Interview with T R Noonan - Synopsis

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Radiopotassium for experiments in Physiology Department with Problems of contamination with radiosodium - need to separate the - Work with animals then human subjects on K+ transfer They still had to do chemical determination in order to know the - Re/Saving the platinum from the chlorplatinate - Others working with radiopotassium - No effects work - all tracers - The experiments on themselves - Sensitivity at calling UTAEC a llFarmll - Missed an opportunity to study s o i l , plant, animal chain

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Mr. Noonan ' s Home i n Oak Ridge April18,1979 ST AHN ARD : This is a discussion with Tom Noonan,formerly Rochester and later Oak Ridge,about the early days of the uses of radio - isotopes from cyclotrons and also anything else he wants to talk about,including work at what used to be the "U.T. Agricultural NOONAN: I was born in Buffalo, Yew York, in 1912. Attended Middlebury College from wnich I was graduated in 1934. STANNARD: What was you major there ? NOONAN: Chemistry. I took a pre-med course, but chemistry was the major. Attended the University of Buffalo Medical School from 1934 through 1939, with two years as a student assistant in physiology. In 1939 I had the Food luck to go to the University of Rochester in D r . Fenn's department, and in late August of that year began the work with radioactive potassium. The first experiment was actually under-way when Germany invaded Poland, ane Dr. Fenn wrote a little marginal note on the STANNARD: It didn't stop the cyclotron. . NOONAN: No, it dien't stop t h e cyclotron at that time. The isotopes that we used were produced over at the University's Physics Department. A man named Dr. VanVorhees used to bring them over late at night. He came into the Lab 2nd he was very, very quiet - he was not like Hoyt didn't click his heels. He j u s t came in and handed over a small amount of potassium that had been deuteron b orr bard ed.K - 4 2 was the active ingredient.It was rather low specific activity potassium. Ne would get maybe a hundred or two hundred milligrams of the material. STANNARD: How long had it been in the cyclotron?

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NOONAN: I can't remember now, Newell. It was presumably e fairly long perioz of time, maybe 12 - 14 hours or so. idea. He realized that when even the purest of potassium salts were bombarded,you had ectivation of any sodium con tar in ant,and all potassium hes a little bit of sodium in it. potentially converted to a radioactive form, wherees only the K-41 would go from an inactive to an active form. Therefore, you could All of the sodium is get substantial contamination with radioactive sodium. This may have been the cause of some misinterpretations of some early work. At any rate, the potassium was precipitated as the perchlorate and then heated with a little manganese dioxide to convert it to STANNARD: You had to do this right away? NOONAN: We did that right away. Dr. Van Vorhees came in, and I w a s unmarried at the time and usuzlly started about nine or ten o'clock at night. We precipitated the material and then heated it, and then in the morning he did a Goo tch filtration on a glass filter. In t h e morning we would dissolve it and make it up to a volume, take a n aliquot for a standard,and use the rest for various experiments. We began working with rats and extenced the work to a few other species, and finally in the finale we did measure exchangeable potsssium in humans, with Loren Mullin s, Dr. Fenn,and I being the subjects of the experiment. STANNARD: This was in red cells? NOONAN: It was in all tissues,initielly, With Bob Dean,we did some work on in vitro uptake in human cells and in animal cells .-- STANNARD: This, of course, greatly simplified the whole business of measuring potassium transport, even though it was hard to get the

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stuff,purify, - it, enc? separate it at night. The procedure must have been much shorter than the old Zi rect chemical determination. NOONAN: W e always ti6chemical determinations too. know specific activity not just total activity. Scholl and Bennett method, which involved precipitation as a chlo rp latinate.In those days chlo rp latinate was an expensive che mica1,and we used to recover the platinum. it at es. 1.t was a nio do metric method. [Good old Rochester traditions,N.S.l STANNARD: That went for quite some little while. .NOONAN: That covered the two years that I was at Rochester before You didn ' t trust the isotopes that much? W e hed t o do it because t o measure exchange you need t o So we used the old We saved all of the pre c ip - the war came. using radio - isotopes in research. I guess you were the first person I ever knew that was NOONAN: May well have been, although Jean Mane ry and Bill Bale ' did some work with sodium before I got there. STANNARD: Well, now, the instrumentation which you used was what ? NOONAN: Bill Bale hac! built it,and he was the only person who knew how t o keep it operating. Although A 1 Young sort of had a talent along this line. Remember A l ? NOONAN: Usually if something w e n t wrong w e would go down stairs - Bill was a floor below us in the Radiology Ce part rne nt.It would be primitive apparatus today,but it worked pretty good. STANNARD: Thclt's one of the things1 would like t o be able to emphasize inthe book - even though things weren ' t as easy,that the

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equipment was certtinly far from unreliable. clumsy and non - transistor i zed and all the rest ..... What would you say about the limits of detection of the equipment you had then versus what we have now ? the counter with a solution of saturated potassium acetate. As I recal1,it used to Five about 60 counts per minute. in the range of 10 counts per minute and on up. One of the- big complications, of course, was it being low specific activity, we had to give pretty high doses of potassium, so we weren ' t doing a true tracer experiment. We were measuring the distribution of an injected slug of potassium, and this -did color the results. It may have been I don't really know. I remember we used to standardize Ke were counting STANNARD: Was that cyclotron producing other isotopes? NOONAN: It seemed t o me it was at the time - it seemed to me it was doing some iodine. Walter Mann was around then, and he (Stannard: Was Dr. Whipple using iron?) He was in iron, yes, Kahn and Whipple were going on iron. STANNARD: Didn't they find that.really key thing that the body doesn't take up iron unless it needs it? NOONAN: I.think it came out of that just about that time. STANNARD: Was Van Vorhees your only contact ? It wasn ' t Sid Barns at all ? NOONAN: For our pzrticular project it w a s Van Vorhees, with Lee STANNARD : Atthe same time,there was a cyclotron at Berkeley. NOONAN: Yes, Greenberg and his group were working and had actually done some work with radioactive potassium before we got into the field. Then Hevesy did a rabbit and a few frogs. STANNARD: Where did he get his? NOONAN: It was somewhere in Europe, I don't know just where. He was

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i n Copenhagen at the time,I believe. STA ~ ARD : Was it Lewrence that he2 been at the cyclotron ' inthe middle 30's,was it? (Noonan: Just about then) So really some of the very early biological app lice t ions were at Berkeley and Rochester and i n Denmark. STANNARD: This was,in a sense,the birth of the field of tracer NOONAN : There was no effects work at all. wouldn ' t have been allowed to take the radioactive potassium. NOONAN: We didn ' t have the foggiest notion of how much we were getting. We were worried because we couldn ' tget enough counts. We reel i zed, again it was Dr. Fenn that did the thinking on that thing.He realized that he never could get counts enough i n plasma, short of bleeding the person to death, so he collected urine and postulated that the specific activity in the urine would be close to the specific activity I suppose today we probably Yourselves? D o you remember anything about how much you took? of the plasma. After about four hours it would be very close to the specific activity of plasma.. So w e would drink the material (I think w e drank it) and then collect urine and boil it down and boil it down and boil it down. STANNARD: It seems to meI can remember some of those processes. NOONAN: You probably did.No,I think you had left before wegot on the human experiments. You left in ' 3 9 around the middle of November. STANNARD : That ' s right. We arrived in Atlanta in early December. NOONAN: W e had just gotten into that. Dean wzs there.Mullin s came the next year.Mullin s came in40. Lorraine Hague was i n on the STANNARD : Maybe that ' s about all you want to say about this part ?

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NOOKAN: That covers it pretty well. the work up a t UT farm (1'11 continue to call it) o r CARL? Is there anything that we didn ' t cover this morning about NOONAN : Don ' t call it a farm. NOON AM : I t ' s fighting words. INOONAN: No,Idon ' t think there is very much that we didn ' t cover. As I said,the very early stuff - I think Com aris the best source. that the program was alot broader than I had realized it was,,., NOONAN : Did ' quite a lot of good effects studies and a ' lso distribution and excretion in large animals. any work with plants ; work. By the time I got there,there was none. The plant program had gone to genetic effects. dicin't tryto do enything with plant uptake, which I think was One thing I certainly didn ' t know was that they had done Idon ' t know that there was very much real good uptake Mutation breeding type After Nate Hall got there they, as far as I know, The techniques were getting better all the time. It could ha've developed into - this is a confidential STANNARD: Nothing i n here will be used verbatim without chance for NOONAN: .Sure. 1just felt that they missed a good opportunity t o \g eta soil, plant, animal chain, because the plant people weren ' t

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interesteZ o r equippe2 o r something to qo into th8t particuler area. STANNARD: It seems as though the so-called radio ecologists, I ' m going to see Stan Auerbach tomorrow morning,aren ' t looking at the whole chain - they were tending to look at concentration factors and specific organisms. looking at a chain that is of damn little importance. - . [ N.B. - I believe this refers to the tulip poplar forest floor detritus cycle or the " hollow log " community project,N.SJ T h e other thing, Newell, is that the people there are