What the document says
T. L. Shipman of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory wrote this report on health, safety and biomedical research at the laboratory. The readable opening looks back at the war years. Los Alamos was not meant to be a permanent installation, and the laboratory had one objective, to develop an atomic weapon the military could use at the earliest possible moment. Army physicians provided excellent medical care, but little could be built up in industrial hygiene, the work of protecting people from hazards on the job. No program of biomedical research was set up at all.
The report says this held true even though Los Alamos had an outstanding group of physicists, chemists and other top ranking scientists on site, along with their equipment, which made it a logical place to run experiments in biology and medicine. At first the laboratory's director felt such experimental programs did not belong at Los Alamos. The assumption was that laboratories in Chicago, Berkeley and elsewhere would gladly take on research chores alongside their own work. The report calls that assumption fallacious, meaning it turned out to be wrong.
Staff knew from the outset that a number of workers at Los Alamos would handle plutonium, a radioactive material, in one form or another. So the laboratory had to develop methods quickly: how much of it could be permitted in the air, how to sample the air, and how to work out how much a worker had taken into his system. Shipman writes that laboratories in other parts of the country did not seem too interested in providing those answers. A public announcement about B-17 flyovers is attached, along with the memo behind it.
Most of the scanned pages after the first are blank or unreadable in this copy, so the account above covers the readable opening section.
Key points
- 01During the war there was no intention that Los Alamos would become a permanent installation, and the laboratory had a single objective, an atomic weapon for military use as soon as possible.
- 02Army physicians provided medical care, but there was little room for industrial hygiene work and no attempt of any sort to set up a biomedical research program.
- 03The laboratory's director at first felt experimental biology and medicine programs should not be run at Los Alamos, on the assumption that labs in Chicago, Berkeley and elsewhere would handle them.
- 04Because workers would handle plutonium, the laboratory had to quickly set permissible air concentrations, build air sampling procedures, and find a way to measure what a worker had taken in.
- 05Shipman writes that laboratories in other parts of the country did not seem too interested in answering those plutonium questions.
- 06A public announcement of B-17 flyovers is attached to the report, issued in response to an attached memo.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy, OpenNet declassified document archive, OSTI ID 16111545. The summary is written from the document’s own text. Old scans can be hard to read, so check the original for anything you plan to cite.