Human Radiation Studies: Remembering the Early Years, Oral History of Physiologist, Nello Pace, PHD, Conducted August 16, 1994

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HUMAN RADIATION STUDIES: REMEMBERING THE EARLY YEARS Oral History of Physiologist United States Department of Energy Office of Human Radiation Experiments

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Initiative. As part of this initiative, the Department of Energy undertook an effort to Iidentify and catalog historical documents on radiation experiments that had used human subjects. The Office of Human Radiation Experiments coordinated the Department’s search for records about these experiments. An enonnous 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 perhent 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 http ://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 Office 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 experimentation that 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 idoxmation, and allow the researchers an opportunity to provide their perspective. Thirty audiotaped interviews were conducted from September 1994 through January 1995. Interviewees were permitted to review the transcripts of their oral histones. Their comments were incorporated into the final version of the transcript if those comments supplemented, clarified, or corrected the contents of the interviews. The Department of Energy is gratefid to the scientists and researchers who agreed to participate in this project, many of whom were pioneers in the development of nuclear

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of Virginia (1940-41); Service in Naval Reserves ..................... 2 Tritium Injection Experiments in Animals and Humans During WW I1 ....... 2 Hospitality to Manhattan Project Researchers Staying in Washington ........ 3 Return to UC Berkeley to Research and Teach ........................... 4 Development of Medical Physics Degree Programs at UC Berkeley .......... 5 Conducting the First Radiation Survey at Nagasaki After the Bomb .......... 6 Censured by the Military for Underclassifying His Nagasaki Report ......... 8 Reflections on Shields Warren ....................................... 9 The Public’s Attitudes Toward Radiation, Then and Now ................ 10 Establishment of a Research Lab at White Mountain (1950) ............... 11 Use of the White Mountain Research Station ........................... 14 Research in the Organic Distribution Rate of Carbon Monoxide ............ 15 How He Procured Isotopes for His Research ........................... 16 Radiation Experiments; Wormed Consent .......................... 17 Inert Gas Research for Treating the Bends in Divers ..................... 18 How Naval Research Projects Were Decided Upon ...................... 19 Reflections on Hardin Jones ........................................ 19 Reflections on John Lawrence ...................................... 20 Reflections on Joe Hamilton ........................................ 21 Donner Researchers Who Went On to Serve in Area Hospitals ............. 22 Radioisotopes He Used in Research .................................. 22 Recollections on John Gofinan ...................................... 23 Education at UC Berkeley (193240) and Medical College Research in Physiological Responses to Thermal Extremes and Burns ........ 16 Willingness of Students and Naval Reservists to Volunteer for Differences Between Berkeley’s Medical Physics and Biophysics Program ... 2 1

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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: August 16,1994; Berkeley, CA Archives and Records me) ORAL HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGIST NELLO PACE, Ph.D. On August 16, 1994, M . Anna Berge of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Archives and Records w e e interviewed Dr. Pace at his residence in Berkeley, CaliDr. Nello Pace was selectedfor the oral history project because of the positions he held with the US.Navy, at the Universityof California at Berkeley (UCB), and as the Director of the White Motmtain Research Station near Bishop, Calfomia. This oral interview covers Dr. Pace s service in the Navy dwing World War U, relationship with UCB 's Donner Laboratory, and directorship of the White Mountain Research Station. He also oflers reflections on Dr. John Lawrence and others he worked with at Donner Laboratory and White Mountain. Nello Pace was born in Richmond, California, on June 20,1916. He has been married twice and has two children. He attended UCB and received his B.S. in Chemistry in 1936 and his Ph.D. in Physiology in 1940. During his graduate years at UCB, he knew a number of the people working in Ernest Lawrence's group. From 1940 to 1941, Dr.Pace was a research associate at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. During this same period, he was in the Naval Reserve and was called to active duty in the summer of 1941. During World War 11, Dr.Pace served as the head of the physiological facility at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1946, he returned to UCB and took the position of a research associate for the Division of Medical Physics. From 1948 to 1957 he went from assistant professor to associate profasor of Physiology and obtained full professorshp in 1957. Dr. Pace served as Chairman of the Department of Physiology from 1964 to 1967. He established the White Mountain Research Station near Bishop, California m 1950, whm he worked from 1950 to 1977. In 1977, he became an emeritus professor of Physiology at UCB. During his long career, Dr. Pace has also held the following positions: 1951 to 1953-Officer in charge of Unit 1, Ofice of the Naval Reserve 1954-Assistant leader and chief scientist for the Himalayan Expedition to Makaly 1957 to 1958-Leader of the International Physiological Expedition to Antarctica 1963-Consultant to the administratorof the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis1971 to 198O-Chaiman of a panel on gravitational biology for the Committee on Space Research of the International Council of Science Unions 1973 to present-Member of a commission on gravitational physiology for the International Union of Physiology Science 1978 to 1980-Experimenter on Cosmos 1129. Dr. Pace is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physiology Society, the Aerospace Medical Association, and the International

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Setting: August 16. 1994; Berkeley, CA Interviewer. Anna Ekrge (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Archives and Records Office) Academy of Astronautics. In 1990, he received the Founders Award from the American Society of Gravitational and Space Biology. Dr. Pace has published on his main research areas of gravitational physiology, environmental physiology, and in vivo body composition. Education at UC Berkeley (1932-40) and Medical College of Virginia (1940-41); Service in Naval Reserves SERGE: This is an interview with Dr. Nello Pace by Anna Berge of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories Archives and Records Ofice on August 16,1994 at his office. I was wondering if you could start and give me some background information on yourself, such as where you’re from, what your education has I was born in Richmond, California, and moved to San Francisco when I was four years old and went through public schools there. I’m proud to say I graduated fiom Mission High School and came to Berkeley and spent four years as a Chemistry major, then went on and got a Ph.D. in Physiology four years after that. I graduated fiom Berkeley in 1936; in 1940, I got my Ph.D. I went on a year’s postdoctoral to what was then the Medical College of Virginia, in Richmond, Virginia. I spent a year there. In the summer of 1941, I was in the Naval Reserve and got called to active duty as a physiologist and spent all of World War 11pretty much in the Bethesda, MarylandMrashington, DC,area with the Navy. During my time in the Navy, I was doing applied physiology, looking into the effects of high-altitude flying and deep-sea diving and carbon monoxide poisoning and the effects of extremely hot spaces on personnel that had to occupy them; the effects of cold-all of the discomforts known to man. Tritium Injection Experiments in Animals and Humans During WW II PACE: I should say that in the time that I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I got to know a lot of the people in Ernest Lawrence’s group that had just built the cyclotron.’ I worked a little bit with radioactive isotopes. In the Navy, during World War 11, the occasion arose to try to measure the total amount of water in the body of personnel, total body-water content. A method had been developed using deuterium2-labeled3water [(“heavy water”)] as a tracer? Even though I was in the Navy, I couldn’t an accelerator in which particles move in spiral paths in a constant magnetic field a isotope of hydrogen, having twice the mass of ordinary hydrogen (protium); “heavy hydrogen” incorporated with a radioactive isotope to make a substance traceable a small amount of radioactive materials used in place of stable forms of the same element to track a biological or chemical process

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Setting: August 16,1994; Berkeley. CA Archives and Records Office) get my hands on any heavy water. I didn’t realize that all of it was being used for the Manhattan [Engineer] District projecf at the time. I did remember reading about a radioactive isotope of hydrogen with three times the atomic weight: tritium. And I read that I could obtain tritium from beryllium that had been bombarded with protons to make a neutron source in the early days of cyclotrons. There was a cyclotron at Silver Spring Maryland] at the Carnegie Institute. A younger physicist, who had trained with Ernest Lawrence, had built the Silver Spring Cyclotron, a small one. I can’t recall his name; I want to say “Dean”Somebody, but that’s not quite it. He had the temble habit of looking over the shield to see where the beam was, and he came down with cataracts6in due course. They operated. At any rate, I knew him and I said, “Hey, have you got any beryllium targets around that have been bombarded to produce neutrons?” He said, “Yes.” Then he opened his desk drawer and gave me a couple. They weren’t that radioactive. I took them back to my lab in Bethesda and dissolved them and made some tritium-labeled water. In those days you built your own Geiger tubes. You didn’t buy them, you made them. It was kind of a cute Geiger tube that had been developed by some people at Princeton pniversity] to measure tritium, where you let a little bit of the water vapor into the tube, which contained the tritium and filled the tube with argon and counted the radiation internally in the tube. It worked very well. So I had a way of making tritium and measuring it. I went ahead and we played around and injected some tritium-labeled water, very low levels of radiation, first in rabbits. I sacrificed the rabbits and measured the amount of water they had and showed that you got an accurate measure of the water content. Then they did this in some human subjects and measured total-body water with tritium-labeled water. These turned out to be the first biological experiments that were done with tritium. This was published in the Journal of Biological Hospitality to Manhattan Project Researchers Staying in Washington 1 always think of the irony of this. The reason we did this was that we couldn’t get any deuterium because it was all taken by the atomic bomb development people. With all that background, I knew people from Seaborg’ would come and Joe Kennedy, who had gone from Berkeley the Manhattan Project-the U.S. Government’sultrasecret project to develop an atomic bomb an abnormality of the eye in which the lens becomes partially or completely opaque U.S.chemist, born 1912; discovmd plutonium in 1940 and played a key role in the discovery of more than half a dozen new elements through the 1950s

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Setting: August 16.1994; Berkeley, CA Archives and Records Office) to St. Louis University. All of them were working for the Manhattan I had a big old fann house that I was renting, and so they’d stay at my house out there and save hotel bills; nobody had much money. They just said they were busy on a project. There were a lot of people working on wartime projects. I didn’t give it that much thought. They never even once peeped anything about what they were really doing. It turned out that all of them were highly involved in the atomic project, which I didn’t learn until after the war. The upshot was that I kept in touch with the people at Berkeley this way. The other connection that I had was that John Lawrence, Hardin Jones, and Cornelius Tobiasgduring the war had a project for the [Army] Air [Corps]”’ to look at the production of bendy in aviators who fly too high and come down with bends, just like a diver. They were using radioactive argon as a way of measuring the diffusion of inert gases from the lungs. Of course, we at Bethesda, at the Naval Medical Research Institute, were quite interested in this from the point of view of the bends [underwater] divers [can experience if they return to the surface too rapidly]. There was really, physiologically, no difference. They’d come to Bethesda, and we’d do joint experiments on divers coming up from the high pressures [at their working depths underwater]. Incidentally, I had known Hardin Jones when we were graduate students in Physiology before the war. John, I met through this; I didn’t really know him at Berkeley. Tobias, I didn’t know either; I met him this way. Return to UC Berkeley to Research and Teach PACE: To make a long story short, after this background, I wanted to come back to Berkeley, and had a chance to get a research grant from the Ofice of Naval Research, but I needed a home to do this. I asked John LawrendZif he’d be good enough to let me set up my shop in Donner the U.S. Army Corps of Enginem organization set up to administer the development of the atomic bomb under the ultrasemt M a n h a m Project. Originally headquartered in New York, it was moved to Washington, DC, and finally to Oak Ridge, Tennessee,in the summer of 1943. In 1947 it became the Atomic Energy Commission. For the transcript of the interview with Tobias, see DOEEH-0480, Human Radiation Studies: Remembering the Eurly Years; Oral History ofaiophysicist Cornelius A. Tobias, Ph.D. (July 1995). The U.S. Army Air Corps becsme the U.S. Air Force, a sepamte military m i c e , on September 18, The bends are caused by tiny air bubbles released into tissue by a too-rapid demase in air pressure &er staying in a compnssed atmosphere, such as …