Scrolling Through History (the Tennessee Alumnus)

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and nights 1 spent standing in waist-high weeds wearing snake repellent and watching construction workers mount E.T.'s hands Chap has been with Universal since before the park opened. says. In the year and a half before the park opened, the staff wrote policies, designed tickets, and one particuiarly tricKy assign. ment, which was to develop a map of the park before it was built. gether a map when all you have IS a model. You can't walk around the area and see where everything is," Chap says. That dilemma now t a m Chap again. She', involved in Universal Studios Florida's long range expansion prolect, which will include a second theme park, five resorr hotels, a nighttime entertainment complex, and expanded television and film product ion faci lit ies. volved in strategic marketlng decisions or riding one of the motion simulator "thrill" rides, Chap says she's thrilled to be at Universal and to have the opportunity to help shape its future I ost of us think of scrolls as documents of ancient times, keys to events long past. However, scrolls collected by ET. Lester VanMiddlesworth of UT Memphis provide dormation about an important-and controversial-part of recent history. He has donated two to the Smithsonian Museum, and one is displayed in the Nabiological record of radiation levels in Memphis and Birmingham, England, through the measurement of radioactive iodine-131 in animal thyroids from 1954 to 1981. The thyroid is the perfect biological marker for atmospheric radioactive fallout, VanMiddlesworth says. His total data collection represents sites throughout six continents. VanMiddlesworth's research began on June 12,1954, after he found high levels of radioactivity in cow thyroids he was testing. The results led him to conclude that fallout from atom bomb testing in the Pacific had traveled to Memphis and settled on the grass, where it had been consumed by the cow. in an animal thyroid. It provided evidence that radiation released into the atmosphere could contaminate far beyond the point of release. This concept was controversial at the time, since it was not yet known that a single radiation leak could spread contamination vdiddlesworth's graphs, known as "scrolls," are a continuous VanMiddlesworth's was the first observation of radioactive fallout throughout the hemisphere. VanMiddlesworth's data was recorded in pencil on standard graph paper. As data accumulated, additional pages were taped onto existing pages to accommodate the growing database, creating a scroll for each site studied. Some of the scrolls are as many as 18 feet long. The entire collection represents the analysis of more than 80,000 thyroids. The original scrolls bear VanMiddlesworth'shandwritten notations and calculations as he speculated about matters such as the size of the explosion or leak requued to produce the graphed levels ot Although retired from full-time faculty service, VanMiddlesworrh serves as emeritus professor of physiology and biophysics and proiessor of medicine. He continues to monitor radiation levels in a project to test the thyroids of deer living in a 300-square-mile area on the Savannah River in Georgia. I THE TENNESSEE ALUMNUS I