Document text
Machine-read from the scan, so expect some errors. Lines that couldn’t be read are left out.
Page 1
.......Health and Medical Physics Consultation Reynolds U ect rica l & Engineering Co., Inc. Chapter I1of the history is very readable. familiarity,Ifind nothing that is vastly different from my recollection. However, 1942-45 was a time inthe Manhattan Project when most people we 'e working hard, and not paying too much attention to documenting priority. I expect that you will have some differences of opinion, not always solub e Of the parts with which I have I have the following comments to offer. I bridle a little at the implication of Full Speed Ahead and Damn the Roentgens. The problem is that the attitude was not uniform through the Manhattan Project. The Plutonium Project under Dr. Stone definitely had higher standards than the rest. You indirectly refer to this later. A t Hanford, we definitely held up the work when safety was i n jeopardy. inline with the views o f Stone-Cantril-Parker, but would not have been tenable perhaps without the 100% support o f E. I . duPont & Co. have not been given enough credit for their share i n making " Safety First " real, not just at rite slogan. Ifor one feel that they ' By contrast, I believe that you could find witnesses t o General Groves saying a t Los Alamos that when he sent soldiers out on a mission he expected some of them t o die, and now he expected the scientists to do the same. You may also recall that two senseless deaths occurred a t Los Alamos--none elsewhere i n the -- Not only pursuit of basic knowledge of biological effects aroused controversy between t h e Army and us. Warren and Friedel l wanted, and made them stick. I n some cases, we insisted on limits lower than Re the refugee scientists and Einstein ' s approach t o Roosevelt, the key man in this was Leo Szil ard,in my opinion. O f course, I knew Szil ard when we were both " hospital physicists " i n England--he working i n London with Chalmers (as in the Szilard-Chalmers effect). What few people know is that Szil ard was interested in the neutron enhancement from uranium dispersed ina moderator
Page 2
as a practical neutron generator for therapy. for him t o know that it would not work with light water, but would work i n heavy water, i f one could get enough. a chain reaction was possible. transmitted from Szilard t o Einstein t o Roosevelt. His work was sufficiently advanced No one else,not even Fermi , was so sure that I am sure i t was this conviction that was There i s some mix - u p here in describing the pocket ionization chambers. main commercial ones a t t h a t time were condensepchambers made by Victoreen Co., essentially a simplification o f the R-meter widely used in X-ray therapy. Wollan and Parker had Victoreen change the wall-thickness and the range t o s u i t our needs.* These became the standard pocket chambers for years. Idon ' t have access t o your Ref. 53, but the merit of using two together was, I think, initiated by me, after we had considerable experience of their leakage performance, e.g., if one in a hundred a t random leaked unacceptably, only one record i n 10,000 would be lost for double pocket chambers. from one's work coat wasn't quite t h a t random. badges were welcomed as a back-up f o r the ionization method. Unfortunately, dropping both That was one reason why film I think some of the references on the early film badges are abit scrambled up, but I can ' t check. IfI were assigning credit it would go as follows: - Wollan instigated work on response flattening of film--the actual work being done by Norm Goldsteih with silver filters. DuPont t o plan the film badges for Hanford. neat trick during the war. with the film. with the security badge. Wollan had me arrange with These were actually silver--a They were also rivetted t o prevent fiddling around Mr. Bugbee of Du P o n t absolutely insisted on having them integral I think this point came from Du Pont - - not Wollan. Meanwhile, within the project we had to settle for poorer badges a t Clinton Labs--sheet metal construction, cadmium filters,but we did tie them into security w i t h code numbers actuated by X-rays. J . C. Hart did wonders in organizing this systemat Clinton Labs and later a t Hanford, where the crew involved a t one time exceeded 120. practical do-ers of this type are just as important as the development scientist. In my view, The caution on the possibility of more nonthreshold types should be credited jointly to Cantril and Parker, because the defining document i s "The Tolerance Dose" of which Sim and I were co-authors. should be included as co-authors in # 8 3 . The published report has the number MDDC 1100 not the CH-2812 which i s an internal Chicago -Health number. A t the very least Cantril and Parker * Wollan also initiated a lot of work on self-reading pocket chambers using
Page 3
parts i n "Health Physics Instrumentation and Radiation Protection" for Advances in Biological and Medical Sciences, Vol. 1 , 1948. I think that when the term "maximum permissible exposure" came into use, the limit was -not the same old 0.1 r per day (or 0.1 rem per day) but was by then 300 mrem per week. cation--the o-way t o go with film badges beginning t o outrank pocket chambers. The reduction by a factor o f 2 (six day week basis) was based on o u r old ideas t h a t time extension lowered the potential harm.* Extension o f time from 1 day t o 1 week was a great simplifiAgain, a great problem i n assigning priority is that NBS Handbook 52 was not published until 1954, whereas the numbers were all set and used within the The connecting paragraph i s not really true. We acted as though established limits gave no deleterious results not acceptable by the average individuals. The possibility of no threshold was considered but not truly accepted i n the sense that you could o r should goto zero risk._I question your history o f Clinton vis-a-vis Hanford, b u t others may have more That very modest scientist ( ! ) Dr. Seaborg, again seems t o claim credit for starting the interest in plutonium hazards, That is total rubbish. From the first time when dribbles ofPu became available bothsthe chemists and the biologists wanted more than was available. Toxicity studies were begun a t Chicago as well as with Hamilton--both long before Seaborg's pronouncement. Also our calculations (as opposed t o biological experiments) on Pu lung dose were done before that time. - t o say about it. Good luck with your very difficult project. * This sounds backwards but isn ' t . With weekly recording, we never had proof that all the dose did not occur on one day, i.e., we accepted an occasional 0.3 rem i n one day, but not 0.6 rem in one day.