Interview with Roger Mcclellan

Page 2

this is in the file with the interview - Pulmonary gavage wark - Anecdote about Harry Foreman - His background in Richland - His summer work on a vocational agricultural program - The control sheep flock for the iodine work - Leo Bustad and Charlie Barns might get a summer job at Hanford Roger also wrote an essay on his background and career - - grew up there - Studies on beta burns of sheep skin - Pig experiment with radioiodine - influence of nutritional levels (i.e. diet) - one diet was marginally goiterogenic - Breeding program for the pigs - H o m e 1 miniature pig vs 600 pound sow - used as llscouterli - Another summer - worked with Frank Hungate, et a1 Reactor effluent for irrigation - uptake by plants, couldn't find it - considerable work for environment - Safety consciousness in operations - Zinc-65 at Riverview in Pasco, fifteen miles or so below reactors - See notes in transcript for one tape - Comar and Wasserman

Page 3

& kCl eli an - page 2 - Interesting that later Kornberg worked at E P R I with Comar as his

Page 4

Discussion with Roger McClellan Cff ice at Lovelace Foundation Inhalation Toxicology Research STANNARD: Would you be willing to s it down anddo two or three pages just off the top of your head on the pu hm x ry aavaoe as pct s of the work fran here? you would prefer to do it another way.) McCLELLAN: No, Ican do that.I can take the time to pull together something on p u ~ a r ygavage for you. I'll try to send that t o you in the next several planning t o do one or two others in between. on the length, every t w o to three weeks t o two mnths. McCLELLAN: One ' of the people obviously on that front is - that you want to be involved Very good.That chapter is going to be a little while yet because I am I ' m aiming fora chapter, depnding with if you haven ' t already - is Vic smith. STANNARD: Yes, I had a good session with Vic up at Richland. Harry Foreman came t o [This relates to therapy in general, N.S.1 -. - San Diego on some other business,andhe came out to the house,and we had a good session, and he sent me a " m e package" of reprints. McCLELUfl: Here is kind of an anecdote on Harry Forernan, which I don't hod whether recall. He came out to Richland for that first symposium,as I recall,in terms a transuranic elements,and during the course of the symposium he was introduced.The symposium was being held in an old the z tre there in Rich ls nd,and he come n ted about how proud his mother.would be .of himin terns of finally appearing on the stage - the .only thing that wss missing was his name on the marquis. Busta d and several of us went out Wzi put Harry Form up on the marquis of the letters and put up H&.rq Form. I s a w Leo snezking out, almost as soon as Harry I knew scgnethinq was going to ha-, bowing Ls.

Page 5

It looked as th ouch the therapy work at Hanford was kind of catch - 2 s - cztch can,andit was never an organized effort. McCLELLAN: I might 90 through It quickly,in terms of how I originally ended up getting involved there. I grew up in Richland,in that I moved there with my parents in1944,and started in the third grade in the schools there. When I entered the ninth grade, there were two sign if iczn t things that happened. One was that my doctor was putting the heaton for me to quit reading so much. books a week,and he didn ' t think that was particularly good for my eyesight. suggested that I ought to take some courses t3-,atweren't going to be very demanding I was going through several The second thing that happened was that the school district had decided to start a vocational agriculture program.I had a tie back to agriculture through my mother who had been born in the midwest,and I spent my sumer s with my grandparents there - so that was appealing. and ' it wasn ' t going. ' to involve a lot of reading. This was scxnethinq Iwas interested, in, . - .._ I enrolled in this class,and it turned out that the way this was structured the school district had incorporated a school farm. Every member who enrolled in the vocational agriculture class ' ended up buying a share in the farm for $35.00. You also had to put in 100 hours of work. You could also put in more than that. In addition,there were certain things you could do onyou own, in terms of individual .One of the community projects we had on the farm was to maintain a flock of sh.eep,. .These.were the control sheep for the Hanford project.. When they started the studies on radio iodine,they decided that it was important that they have a group of control animals maintained off - site,where they would have potentially less ExFerh-ent S"&tion, which.w,=s a part of Fasiiington State Wversity, and They &tained those fkst at Prosser, Wclshhq-ton A qi cultural

Page 6

then with the creation of the school farm,they worked a n agreement and moved down STAN::ARD: How far was that from Richland? McCLELLAN: That w z s right on the outskirts of Richland. In fact,that is probably about a good stone ' s throw from where Bill Bair's house i s located now. As you are driving from Richland going outto North Richland - the Bat tell e facility now - you ' ll see a school off to the right of the road between the road and the river.That - - area was all the school farm. I t received irrigation water from the big ditch up above. That was 1949 when they started that. STANNARD: How was that school spelled ? McCLELLAN: Richland. I t was just called the school farm. I t was the Columbia High We ended up with this flock of Suffolk sheep, big black-faced sheep. I t ' skind o f amusing to think that Suffolk sheep have rather big ears. Low and behold, who comes down to take care of these sheep periodically but Leo Busta d - big ears and all, and a fellow by the name of Charlie Barns,who was an airforce officer. They would come down about once a month t o look over this flock of sheep. We had some involvement and contact with them. They would send down some of their technicians about. . once a month t o count the thyro'ids on these sheep. They had sort of a collar arrangement that they put on the sheep with aGM tube a t the side. T mt was actually my first contact with Leo - also at the same time throuch the Lutheran Church. .,,I went to school at-Washington State University. I had contact with him over those four years.That probably had some background. decided that that was kind of dull - awfully locked i n - and from there I went into veterinary medicine. I decided t o see ifI could get a job at the ls b oratory during the summer. Iw z s fortunate enough to get a job there in the summer o f ' 57and worked with Leo. He had broad interests. like this aging. Some of them stayed with him throuch the years, One of the studies we did that summer involved looking atthe skin

Page 7

of sheep that had had beta irradiation - beta b u m s - which ti& back t o the fallout a t the test site and the litigation in the '50's over whether these sheep deaths were really caused by the test site activities. We were studying what happened i n terms of the skin, vascularization an2 permeability of skin. dye - bj ect d dye - in the nature of a dspersion. That was kind of interesting - that time period - a fellow by the name o f Lynn West u did using B George wzs one of the people who was there at that time - just getting ready t o leave a i - I recall to do - post - graduate work:- Lynn George was one of the people involved i n early radio iodine studies with Leo Bustad. early age of a G.I. carcinoma. I t was very unfortunate - he died atan He was a very bright guy. The other things that were going on at that time were the studies of radio iodine in pigs as a second species and the question of nutritional level and how that . influenced radio iodine uptake by the thyroid : got 70% of that. W e maintained these pigs on two nutri - hs I recall, one was essentially all the needs for icdine, the other They were on several levels of radioiodine, an6 we were not only looking a t ra6ioicdine in the dam and s m but were also interested in raiiioiodine in the fetus because that wasa question that was caming up a t that time in terms of transprt of radioiodine frm the mother t o the fetus McCLELLAN: That was done, as I recall, because most of the diets in that area were that way: I t was my understanding that.the sheep studies were intended t o provide sort of a practical assessment of what is the impact o f .the Kanford Plant operation on livestock in the area - and sheep as atypical grazing animal. t o use diets pretty much typical of that of local ranchers. and a t what stage did that occur. On the nutritional levels, I wzs a little surprised that the diet for the So we were trying Oh, no, - pigs. These were s o - called palouse pigs, which were across -

Page 8

bred pig between a Danish land race pig anda Chest57 Nhite pis,which is a breed that is common in this country. They had been deveioped a t Washington State The pigs on full ration - some of those sows would weigh up aroun2 600 punds. They area large white pig. One of the things I had responsibility for the summer I was there in ' 5 7 wzs t o manage the breeding program, i n terms of these pigs. So we hada mating system worked out where each sow was t o be bred to a particular boar, etc. One of the things we decided was that we had t o have some way of determining when the female was in season, so we took one of the other more infamous lines of pigs (which was a Hormel miniature pig), and the Hormel miniature pigs that we had were viewed asan incompletely developed breed, sothe Hormel Institute in Minnesota would only release vasectomized males. So we used a vasectomized male as our scouter, so this vasectomized male lived in there with 40 in t h i s pen. When you backed the cart up, he quite literally c a m . jumping across the top of the other pigs - jumped i n the cart - we wheeled the cart and opened the gate,down t o the first pen where there were four females inthe pen and he would.jump out and run around and see if any female was i n season. If there weren't m y in season, then he would go right t o the door, and when you opened the door he would jump across the hallway and into the next one. If he found a female who was in season, why he would do everything but pullout a harmer and start to build a scaffold because here is there was a potential to use a miniature pig, but it w a not possible to get the nmkers Feat big 600 pound female, ad here WG this litThe stuZies we were doing then were kirui of bdicatiq that we wanted in terms of ~ o n t d ,and that is w k t really led to the efforts t o develop .another strain of miniature pigs, which Iwill come back to later. The next summer (sumer of ' 58)I returned to Hanford. Leo was gone that surmer, and Iwasn ' table to get back into that group. I worked with Frank Hungate and Jack Kl ice and efell ow by the name of Wxrt Uhler (a V ~ I Ibriaht young quy who unfor-

Page 9

tun at ely later died o f czrbon monoxide poisoning - either by desicn o r by accident - one will never know). What we did then, that summer, we were interested sever zl different facets ic the question of uptake o f radionuclide5 bv u1Zn:s. involved studies in which we actually took reactor effluent water out czthe cooling pond,and we used it to irrigate crops. I guess the thing that has always stuck with me through the years time trying to find the radioactivity in the crops. and you would really have t o go to pretty sophisticated techniques t o find activity. STBD'3RD: Would you say that work was stimulated by the fallout problems, or it was mre oriented tmard the plant operations? Hanford plant,to that extent, was probably a unique operation not justa nuclear field but across industry in aeneral. i f you Lr t o look a t the care that =s taken t o assess the impacts of the plant operation on the surrounding community - that was clearly what we were trying to do there River, and the Columbia River water was being used for irrigation. is,even using 100% reactor cooling water, we had a devil of a We had barley and we harvested it, No,that was really more oriented to the Hanford operations.I think the because t h e cooling water would 90 back into the Columbia conscious. I think I would modify it to say Herb Parker was very safety conscious. speak secondarily there (my father was an employee of DuPont). concern for safety. They also had a overriding concern for public relations and imase. They've taken such a beating i n World War I,in terms of the munitions game, that they Herb Parker insisted that this got that way because DuPont was very safety Well, I think it; both - a combination - certainly DuPont, and I can only DuPont had an overriding really didn ' t want t o be caught with adverse publicity about what their operations might do - orthe products they produced - so I think that was in the background. i n terms of the water (reactor water)the other thing that time inthe mid 5 0 ' sin tho environmental surveys …