Interview with Robert Bennett

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1,. Earliest beginnings of nuclear medicine Can find much of it in Nuclear Pioneers - series of Society of 2. His work at Berkeley - John Lawrence Problems of adsorption on glassware at low concentrations 4. More on his career (part not recorded) His wartime work completely away from field 5 Re/Use of internal emitter toxicology research in nuclear medicine (not much in his view) Very little toxicology in nuclear medicine 6. Back t o Berkeley work Taplin studies with rose bengal - big change in application of7. radioisotopes, i.e., organic compounds 8. Development of rectilinear scanning 9. British work - Veal and Vetter 10. Inhalation as mode of administration - Taplin work

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11. A bit about Society of Nuclear Medicine 12. Has health physics been a help to nuclear medicine? Yes, in sense it gave a heaastart - Nuclear medicine is a 14. Ultra sound-vs radioisotope scanning His experience with them Nothing to be gained by going back to Utah now 18. Epidemiology of uranium workers Analogy to asbestos (partial) 19. Late effects peak at different times 20. Re/Plant medical records - not meant for a research study 21. Re/Urinary albumin test and more recent tests for uranium 22. Early radiation protection Benign nodules do not mean anything - and thyroid carcinomas are not very life threatening Should be considered in making risk estimates Must include hypothyroidism in risk estimates 17. Thorotrast, liver sensitivity in Utah studies Too late for meaningful U.S. study of thorotrast cases (i.e.,

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23. Re/Scanning - note: much more about development of scanners, etc. in later unrecorded interview - used in Chapter 10

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Professor of Racliological Sciences m.m: Apparently Blumqart mrke6 for a nunber of years with ~ lant sand maybe kkdicine-type work in humans as a tracer type study. would you say what you just said about E ~ ~ a r taqah so we can qet it dam? h'ell, he was probably the first one we know of who really die hkclear me a lot of papers. cine tcday, I man, he deliberately pt sawthing in. He measured its rate of appearance, did circulation time; a real bonifide, clinical, experimental, diagnostic study. See Myers interview] We think of it in tenns of nuclear mediAnd apparently he worked for a number of years w i t h this because there were around two or three publications, I forget exactly off hand, ht they're spread over a perid of several years. of their awards, say Pioneer in Nuclear Medicine. This is docurrented I think in the Journal of Nuclear bte2.i.--- lbo or three years ago sawone else figured this out,& they gave him one So you might check the Journal of Nuclear pedicine for saw specifics of all this. BENWIT: I think I referenced a couple of his early papers, too, in Blahd, "Nuclear clinical stuff, and then there w a s a hiatus as f a r as I knw when no one did anything until the cyclotron isotopes hamt avzilable. sure, heard of the use of radio-icdine in the Boston area. And then of couse you've already, I ' m SWNKAED: Mno do you think of as the f i r s t fellow t o use radioisotopes either as a eater or for therapy, probably the tracer use w a s first. EENNETT: Oh, well, that was Blu n xp rt. I rean he wzs 10 years ahead of anyMy else. I man', a lot of the people that are irrportant in the field

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were still in grammer school when he was doing his study. Professor of Edicine a t Harvard so he abst stands out alone. He was al read ga He was a ueneration bho was the first one t o use radio-iodine? I thought Blu q art used radon and other naturally occurring radioisotopes. EESNETP: Well, that was the group at Harvard. They used it off the MIT cyclotron, and it is well docmented, too. every text book of nuclear medicine cites that original work. mst of the text barks have that pretfy s+daight. I don't remember the exact details, but almost As far as I know, - It wzs Hertz, Roberts and Evans. STANNARD: Well you ' ve already answered one oflTy other questions. I thought it would be ridiculous for me to spend any appreciable time on nuclear medicine ; i t ' s so well written up, so well - documented.Iff counter.f distinction to this is what is being called internal ernitt(er toxicology is scattered all thrcugh the lite rake and s m of it is not published atall. For nuclear Mcine itself, allI need t o do is give afew references and maybe a few remarks. BEXhZTT: Yeah, the Society of Nuclear Medicine with its nuclear pioneer series .and the like, - ~ ea wards that they make a t the annual meetings which usually have a write - up with them and the like, : focus attention on the back by just lookin? at those. about and passed over and a little bit of favoritism and the like enters into it. Could be the people making the awards w zn t to honor some one person Anybx3y could almost follow the field Obviously som people have been forgotten

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or something.But I think it ' s pretty good source m zte rial. Begi n there . . .t here were people who jumped right on t o the cyclotron and of Chicago. Who was the professor of physiology there? STANNARD : Carlson wzs head of the department for along time, biochemistry was on the use of P-32 in 1939. Berkeley ' 3 6 to ' 4 0 . I could gather enough papers in the literature to give a seminaz, which as you know, surprises people. mst people didn ' tknow there was any radioactive material around until1946. P-32 got a qoai go around in the early 30's and in the I suppose you ' re familiar with this. Some ofit W3.S a t the university Iwasa mjor in biochemistxy a t there was an active program studying P - 32in the formation of phospholipids in ChaLkoffLs lab. group or anything like that ? STANNARD: 1haven ' td one anything about it yet because I thought I ought to Have you had any access to Chaikoff's get some of. these other things settled first. Why doyou think I should especially BENNETT: Well,simply because these were one of the early applications Of tracers. !There weren ' t very many people doing it. Idon ' tknow why you need to STANNARD: Well, this is all on the premise that I ' m going to largely refer to tracer chemist y by selected review references and just enough to remind whoever wants to read it, that these things were around,as you were just saying ; znd were Iron-59 fran the cyclotron physics depa.rtmmt* and Wallace Fenn got potassium. There wasat the program at Rochester, I guess Dr. h'hipple got

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Idon ' tknow who else got things. ? quess Staff Warren got s a th*s,ht he was more interested in other things st that time. BENh',PTT: Yeah, there were just scattered people doing experiments, I remember one Saturday morning we injected radio - iodine into a dog in Berkeley. It was a big deal,I ' m not sure what it really proved except that it went to his th g roid but...It was sort of a superficial gross demonstration. quite dramatic. Of course, they did some work with organic things; that is, the biological applications because people like C haik off were interested and eager to get involved. Most o f it was just straight chemistry,and they were deeply involved in the problems this has gotten,but the problems of working with very dilute solutions of radioactive materials took Blot of wrk, con- Zlot Of the because of the problems of adsorption, the necessity of using carriers, hether the carrier should be the same e l m t or a nearby element in the peridic table. These were in a way rather big problems and they had to be solved before I ; don ' t know what kind of reviews and write - ups you yo on to a lot of other things. STANNARD: These were exactly the same problems that the internal emitter toxicology people had to face. vhen you injected it or inside of a test tube when you want t o precipitate Yeah,, you couldn't leave everything on the inside of a syringe it and measure it or something. what today would be considered very simplistic techniques but they were very critical at the time. So a lot of effort went into There's one question that I ' v e been struggling with,

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knowing I have only B finite space and tl me,is how much effort to put in I am not an instrumnt m,soI ' m going to get help. write one on field in smt ation. how,has said he ' d write a chapter on laboratory instruments. been plenty written on instrumentation j and the only idea here would be t o have major quantum jumps emphasized where a new technique - cameL along that made it possible to do things that either were very difficult before or made it possible to do things that couldn ' thave been done at all before the technique was developed. general methodology was so well documented in the tracer chemistry liter a tUe that I wouldn ' t try to spend very much time except on specialized techniques like inhalation expsure and the mre toxicologically oriented techniques *at haven't been quite as well documented. Does t h a t mdke sense t o you? BENNEIT: Yeah, because really, I think the only part that ' s in pr tant is I ' m going to have a chapter or maybe two chapters on One on f i e l d instrume?tation, and one on laboratory htruments. Anc! Hmd Andrews, Wfio you m y or ma17 not Ido plan to do that, ' butIt ' h ought thar thej the point that this was am j or step at that particular period. And it was covered, done by lots of people and published in lots of papers. But it was something that chemists and biologists had never been confronted with before. And so they had to pause and argue and ex peri3ent and develop [mestion asked abaut his career. First part not reConied.1 Then I decide to go to mica1 schcol and my medical school years r e a l l y had nothing to do with the field e are discussing. b do with it. standmint, I bcs ca-rpletely out of the field. And even my military service had nothing So s m of these very exciting years f r m the military

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I participated in it [as an udergraduate?] at Berkeley which w a s of course, as every bol y knows,a very excited and exciting place at that time.Everybody was into it,The faculty weren ' t a whole lot older than the students. in. I figure s m of my assistant professors were only 5 or 6 years older than I was. So, it was fun.But then I dropped it completely for Lawrence really recruited alot of young rn awhile. So the next phase, the big one, I had nothing to do with, I suppose I would have been a logical person to get into the Manhattan District ; butin the usual military sense,I ended up with the amphibious forces h the Navy in the Pacific. I couldn't have been farther away! STAh'NARD: But then you wound up at Rochester. BENNETT: Well, then I came back to Rochester,and there were Opportunities to really get back into research and medicine at the sametime (NEW TAPE, #SOB). Rochester was just a chance to get back to what I was doing at Berkeley added to what I learned in medical school and to get h to cl kh.1 problems, STANNARD: So, it would hardly be said that the big business of the Manhattan District got you into something that you would never have qiven a thought to had you not been involved. Bill Nem, arid I think, Tq?y toa cerkin extent. There are people like thzt, for example, Aser Rothsteh, You might be able tonm BENNETT: Well, of course, many of the people around herec %ey Were early people in nuclear medicine j all joined the field in46. Before the w a r there had been John Lawrence, and only two clinical groups I ' m really aware of. %ere were John Lawrerce's q a u p

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at Berkeley and the people at Harvard.That was about i:. mmence we can link to? BENh'ETT: Well, there was a fellow named Chapman and ... X ' m not too good at recalling names there. They were people I never really worked with. -sIIANNARD:: Well,letE ask you, Bob, (mawyou'd like a little time to Yau say the people a t Hanard, was there a nam there like John think it throucrh). leaders in nuclear medicine think of ways in which the internal emitter toxicology w rk,particularly during the earlier years,.laid the foundation for what ye now think of aS the practice of nuclear medicine? Can pfrcm your vantage pint as one of the BENIElT: Most of this work used m Y l munts as tracers. very toxic, especially if they had a short half-life. that about some of them now, like I-131, we have a much healthier respect for. They were really not But' some of the earlier assumptions were fairly reasonably valid. They haven ' t proven t o be any toxicological hazard or anything. STANNARD: Well,I ' musing the term toxicology very loosely. My job i s primarily those experiments whose end result was effects rather than tracer f%ings, buti ' m going to have to include ; and want metabolism as we were saying a little earlier, the movement through environmtal pathways, etc. m r k to get it done, to get it organized md ready even though it was on include, alot of the wrk on This field of nuclear medicine had to do a lot of prelimhay\

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the like Hamilton reilly hit that hard.He never told me this, bt I alwalrs ha2 a feeling t h a t he felt that with the cyclotron there he had a running start so he w z s going to find the magic bullet for cancer, And he went through screening isotopes in rodents at an absolutely terrific STANNARD : AS I understand, three rats per experiment. BENNETT: Yes,but he did so many experiments that he used up a lot of rats. Now there was that approach. And perhaps in a little less hectic fashion bya good many other people who looked at say P-32 or Sr for bone turmrs. mey got a feel for hm rmch P-32 you could give before you knocked out all the bone marrow, …