Interview with William Bale (Redacted)

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Arthur Roberts and MIT cyclotron How Lawrence, et al, missed discovery of artificial radioactivity by attributing residual activity to faulty Nobel prize went to Joliot-Curie instead Gurwitch and the mitogenetic rays Paul Kahn at Rochester His interest in instrumentation a matter of necessity Looking for lost radium in Strong Memorial Hospital ses of radioisotopes in basic science departments ars - instrumentation development His entry to polonium studies . Metabolism of polonium Acute and long-term effects .Finkel s work on polonium The relative toxicity work Some discussion of Pu metabolism and standards - not very

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4. Re/Publication of war work 5. Review of book plans - chapter by chapter Radium - Vitro1 Chemical Co., near Pittsburgh, used bathtubs Port Hope, Ontario - his visits there 7. Early plutonium alarm device Pluto be came )I Sandy His contacts with the problem - students 9. Current work at Georgia Tech 10. Internal emitter research and standard setting Fallout - his experiences on Advisory Committee 12. Back to Radon and Uranium Miners, then more on fallout 13. Pu and Ra in soil 14. Contributions to basic science

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STAIXWU): Perhaps one of the things we should ' dois go back t o the thirties if be can. prcduced isotopes; it's kind of a forerunner to the Manhzttan District mrk. Of course, you were in the middle of all that at -ester. rn you As you see I have a chapter on the acceleratorhave some reminiscences of the 80-inch cyclotron and the instrumentation which you developed, any references that might be pertinent to how things went, and what,as you remember,was going on i n some other places that had cyclotrons? I guess M I T and Berkeley were the only ones. BALE : Iwas wondering I f you,by any chance,have a copy of a record that Roberts made vhen he vas up a t MIT called, "40 milli curies of iron by half - past four. " Something of that soft. Do you have that deuteron s ; round znd round tothe cycloAmn," urd so forth. It has a ci.lorus about "round and round and rourd go the STAXXARD: \-!here is Roberts n o r ? Kat ional Laboratory. HE cane t o Rochester from PiIf and then vent to Argonne And the last I knew he was there, but I don't h o w anything about him in recent years. . BALE: Half - past four ifI remerrber correctly. That vas about the

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STANWdW: I remember the one at Rochester. That vasa doozy. The "AE~''t u n e d out to be the "Appropriate Expressions Cumittee''. I do need samz things to liven the bdc. the way of anecdotal material and light touches. ahold of that. You don ' t have a copy of the record ? I don't have enough in I ' d love to get - . ~- BALE : Idon ' t have a copy of the record, no. One thing that always amused me,and I think that it ' strue, one vould certainly want toget mre authentic dab before pt ting it dam, it's prabably fran the personal histories, and that is *en Ernest Lawrence hilt his first cyclotron in California. their instruments.Their electro scopes leaked,things like that went They had alot of trouble with on. They couldn't understand it,until over i n France artificial radioactivity r2s discovered. And then they immediately knew what had happened; they were making radioactive isotopes all over the place, ard they didn't hcw it. If an my had even suspected it, it would take hrize for it. %e cycloAiran, as you suggested, hm&iately becam the way to BALE : This was Ernest Lawrence. STARTARD: Approximately r-hen would that. have been? See when the - K o k e l Frize was award&; it was received by Joliot-Curie, I I ' m not sure what the year would be. You could look up and

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thin):. h a t would be the year. STAhThRD: Vhen did they set up the BO-inch cyclotron at Rochester? STANNARD: I meant the one in the physics department. BALE : The one i n the physics department, I ' m not sure what the It happened two or three years after Lee Du Bridge cam to It happened t o be "mitogenetic radiation". as one of his early National =search Council projects, and that was t o see whether there was anything in t h i s "Gumitch-ray" story that had Alexander Hollaender had this SCANNQD: me mitqenetic rays? BAI;E: Mitogenetic radiation, yes. SBNNARD: Oh, for goodness sakes. That WES when Hollaender was d m PALE: Du Bridge had been a t St. Uuis where he w a s with Hughes. They had hen investigating photoelectricity there. They I kli eve so. wrote an authoritative volurrre on photoelectricity. *at mitogenetic radiation was radiation sm place in the ultraviolet, it seerned reasonable to both to ask *ern t o see i f they could detect such radiation by physiczl mth&. was that he would, as a g o d micrabiologist, see i f he could reprcduce the experim=nts that Gum5tch had c m i & aut in U s i a .=nd that Otto Since it w a s suggested rahn wzs czmying out down at Cornell a t that time. M-m, ifi recall cszrectly, published rally remarkable.;

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results.HE apparently could not only find rito genetic rays,that is to muld kill cells. One of the g d sources of these killing rays was said to a l o t of folklore as I recall it. He hac! one of his technicians (happen& to be the wife of Sid Barnes), and that s d to be the reason,= far as 1. know,was the reason that he was really picked outto come to Cornell. He vas a good physicist, but he also brought along somGbody who knev hov t o set up the Plitogenetic experiments. But she sort of lost her touch in going fscm'c~rnellt o Rochester. ever had any demonstration of mito genetic radiation at Rochester. As a mtter of fact, it:seemed t o have been a mss delusion or a t least a delusion of how people can fool themselves because there are mny papers published on it. He ahst put a scientific basis urx3e.r I have a bzck that has agod chapter on Science ' of Radiology,vas probably put out about the early 301s. Tnat woul6 have been about the40thor50th anniversary of the discox*ery of I ' m going t o have ton3t 523 anything about mito genetic radi a - myself always finding interesting things in the external radiation field that I m o t take the space t o do. I had no idea that Du Bridge's fkst F cro j eat Rochester had to do with at .aspect of mitogenetic radiation. BALE : tell, they were supposed to,asI remember, see if they could detect it by photoelectric techniques. Since it doesn't exist, they

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Upd a cyclotron. So they hilt a cyclotrm. RUE: Yes, I think that would describe it adequately. It was b quite an extent a community project because many people around Rochester, many companies around Rochester,contributed to its being put up. weren ' t the nation el sources of funding for experiments of this sort then as exist at the present moment. a was that a.little while later ? I shauld say uses of isotqes for Well,did they begin medical work soon after it was in operation, Medical uses of isotapes, yes. It was pretty sm,btI couldn't I'm not sure whether I would have notebooks; It's possible I would have notebooks that would tell when the first isotopes were used .for medical purposes,but I don ' t know the exact year now. Stanley van mees was also pruninent in the early use of.& cyclotron a t Rochester. doisotopes fran cyclotrons and where? I hod NIT was in there early. I've g& several pa- frun Evans abaut iodine being used, not 131 but s ~ n eof the .Do you have in y feel for when the first use was made of The 8-.haur isotope of iodine was the m e that was cam m ly usedSTA.SXARD: Those papers were inthe 33-34 era,I believe. BALE : The cyclotron at Rochester vasa little later than the one at MIT and was substantially smaller, It.= still a useful cyclotron. STAXNARD: Oh, sure ! sible use of a radioactive isotape in New York at one of the hospitals She had Wen part in an early d mt ration of the p s -

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therr,vhere she r-as vor king either as s technician or es e volunteer, something of the sort. Anyway, she had volunteered to swallor- 6 capsule of radio iodine that was supposed t o be well - sealed an2 w l d just go through the digestive tract for the edification of the cpldience to shw h w this w z s cione. It was to be follcmd with 2 -Geiger counter as sort of a public-viev thing.Unfortunately the capsule ruptured, and she got quite a dose of i d h e in the thyroid, maugh t o worry people because during the time she wasat Rochester,she was always asked,I think,to go t o New York once a year to be examined for any possible changes in the thyroid. STAKXARD: Did she have any? BALE : Not during the time that she was at Rochester. She i s nor: living in England and has some children there. Whether she ' s continued and Doris Cobb working feverishly vith one of the pot as siu n isotopes which came off the cyclotron.I ' v e nor: forgotten vh ich one itwas.. Ib y a ~remaker which one it was? BALE : It would be easy enough to find out, but I couldn ' toff - had this work without Bill Bale. used; and i f anything goes wrong with them,we zre helpless unless WE? can He was the designer ,of the instruments we find Bill znd have him tell us what to do." into the book. Ani I want to get this I think credit should be given where credit is due. BALE : %ne first isotopes that were produced a t Rochester vere sodium and potassium 2nd phosphorous if I remember correctly. And io Zine later,

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but1don ' t think itv as one of the - first ones that vas riade. kt least, in use for experiments. hfore the wzrat lemt, there. radioiron f r a n Lawrence at the big cyclotron in California. And selenium was another one that was rra6e, ~ n dthen but that time, we got was primarily an arrangement between Dr. h'hipple and Ernest Lawrence. Ernest ' s brother John had been an internat Rochester incidentally, but later went out to California and became very much interested in medical aspects of the use of radioactive isotopes. Rochester before this development happened. gut he vasat STAYTARD: As I recall, both you and Leon Miller were concerned i n that iron work. BALE : I ' m not sure about Leon Eiiller. Paul Hahn was the person that did most of the physiological experimental studies. And ina sense, he and Idid most of the experiments together with some nice young lady technicians who worked there. Mary Salmon was one and a girl ..chose last name L-as Hull ig an. STA\TARD: Well, these iron experiments %.ere really z landmark, weren'.t to absorb iron when i t needs i t ? Weren't they the first that showed that the body only chooses . BALE : Vell, yes and no. Of course,there had been lots of xork done on iron, and I think it ' s one of chose subjects in the literature a paper telling you almost anything you r-anted to find.But there L-ere two English investigators named Kchce and k ' n it t lest on. XcAnce r-as a rn and W ttl est on was a wunzn. And abs tall of our early studies used rafioactive iron. they had ob:ained fron very carefully done iron balances rudi es,so

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ie ha2 quite m enomus admiration for these two people. them until efter the my.I never t52 neet klttleston, but I you might say, ard gave a lecture about nutrition of people who had been in the concentration camps i n Germany. And he got up to talk, and he was the thinnest most emaciated looking person that you ever saw, and he said, "I ought to tell you right away that I was not in any concentration cap. That i t ' s just natural for me to be thin Like this. &cause people are forever jumping t o the conclusion that I was personally wnfined in a concentration carrp and essentially starved to death, but I ' mnot. It's just that I'm naturally thin. " And he was. It cas cer rain ly true that use of iron led to a lot of findings that couldn ' t have been found zny other vag, and that showed the power of isotopic techniques for studying metabolic prablens. Do you happen t o remember any of them specific elly ? tryto remember such things as that very much. excreting extra iron but by limiting the jn&&e No, I have alist of reprints on this subject, and 1don ' t . As you pointed out,the s mn the lxxiy had Yes,that ' s what I vas alluding to. And this vas the thing that you could see by looking at BALE : No, again I could look at reprints and find out when they

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Tne reason that, in a sense, I be cma specialist in msu ring ra2ioactivity was perhzps slightly interes?Ang. r - rit ten a Ph.D. thesis on crystal structure,the crystal structure of enamel and on dentine and comparing them with some of the natural apatite miners ls. And I happened t o have next door a man named Steadman, who was studying the spectra of radium, and he was using a Geiger counter, the first Geiger counter that I ever had seen, as a matter fact about the only one I ’ dever seen until I started building them myself. A t leaSt,I got the principle of building Geiger counters from him , The first counter that I ever built resembled the one that h= built. I wzis always interested in having thin windaws so that low energy radiation could get inside. But the first ones I built were for measu ~ i n ~radiation spectra, and then the sarrre things caul? obviously be used to zrreasure radioactivity. When ra2ioactive is ot qes becarre mailable, it becrme sirrple to me.=sure radioac&Avematerials: STIA’XkRD: Essentially,if you were going t o have these to vork L-ith, you had to build them yourself. counters at thzt tim as that goes. mere was no ccmnercial source? or the electronics that went along with th m ZLS faz laboratories even in these pre-world war laboratories ? Was there a lot of …