Human Radiation Studies: Remembering the Early Years, Oral History of Biophysicist Robert Edmund Rowland, PH.D., Conducted January 27, 1995

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HUMAN RADIATION STUDIES: REMEMBERING THE EARLY YEARS Oral History of Biophysicist Robed Edmund Rowland, Ph.D. United States Department of Energy Office of Human Radiation Experiments

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her Openness Initiative. As part of this initiative, the Department of Energy Iundertook an effort to identify and catalog historical documents on radiation experiments that had used human subjects. The Oflice of Human Radiation Experiments coordinated the Department’s search for records about these experiments. An enormous volume of historical records has been located. Many of these records were disorganized; often poorly cataloged, if at all; and scattered across the country in holding areas, archives, and records centers. The Department has produced a roadmap to the large universe of pertinent information: Human Radiation Experiments: The Department of Energy Roadmap to the Story and the Records (DOEEH-0445, February 1995). The collected documents are also accessible through the Internet World Wide Web under h t t p ://www. ohre.doe. gov . The passage of time, the state of existing records, and the fact that some decisionmaking processes were never documented in written form, caused the Department to consider other means to supplement the In September 1994, the Ofice of Human Radiation Experiments, in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, began an oral history project to fulfill this goal. The project involved interviewing researchers and others with firsthand knowledge of either the human radiation experimentationthat occurred during the Cold War or the institutional context in which such experimentation took place. The purpose of this project was to enrich the documentary record, provide missing information, and allow the researchers an opportunity to provide their perspective. Thirty audiotaped interviews were conducted from September 1994 through Janua~y1995. Interviewees were permitted to review the transcripts of their oral histories. Their comments were incorporated into the fnal version of the transcript if those comments supplemented, clarified, or corrected the contents of the The Department of Energy is grateful to the scientists and researchers who agreed to participate in this project., many of whom were pioneers in the development of

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From College to Argonne National Laboratory .......................... 2 Initial Argonne Interest in Elgin State Hospital .......................... 3 Early Radium Injections at Elgin State Hospital .......................... 4 Radium Studies by Argonne National Laboratory ........................ 6 Medical Treatments Using Radium .................................. 10 Research Into How Radium Deposits in Bone .......................... 12 To University of Rochester for a Ph.D. ................................ 16 Wartime Plutonium Injection by Metallurgical Laboratory S t a f f ............ 18 Director of the Radiological and Environmental Research Division ......... 20 Establishment of the National Center for Human Radiobiology Making Contact With Radium Cases for Follow-up ...................... 23 Tracing the Effects of Radium in Bone ................................ 26 Funding for Radium Study Ends .................................... 29 Recollections of Argonne Scientists Participating in Radium Studies ........ 31 Differing Perspectives on Radium Retention ........................... 36 Seeking a Threshold for Radium-Induced Malignancies .................. 38 Obtaining Consent to Exhume Remains of Radium Cases ................. 43 Human Use Committee at Argonne .................................. 48 Termination of the Radium Program ................................. 49 Potassium Studies in Cooperation with Loyola University ................ 50 Idormation Provided by Argonne to People in Radium Follow-up Program . . 55 Reassessment of Plutonium Injection Cases ............................ 52 Public and DOE Awareness of Plutonium Injections ..................... 56 Analyses of Thorium Workers ...................................... 57

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The opinions expressed by the interviewee are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Department neither endorses nor disagrees with such views. Moreover, the Department of Energy makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of the information provided by the interviewee.

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Setting: January 27, 1995, Batavia, Illinois Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Michael Yuffee (DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments) ORAL HISTORY OF BIOPHYSICIST Conducted on January 27, I995 in Batavia, Illinois, by Dr. D w e l l FisherJiom Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratory and Michael YufJeeeefrom the Department of Energy 3 Ofice of Human Radiation Experiments. Robert E. Rowland was selectedfor the oral history project because of his research at Argonne National Laboratory involving the follow-up research on the populations exposed to radium, and other areas of research. The oral history covers Dr. Rowland’s epidemiology studies of populations carrying internal depositions of radionuclides, his research of the metabolism of radionuclides in the skeleton, and his involvement infollow-up studies of the living plutonium injectees. Dr. Rowland was born in St. Charles, Illinois, on January 10, 1923. He received his B.A. Illinois, his Ph.D. (Radiation Biology, 1964) from the University of Rochester, and his M.B.A. (1975) from the University of Chicago. He is married and has three children. From 1950 to 1962, Dr. Rowland was an Associate Physicist in the Radiological Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Dr.Rowland left Argonne from 1962 to 1964 to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester. In 1964, Dr. Rowland returned to Argonne to become the Associate Division Director of the Radiological and Environmental Research Division. He subsequently became the Division Director, a position he held until 198 1. Finally, from 198 1 to 1983, Dr. Rowland was Associate Laboratory Director for Biomedical and Environmental Research. Concurrently, Dr.Rowland held the following positions: Dr. Rowland has published approximately fifty articles in open-literature publications. These publications have focused primarily on mineral metabolism, and the effects of internally deposited radioisotopes in human bone. 1966-83, Senior Biophysicist, Argonne National Laboratory 1971-83, Member, National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements 1976-8 1, Consultant, Nuclear Regulatory Commission

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Setting: January 27, 1995, Batavia, Illinois Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Michael Yuffee (DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments) From College to Argonne National Laboratory I am Michael Yuffee. I am here in Batavia, Illinois, at the home of Dr. Robert Rowland, with Dr.Darrell Fisher. Both of us are [representing] the [U.S. Department of Energy’s] Office of Human Radiation Experiments, and we are here with Dr. Rowland to discuss his career and, also, to discuss any information that he can give us in regard to our Dr. Rowland, we would like to start with general background information-where you’re from, your education, and how you got involved in the field that you eventually joined. I was born right down the river here in Saint Charles, Illinois, in 1923. I was educated at a number of places, some of them the courtesy of the U.S. Army, because I am of that generation. I graduated from college in Mount Vernon, Iowa-Cornell Collegeand I immediately went to graduate school in Physics at the University Well, because Physics seemed attractive after World War I1 and the atomic bomb. This was-you know, it was a big thing. I did well in math and in science, in general, and it seemed like a logical field to go into. I only stayed at the University of Illinois for a year-and-a-half. I left because I flunked my French exam. It was a matter of bitterness at the time, because I passed the French exam, according to the French Department, but our professor in Physics flunked the whole flock of us who took it. He thought, probably quite correctly, that we weren’t really that good in French, and we really ought to take the whole thing over again. One of my colleagues in graduate school had recently applied at Argonne National Laboratory and gotten a job up there. Since Argonne was in the Chicago area and I was from [that] area, I, in a spit of something or other, applied to Argonne and, even with just a master’s degree, I was very, very fortunate in that. I was hired, really, by a man by the name of Leo Marinelli. Leo also did not have a Ph.D., and he was sensitive to this and was willing to overlook the lack of same, and, in that day, anyhow, scientifically motivated people were being grabbed up very, very rapidly. I was hired at Argonne, June of 1950. I worked in an old brewery, called Site B at that time, which is just south of the campus of the University Wasn’t that the site of the Met Lab’? Metallurgical Laboratory established at the University of Chicago during World War I1 to develop methods needed for separating plutonium and uranium from fission products after reactor irradiation, as part of the Manhattan Project

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Setting: January 27, 1995, Batavia, Illinois Interviewers Darrell Fisher (Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Michael Yuffee (DOE office of Human Radiation Experiments) ROWLAND: Yes, it certainly was, in part, the site of the Met Lab. The Met Lab was spread out, going as far as, you may recall, the Argonne Woods Forest Preserve, where they moved the reactor after the demonstration at the west stands that the doggone thing worked.*They moved it out to the Argonne Woods, and, obviously, that's where the name, Argonne National Laboratory, ultimately came from. Yes, I suppose the Met Lab was there. The brewery had been used for some time, and several other sites at the University of Chicago, including the Museum of Science and Indu~try.~There were ofices down there, as well, if I recall correctly. Anyhow, I worked for a short time on a project that had to do with the detection and characterization and concentration of a plume! We were thinking, obviously, of emissions of radioisotopes up [ventilation] stacks, and we had a project going to use freon as our gas that we would release. We were trying to be able to detect it quantitatively with The machine was called a fieon leak detector, which worked extremely well for detecting [hon], but, we were never able to make quantitative Initial Argonne interest in Elgin State Hospital ROWLAND: Fortunately, I was able to get off of that project at a very early age and into what actually became, but was not called, the RadiumSProgram. We did not have a radium program in the early days of Argonne, the There was work being done on people who had radium in their body, because the old-timers, like Leo Marinelli and John Rose and Austin Brues, knew that these people had been exposed to an alpha emittef many, many years ago. There were some efforts as early as 1945, '46, to go out to a very famous place-to us-called the Elgin State Hospital for the Mentally Insane, because at that time, there were people living there who were injected with radium in 1931-and ultimately '32 and '33, we ' Stagg Field, the university's football field, underneath which were laboratories that became the site of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction achieved by a team led by Dr.Enrico Fermi on December 2,1942 The museum is located about two miles from the campus. It is not affiliated with the university. the rising or expanding mushroom-shaped cloud that would form from an atomic explosion a radioactive, luminous white, metallic element that occurs in very small quantities in combination with minerals. Radium emits alpha particles and gamma rays to form radon gas. Radium has been used in luminous surface materials, such as the numbers on watch faces, and used in treating cancer. a radioactive substance that emits helium nuclei during radioactive decay a psychotic disorder manifested by loss of contact with surroundings, personality disintegration, and deteriorated ability to function in daily life

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Setting: January 27, 1995, Batavia. Illinois Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Michael Yuffee (DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments) I wasn’t aware of that [those early efforts (I94546)I until very, very recently, when we’ve been involved in delving back to find out what human experimentation or human contact took place in those early preArgonne days, or early Argonne days.‘ At that time, I discovered that there had been efforts to go out and collect excreta or to try to collect radon’ from these people at the Elgin State Hospital. In a sense, that’s getting ahead of the story, because very little was being done at the time. It’s interesting that you mention the Elgin State Hospital, because that was one of the first uses of radium for treating mental disorders and, probably, not a successful treatment. Well, it certainly wasn’t a successfd treatment. Actually, to give you an interesting anecdote-which, of course, you will find in my book,” of which that is the first copy. I was just going to ask you that: Is that the first copy? That’s the first copy. For the benefit of the transcriber, can you give us the title and the pubWell, yes, I can. Radium in Humans, a Review of US.Studies is the title; I am the author. The publisher, 1guess, is going to have to be called the U.S. Government Printing Office. It does not bear an indication of a The Library of Congress. The Library of Congress. But it does say, “Available to the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Oak Ridge.” But there are only 300 copies, hardback, of this, and I have them all. I think we would be very interested in a copy of that. Early Radium Injections at Elgin State Hospital ROWLAND: Anyhow, I intempted my story. A physician-and I gather, at this late date, there’s no reason why names can’t be mentioned-a physician by the name, I believe, of Findley John was treating patients in the ’20s with radium, and he claimed to have had remarkable success with a patient that had symptoms of schizophrenia by injecting 10 microcuries once a week for a period of time. For a description of the Elgin radiation treatments and a list of related references, see ANL-I, “Radium as an Experimental Therapy for Treating Mend Disorders at Elgin State Hospital in Elgin, Illinois,” in Human Radiation Experiments Associated with the U.S. Department of Energv and Its Predecessors Rn-222, a heavy, radioactive gaseous element formed by the disintegration of radium Rowland, Robert E. (1995). Radium in Humans, a Review of U S Studies. U.S. Government Printing

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Setting: January 27, 1995. Batavia, Illinois Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Michael Yuffee (DOE office of Human Radiation Experiments) Apparently, he was responsible in part for the study at Elgin, because it appears that he may have talked those who ran the study or, at least, talked the Elgin State Hospital into cooperating. The study was performed by a Chemistry professor from Missouri. The name escapes me for a minute, but you may very well know itThe experiment was very straightforward: They took a number of promising candidates and injected people with, in general, 10 microcuries” of radium-226, once a week for periods ranging from 10 to 45 weeks. The interesting thing that was done, from a scientific point of view, [was that] twice within a period of three to six months, he made measurements of the body content. Then, there was a report to the ofice that supplied the radium, which was something called the U.S. Extension Service in Chicago-U.S. Radium Extension Service, whose background I know nothing about. They supplied the radium for this study. Schlundt and his coworkers wrote up a series of four papers, one …