in short supply.149 We were going to increase the use of coal, but we know coal has only two things wrong with it: You can't [safely] mine it and you can't [safely] burn it. So we would try to see what we could do about clean coal and what happens with fly ash. We had discovered that fly ash was carcinogenic-well, it was mutagenic [(causing mutations)] to cells, and therefore the question is then whether it was carcinogenic to people. People are not sniffing around sitting coal fly ash. We found that the smaller the particles, the more they mutated per gram [of ash]. Obviously this was something on the surface of the particles: When you have a gram of small particles, you have a lot of surface compared to a gram of large particles. Unfortunately, the small particles are the ones that get inhaled. It doesn't take an advanced course in imagination to see it. We were onto something. We wrote some papers on it and made the cover of Science Magazine. We started to do inhalation toxicology studies on animals, at the time, that DOE decided this was enough. So all of the funding on that died, as it will again this year with DOE's present budget-assuming DOE survives, because there are some persons that would like DOE to go away. That's one of the plans-to reduce [the] number of Cabinet agencies [and] make it an administration like EPA [(Environmental Protection Agency)] or NASA; but we'll talk about politics after the tape recorder is off. We have this big program of a battery of these tests, and suddenly I find out that the [U.S.] Army is interested in finding a secure laboratory in which to perform some test on nerve agents. Why? We have 50 thousand tons of [nerve agents] sitting around, and we have to demilitarize it, and we don't know if the people who will be involved in demilitarization will be at risk for a carcinogenic potential. We know about the neurotoxicity [(tendency to kill nerve cells)].150 No one ever tested these compounds to see whether they were [also] carcinogenic. I always felt if you got enough of them to get carcinogenic you would die because you had already been zapped by the nerve gas. Well, not quite so-you're dealing with tons of this stuff-a little goes a long way. So I got a contract with Fort Detrick, which is the Army Chemical Warfare Center [in Frederick, Maryland)]. There was a medical research branch, and [the] contracting technical [scientist] who did this was Jack Dacre. He was a New Zealand toxicologist151and he [came to] us because we had all of these tests ready to go, and he had all these compounds ready to be evaluated. So I got this nerve agent money as a "work for others" (is what DOE would call it) program and I was doing a whole series of [tests] on very [nasty (toxic) agents] called VX, GA taboons sarin. These are the worst nerve agents. These are the terrorist dream agents. We had a whole Johnson Island full of 50 thousand tons of nerve weapons in case we ever got into that, and now we [had to] clean it up. We were going to build some incinerators or something like that, and my lab got little bits of it, under very careful scrutiny, even more careful than we had [when working with] the radium and strontium. We were designed to handle things like radium and strontium so we knew about those types of [security/safety] protocols, which most universities don't do. I had special wash-in, wash- out facilities and airlocks [to do] those studies and it brought in a few million dollars to help the Laboratory at a time when the interest in doing these long-term, low-level [radiation] studies was going away. It's gone now. Now we do epidemiology, hoping that we are going to find something, and we don't know enough about the mechanistic studies. We're in transition. There [were] also some of these studies going on at Hanford, at some of the DOE Lab sites; because of the security in there, [they] were places where you could this. You couldn't have such work done on any campus and you couldn't do it in-house, otherwise it wouldn't be credible [because of a perceived conflict of interest]. These were what were called GLP studies (good laboratory practices). They had a complete track record and all that, with very accurate bookkeeping, which we had already done before that phrase had been invented (since 1960 with our radiation studies). We had a daily log, complete records-keeping of that study. [The dog studies] went on, and [as] those [were] finished up-we got quite a few interesting papers out of it and got involved in the toxicology club. We just finished [the nerve agent studies] a year ago and then I stepped down, a fellow named Alan Buckpitt-a toxicologist at Davis-continued, and we wrote them up. That's it-I wasn't at Dugway. I know about Dugway-I know a lot about Dugway. |
Patricia Durbin's Research | |
| GOURLEY: | You were also on the committee to look at Pat Durbin's work-the decision I guess to do the follow-up work? |
| GOLDMAN: | Where did you get that? Is this something I wrote or something you wrote? I wasn't on that committee. I know about Pat Durbin's work but-(sarcastically) is this my résumé that I gave you? |
| GOURLEY: | Some things came from that, and some things came from other sources. There might be- |
| GOLDMAN: | Look- (points to a folder of papers including his curriculum and list of publications) this file is thicker than my security file. |
| GOURLEY: | It might be something someone in the office [(Office of Human Radiation Experiments)] someone thought was true. Ah, I see where it came from now. |
| GOLDMAN: | Where? Show me. |
| GOURLEY: | It's something someone else thought. |
| GOLDMAN: | [No, I was not involved with Pat Durbin's committee]. I have reviewed her work and I spent many a day with Pat Durbin because she's doing metabolic curves of [excreta from] plutonium patients that she'd been tracking. |
| GOURLEY: | Tell us about the review. |
| GOLDMAN: | When you say "review," that has a formal connotation; this is
informal. She and I are sitting in her office and we're reviewing it
together. I'm not part of an evaluation team that has come in to look at her
program. I never was. There is a little incestuous group of maybe 20 of us who
know about this business, so we all have been interacting, all through our
careers-informally and collaboratively.
I was counting some of her monkeys in my whole- body counter. I was reviewing with her some of these metabolic models that she had come up with for the human follow-up studies, where she'd do the excreta analyses with Marilyn Williams, her assistant. The [studies] I was doing with dogs matches what they were doing with people. We would have these periodic get-togethers, and one of the things we would do is that all the dog lovers would get together about once a year. We would have a group meeting during the course of these studies, headed up by the Robley Evans/Wright Langham team, the "foundering floundering fathers" we called them; it was ongoing. The AEC assigned a fellow by the name of H. Dave Bruner152 to be the DOE coordinator on this. I believe he is retired in Florida. I'm not sure if he is still alive. Robley Evans, I heard he's [not well]. His wife died about a year ago and he married Mary Margaret McClanahan, his secretary for 45 years, and he's got a bad heart.153 He must be pushing 90. |
Work With Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Accident (1986-88) | |
| HEFNER: | You also worked on the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.154 |
| GOLDMAN: | Oh, yes. I taught a course called the "Bioenvironment Significance of Nuclear Technology." Marvin's "nukey" course in environmental studies at Davis for 20 odd years. Every spring. In the spring of '86, I was about to do the lectures that week [on] radiation accidents. I was going to dust off my Three-Mile Island155 slides and SL-1156 accident and all that. And it's Fr |
n
December 1993, U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O'Leary announced her
Openness Initiative. As part of this initiative, the Department of Energy
undertook an effort to identify and catalog historical documents on radiation
experiments that had used human subjects. The Office of Human Radiation
Experiments coordinated the Department's search for records about these
experiments. An enormous volume of historical records has been located. Many of
these records were disorganized; often poorly cataloged, if at all; and
scattered across the country in holding areas, archives, and records centers.