Interview with Lauren Donaldson

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Ih TER VIEW WITH LOREh' DONELLDSON - SYNO ~ SIS Last paper - just recently - many thousands of fish later Convincing others of need for long term studies Evolution of concepts of special strains, etC Lab experiment vs total ecosystem - thinking of Columbia River as a system was new - His book on fish culture - Rat population on Engebi Island - Resistance of Chinook population to radiztion - "equivalent of Sensitivity of ecosystems Buffering capacity of the sea A reservoir of iodine Waterfowl work on Columbia Ducks on ponds that were contaminated Stafford Warren - support from him on ecological work Ecosystem vs laboratory research His role in Japan - gathering tuna, etc, after Bravo shot Mercury story - sea water contamination Orange peelings - chelation

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- Nore on experiences there - Kermit Larson - Hanford - role of Parker and Kornberg - Frank Lowman and Puerto Rico - More Pacific - Johnson Island, Bikini natives - Fern Lake work - Neoplasms in plants - no relation to radiation The "homing" of salmon and trout - See Bill Shell for NRDL reports

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Unlv ers iry 6f Fe shing ton College of Fisheries STANNARD: We just started total kab it about the criteria for deciding on when a radio biological effect had or hadn ' t happened. DONALDSON : Idon ' t know how you wish this conversation to go but since we just came from the pond where they were working. Of course we had t o develop some facility like that. We had t o develop stocks of salmon that we could have under our control. Once we got the facility,got the stock, developed thern, then e were ready t o do cq let e life cycle for several generations. exposure, 'release, send them to sealand then recapture them back. ~ r o mthat ini&Aalplan (actually it was an extrarely egotistical stat mt to call it a plan) in 1943, w e labored away until the tex run d' ppr was published this last year. That involves thausands, hundreds of thousands of fish. Do you have a copy of it or a reference ? . DONALDSON: Well, I have copies of the references. 1'11 give you the [S- discussion of plans for book anitted, N.S.1references i f you wish. STANNARD: I had a series of specific questions that have DONALDSON : I have those right here. STANNARD: Let ' s reminisce just ali ttl qb it first. Hy impression from reading Proving Ground and from many of the things you've said is that you had constantly to convince people both in the university and inthe Manhztzan District,then la rer on i n AEC of the need t o

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& lonq-te,m studies. They always wanted to sip off 52y: "Ithink DONALDSON: Yell,I think we came along in a difficult period of th=, really ahead of the en vi rom tal era when people began t o look at the whole ecosystem as a unit,if you wish,or look at whole life cycles. You remember the state of the art in research was do a single experiment and then publish a paper on some of them take six weeks o r six months,and you know all there was Run quick and f i n d out what the D 5 O ' s were, do a quick nutrition stuey, to know abut the subject! We didn ' t have the broad-breasted turkey,and we didn ' t have Donaldson trout End saimon and what not. That is, the manipulation of a population. We didn ' t have people ' who were thinking outside of laboratories. They weren ' t thinking in terms of total spsteas. the Columbia River as aunit and note inpact on the whole river. The actual developrent of strains of fish took Applied genetics was really just in its infancy about then. Those concepts were just evolving. When w e came along and began to talk about the Pacific, the concept wasto go out, shoot a big firecracker, run back home and it was all over with. We were essentially alone in blame has t o go directly back to AEC or Department of Defense and the O f caurse,when r he testing program started in We really could never get support for char. I guess the principle I think it was just that timing was bad. I b n ' t think people purpsely were bypa~sinqmrtant thin~s. =e a few that were.

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,SAN%€D: Ahead of time by about 25 yez.5. DONALDSON : Yes. But in retrospect, people now are coming along and doing environmental impact statements on everything from here to there and back again in a ridiculous way because I think much of that information i s now available. It wasn ' t available 35 years ago. But too many people now don ' t read. They've forgotten how t o read. STANNARD: Well, that ' s the reason for my taking on rhis writing project in part,not that it ' s going t o make anybody read. Sometimes I think I ' m crazy to take this on. Did you find the outline and the question ? STA.NNARD: I might aska very general question first. From what you ' v e seen of the outline, do you think it ' s possible for m e man Witha little help, perhaps alot of help fran m y pople like you, b u t with a little help CJan instrunu3ntation peaple writing chapters, t o do it. What I wrote was an outline of the book I ' dlike to read.I ' m not sure it ' sthe book I ' m going to be able to write, especially.with an invalid wife and having t o pay nursing care anytime I ' moff anywhere doing these things. DONALD S ON : I guess I ' m not the one t o answer that.I ' venot much involved in writing a book on fish culture. I've v ric ten parts of books. At the present time I ' m be published by Academic Press as soon as Iget some pieces in.

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ular emphasis on the cell limits STANNARD: Well, one of the reasons I think that DOE and Bttelle are willing t o supprt scmebody to do t l u s is that they're finding just the thing that you mentioned, that the current generations But i t ' sto cover problems around the world with particcoming i n have no idea of what ' s back there in the literature, what is the tradition and body of knowledge that they ' rebuilding on, reinventing the wheel. DclNALDsoN: Ijust papped part of the things frm this laboratory done into boxes. That's j u s t a part of it. Here's another part cim here in these boxes. longer than others. obj e czi vit y that ' s quite unique in scientific research. All ofthe original people that started with mein 1943 are still all actively STANNARD: That ' s as tom ding ! That's great. I cpess the only claim to farce is we've been a t it mere's been a continuity both i n pcple ant? retired but they ' re still plugging along. They show up. Dick Foster is still at Hanford and working away. early in the morning for some reason or other. Gets here about 5 o ' clock. Kelly Banham is here. He cares

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A r t &lander is here. An2 of coarse Al Seymour. Fr&& laman an2 on and on. But :hese key people have been plugging along fort nes e many years. So there ' s a human resource here that is unusual.With the other labor a - tories the direction has changed a dozen times. with the weather. STANXAIZD: Kel1,they seem to have also changed their research interests, too. They have eone away fran what was really pertinent a t the tim and gone into mlecular biology or biophysics. I have as mch inteest in basic recham'sms as anyone else, but there are a l l kinds of laboratories i n the world that can do that. I don"t see why these specific laboratories should diverge so much. -ester is a qood exqle,I think, of a place that's been gradually They have changed like going away fran what they w e r e really gccd a t and into samething that's very interesting, but they're not any better a t it than a hundred other laboratories in the worl2. DONALDSON : There's surely been a shift in all. Naybe i t ' s more funto jump around,but you have to stay pretty much in the general area, a field you can redly be comfortable with. why, we seem.to be comfortable with the kind of problem that does bring many different disciplines together witha closely knit The people here, We. have t o hzve some people who are,of course, qecialists in environmental ecological arez. STANNARD: I was delighted to find inthe back of Provine Ground alist of the laboratory reports. Before I leave,I ' d like to br hg it

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could help me get that together. One of the things1,of course) wanted to be sure we discussed was your perspective. This bcok stopped in ' 64, what i n your view has happened since then ? DON ADS ON : Neril Hines has written mother bxk you probably haven ' tseen. STANNARD: Oh, Ididn ' t realize that. DONALDSON : I t ' s a completely different slant. CONALDSON: Yes. Neal could c m by, and he'll aut qr a ph it for you. \ STANNARD: Oh! Does that pick up the Pacific story,or is it more on the species th ac you developed? Actually it ! s a story of my life. DONALDSON : Well, people shouldn ' t hold others up. Wait till why Ikind of pulled it out back there. STANNARD: This book is very well written. DONALDSON : Neal is a master. STANNARD: IfI can write half as well, I'll b e very pleased. He did some things for them. They had Provine Ground and another thing that he wrote. But people there said that he only did half the job. What about the other half. So he worked away at this fOT several years.Finally Smithsonian published Ir. Ee wrote this one ' ie ally at the request of Smithsonian.

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STANNARD: I ' m going t o have t o be very careful to limit my self t o internal emitters (radioactive materials) anZ not qet cff into external irradiation except as it contributes directly As DONALDSON : Total effects in almost all instances involved both the internal an6 external [sources.1 Of course, it's one thing t o do a sweep across an area and measure what the levels are; i t ' s quite mother t o put that in canbination with both the ingested, absorbed context sort of thing. Engebi Island in terms of any one isolated incident. inthe1ab oratory ; itwas done in the field. I t ' s hard t o conceive of arat,for example,on A direct study out there is one I think is tremendously It gets practically no attention because it wasn ' t done Well, they say you couldn ' t Iknow,but that ' sthe real world where you have these mixed responses. From the fact that we never killed arat on ,En geb iL s land,never exterminated the population is in reality a very important thing,z nd it should be cranked high in our discussion. fact that it took the @valent of 7,200 reactors like the ones a t Hanford to make a reasurable change in the genetic pattern of chinook Sdlrrron is important. But people say, "Oh well,it could never hzppen. Of course ir could never happen." But when you have thzt much radiation Zbut bo^& internal and external, why it qives s a very canforting feelings tothe world we live in. Iget so uptight about these people who start screaming 2nd hollering micro-micro-micro or pico curie is going. to cause generic dunage. I think they just neglect the evidence.

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DONALD S ON : I think they ' re insane. STAXNARD: I think Ido,too. Somehow we've got to laugh. I ' m just not going to be able to avoid a certain amount; well, I go up t o 1975 in my chapter. EPA was just ccm'Jlg on the scene then, so I don't have to say much about them. I can shl myself not t o say sm thing to the extent that these years and years and millions of dollars of work are directly pertinent to the very current questions that are not being suitably DONALD SON : I guess if we had the wildest extrapolations,those of u s who've been involved for 35, 40years had all long been dead. Weall would have two-headed monster children or some ridiculous thing if we believed the rabble ro users of the moment, the maybe-maybe people I call them, maybe-maybe, i f - if. from one or' the Rochester toxic itv conferences achI guess is my swan song at Rochester, "Radioisotops in the Aquatic mvironment" that if there were going to be any unplezsant I ' v e made this state rne nt,in2 book that we got out surprises for us, i t probably would be inthe marine ecology field. My re qs on for that statement was that the marine system i s so much Vaster than most terrestrial systems that the chances of something important cccurring that was not found are -eater. I ' m not so sure I that that ' s correct vlymore. DONALDSON : I think we could really discuss that from sever zl different

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and particular lp mineral uptake,Is top at uptake, yoc have t o My personal feeling is that when you talk marine ecology realize that there ' s ~i tremendous buffering.capacity in the sea that you don ' t have on terrestrial areas. This tremendous buffering capacity,for example strontium,well, look at the gill ions of atoms of calcium there are that can dilute down the strontium uptake. so i t ' s spread out while environments ljke this terrestrial environment here you practically have zero calcium. The water you have back a t Rochester isn ' ttoo much, but the water I grew up with at central Minnesota had 60, 70 parts per rnilfi0n. So you have these variations. Our water has a part per million. But then in the sea you have trgnend0U.S buffering capacity.It ' s hard t o conceive. Surely there were tremendous amounts of say iodine uptake in algae. But who knows what - iodine does inthe way of damaging genetic components in algae .? QI the other hand, i f one considers the idhe uptake i n human thyroids, that ' s something different again because you don ' t have that grear backlog of iodine that you do in these a. in …