Interview with William Spiers - Synopsis

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1. Early days of radium in U.K. and Canada Canadian radium was much cheaper than Belgian They had about 3 grams at Leeds in 1935 Parker at Manchester 2-3 years before he stated there Patterson preeminent in Manchester Concern about losing radium because of its great value Concern about amounts of radium delivered - i.e., needles not Also purity - dealers let mesothorium get by Hard to measure - especially with gold leaf electroscope 2 . Measurements at MP level, could use a thick walled carbon electroscope (iR per week for 35 hr. week) The Seibert condensers - homemade Pinned on Ra workers, surgeons, nurses Most readings in 0.5 R/week range or ca. 25 R/year (partial Need to handle quickly to keep dose down 3. Transport of radium - primitive 4: Computation of dose in a cylindrical applicator Parker in 1936 - Patterson, Parker, and Spiers [Brit. J. Radiol. IX, Aug. 1936, 4 8 7 - 5 0 8 1 Patterson - clinical aspects Parker - basis for dosage system Spiers - raciation field in a continuous cylindrical

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Based on work by Seibert His reunion with Parker in 1965 Patterson - Parker - tremendous systemization of the work so could be taught to clinicians. Lindeman electrometer - made for measuring starlight Use of amber for insulation Use of cylindrical applicators for skin cancer Small applications, also lums vulsaris Finsen Institute - Danish propensity for suntan Epitheliomas on top of lupus areas In 1957 he built a portable high pressure ion chamber to do population surveys in Scotland (natural background) Did Dundee - old red sandstone Edinburgh - carboniferous limestone Aberdeen highest, Dundee next, Edinburgh lowest (difference between highest and lowest about 2 0 m rads/yr.) Later survey according to geology Problem sorting out cosmic ray effects from local effects 9. British Committee on Radiation Units Book - "Guide to Measurements of Gamma Radiation" Need to have 12 rn rads/yr. change to say it is significant "As long as a piece of string" Depends on so many factors English calculation of average dose

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Toward end of Ra story in Britain 12. Radiation levels in other areas of England Cornwall - extremely variable - from 50 to 300 m rads/yr in Still liked the high pressure chamber Instrument comparison at first Houston meeting - see book from13. 14. The Bureau of Radiation Health video series The Evans arc method was one of the best early methods First whole body counting conference was in Leeds in 1956 1961 - IAEA - Second whole body counting conference Hursh paper in Supplement 7 - Spiers enthusiastic about it - polemic with Krebs Some geological overtones 17. ICRP and dose calculations - bone The 10 micrometers business - origin of the decision [It was Good story of how it came about - at surface would be infinite 18. Dosimetric vs. toxicity ratio approach

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19. Role of initial high 6ose 20. His retirement routine vs. mine 12 research papers, teaching Counting fallout from the Chinese bombs and Russian tests - 21. Their counterparts for Sternglass

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DR. WILLIAM SPIERS & WIFE, KITTY Actinide Symposium, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin Manhattan Engineer District [ I t did fora while, N.S.]. S PIERS : Ina way we couldn ' t start at a better point than Dr. Abbot's paper, a s For this book, the contract calls for emphasizing the work done during the Let ' stalk about radium a s far as the U.K.is concerned, because this discovery of radium in Canada in the early 1930's meant that as far as U.K. was concerned,.- .- .-we had a n abundance of radium (an abundance for those days). Canadian radium was coming into our country at prices from 5to 10 pounds i n Leeds, I went tothe infirmary from the University where I had been teaching That ' s five or seven times less than radium (Belgium). For example, from half a milligram upto 10 or 20. primitive B - unit, so we had about 3 grams of radium in 1935. Many of the hospitals in Britain were i n much the same sort of state. We then had about one gram of radium,inthe form of needles; anything We also had a 2-gram radium bunit, very had access to relatively large amounts of radium needles. were beginning to recruit physicists. three years before Idid. - with .an international name, had been working Parker had started in Manchester, two o r i n London for probably the best part of ten years There were a few other people about the country, not many, buta few, and there were,in most of these centers, youngish radiotherapists colleagues i n Manchester, I suppose, were in a way preeminent, but there were others, and they were very keen on setting up radium treatment as quantitatively as they cvuTd, so they were dead keen on calculation and measurement. atthe cancer hospital. of which.Patterson and his In our old records I read that there was more concern about losing radium beceuse i t was so. vel u able,and they thought they better have e physicist to help them. So the concern i n those days was, in a way, more for protecting the

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radium than protecting the operator. There was also a great concern, where the physicist could help, in the quantity of radium bought because sometimes the needles weren't very well filled, etc.,and you could do this with physical tests,and also there was concern about the p u r i t y of radium because mesothorium was being sold by dealers instead asit should be. So I - still have i n my possession some certificates from radium bills and others guaranteeing the absence of mesothorium. Of course, t o Prove its presence or its absence was exceedingly difficult because there was no Or, you could perhaps buy radium that wasn't as free of mesothorium easy analysis ; no crystals. You could only do i t by absorption - the difference between the high energy thorium 2.6 MEV and the low energy radium, so this was a fierce problem. Ihad seen the equipment they used forit,butit was primitive in the extreme. Also,at that time, nearly all the measurement was with golf - leaf electroscopes literally. People, of course, laughed at this,but I did all my early protection work i n 1935 witha thick-walled carbon electroscope. I could easily measure down tothe level of what was then the permissible dose rate, very easily,that was R per second. You probably remember this figure. One Ra week for a thirty - five hour week = lom5 R per second. could easily cope with that, provided you constructed i t properly. early protection work was done like that. Very soon we turned to.Seibert condensers which perforce had t o be homemade. I either made myself, or got made, very small cylindrical chambers. I made with my own hands some brass ones, which had a volume of about one mil,.and pinned these on to radium workers, radium surgeons, nurses, etc.I ' v e got a little book a t home with many, many records of our work, i n about 1938, i n which the majority of us ( I measured them once a day a t the most, usually once per week) were i n the range of 0.5 R,per week, or sometimes upto 1. On the average, I should think

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about 0.5 is e sort of steady level.That ' s 25 R a year. about that level for upwards of 10 years, so my partial body dose, because we were abit shielded,up t o 1945 was probably 250 rads,or something like that. I ' m sure we worked t o I t ' s very interesting to look back on those days because we were very careful t o handle quickly, not t o overexpose we had these primitive condenser chambers t o a week, which you will recall was not called a tolerance,with all that implies. ourselves, a n d consciously since keep be 7 ow one Roentgen a permissible level,it was called Transport of radium was, of course, primitive. When we got a new gram of radium, i t was brought t o us by a personal carrier in a suitcase shielded w i t h about 1/10 of an inch of lead. This was the way things were done. I once took 800 milligrams t o and brought 1200 back, by train, and I got about 1.5 R on the journey. regarded as a tolerable way of going on. after all this meant that by the time the war came off for us,but by the These were things which were I think the next step from that,and time the war was over, there was no Manhattan Project i n England. alot of people about with experience of measuring a t permissible levels,as they were then. I started looking at the calculations made by Edith Quimby, particularly ; Manuel i n London, and of course, Parker i n Manchester. see Parker and work with him(I was over there for a few weeks and worked together),I had calculated the radiation field inside a cylindrical applicator, which.I found could be done with first order elliptic integrals. When I got t o Manchester, Herb had been calculating this on the 20 in.slide rule by numerical methods, and h e ' s never held it against me. and there were papers which we published - well,Ihad one third of it,and Patterson had the c7inical third,and Herb had his third, and this was published But there were So right from the beginning i n 1935 I started at the infirmary, By the time I went t o We got on extremely well together,

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SPIERS: I t ' s \*cry interesting.Ididn ' t see Herbert Parker again until 1965 because he came over here and worked with great distinction inthe Manhattan Project. He wrote t o me in 1965 and said could he come and see When he walked into my office the years fell away, andit was the same Herbert Parker - and presumably the same Bill S piers. We got on just as when we had seen each other a good many times. We've seen each other many times since, and Margaret, h i s wife. All this was really based probably upon Manuel's calculations and Seibert, because Ralph Seibert had done the ring source in 1922. This sounds unbelievable. You could integrate the ring source on its axis with elliptic integrals. As far asI know,that's about the last of the analytical expressions. waited until you got computers and could d o Monte Carlo calculations. After this you I really can ' t emphasize Patterson and Parker too much. I t was a tremendous system at iz ation of the work, which meant i t could be taught. so,but could be taught to clinicians.Patterson ' s idea was that.it should be so Forgive me f o r saying and clinicians could be taught to handle these things. I was always abit of an experiment a list, and I was dead keen on making measurements. I had also worked witha very good electrometer made by Lindemann (Idon ' t know whether you are familiar with this), but Lindemann made a beautiful electrometer of such asize, about 5or 6.centimeters diameter and about 3 small cy1 in dr ical things which could be bolted on to the end of a telescope t o measure starlight - with a photo cell.That was allit was made for. You could control its sensitivity, and i t proved t o be a very good instrument for measuring changes of potential on these small ion chambers. I said to Bob , as I say, homemade ones about an inch long and a half a n inch wide, made in brass, amber insulation,that was another thing that helped i n those days - we got away from sealing wax and got on to amber,and

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ids a beautiful insulator. eventually the smallest one t h a t 1 made was only 3 millimeters in diameter and about 10 millimeters long. This was small enough t h a t you could use i t on these radium applicators, which were used a great deal to treat skin cancer. because i t s radius was small, you could measure close-up t o radium sources and since the smallest distance for an applicator was 5 millimeters and the majority was about 10, you could measure a t t h a t distance without making a big inverse square law correction. calculating the chamber response from the energy released in the chamber wall, again, of course, using elliptic integrals since they were cylindrical chambers. This meant that with fair confidence I could begin to test the Parker-Patterson, Igota mechanic t o make me some small ones, and - I published a paper on this in 1941. Again, which we would use tolay the radium out, and if we got a hot spot here,you could take a bit off. You could calculate how much t o take off, or ifit was a low spot,you could add some. Later we did this for interstitial radium implants, because there was no'doubt about it,at ' ihat time (this was before the second World War) in these Norman cities,there was a lot of skin cancer. of malnutrition ; people were small in stature. There was quite a lot of lupus vulgaris (I think it was); i t was the one which spread, particularly over the face.Alot of fens in lj te was used. You know the Danish There was alot for this,and the British physicians used t o use alot of ultraviolet light to ir rid i ate these people, and they also not only treated the lupus, but they would s it their patients around a couple o f carbon arcs to give them U.V. and build up vitamin D(to treat rickets).It was a but interesting period .to live in. Copenhagen Finsen Institute was the great center You often got epitheliomas on top of these UV irradiated lupus areas, so the non mode which the Patterson formulation dealt with was by no means an academ c exerts e.

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STANNARD: I realize that. I'm constrained by my title and just the size of the enterprise to talk about internal emitters almost entirely,and I regret to have t o leave off some o f these things o f concern primarily with measuring external radia - tion,but Howard Andrews (Idon ' t know whether you know him or not)will cover some generalities. Kathren will do on the field and monitoring instrumentation, and Howard Andrews is doing the one on laboratory instrumentation. That ' s the place where I anticipate we can putin some of these early instruments that were used both ways (for both external and internal We have two chapters on instrumentation; one w h i c h Ron checking when say needles were pushed into tongues and into breasts sort of thing …