Human Radiation Studies: Remembering the Early Years

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

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her Openness Initiative. As part of thls initiative, the Department of Energy Iundertook an effort to identify and catalog historical documents on radiation experiments that had used human subjects. The Office of Human Radiation Experiments coordinated the Department 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 accesThe 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 documentary record. 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 information, 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 histories. Their comments were incorporated into the final version of the transcript if those comments supplemented, clarified, or corrected the contents of the interThe 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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Early Education and Career (1920 to Mid ’50s) ..........................2 Early Dosimetry Research (1940s to 1960) ............................ 12 Radium Dial Painter Research (Early ’50s-60~)......................... 14 Fernald School Calcium Metabolism Studies (1948 to Early ’50s) .......... 16 Robley Evans’s Role in Experiment Oversight and Funding Information Experiment Safety Protocols. Clarified (1 950s) ......................... 29 Volunteer Inducements and Informed-Consent Procedures ................ 39 Other Radionuclide Research ....................................... 60 Radium and Thorium Ingestion by Human Subjects (Late ’50s to Early ’60s) . 34 Research as a Private Consultant and Additional Publications (1972-95) ..... 62 Comments on Human Radiation Experimentation Controversy ............. 64 First Knowledge of Plutonium Injections .............................. 65 Thoughts on the Use of “Disadvantaged” Populations Work With Manomet Bird Observatory (1975-95) ...................... 69 Additional Comments on Human Radiation Experimentation Controversy and Closing Comments ......................................... 71

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The opinions expressed by the interviewee are h s 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 20, 1995, Gloucester, Massachusetts Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Karoline Gourley (DOE Ofice of Human Radiation Experiments) ORAL HISTORY OF HEALTH PHYSICIST Conducted Jmua.y 20, 1995, in Gloucester, Mmsachusetts, by Dr. Damell Fisher, a health physicist from PaciJc Northwest Laboratop and Karoline Gourley, a researcher with the OfJice of Human Radiation Experiments, US. Department of Constantine Maletskos was selected for the orai history project because of his research at the Radioactivity Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The oral history includes Dr. Maletskos 's work at the Center on research projects that used subjectsfrom the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waverly, Massachusetts, and the New England Centerfor the Aging, as well as blood volume studies involving pregnant women. Dr. Maletskos was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 16, 1921. He received his B.S. in Quantitative Biology (1942), his S.M. in Biophysics (1943), and his Ph.D. in Biology, Chemistry and Physics (1954), all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He manied in 1947 and has three children. Dr. Maletskos was at MIT in various capacities from 1942 through 1976. In addition, he has held appointments at the Harvard Medical School and the New England Deaconess Hospital, and has worked as an independent consultant. While at MIT, he worked closely with Dr. Robley Evans and other scientists in the Radioactivity Center. There, he studied the effects of food phytates on calcium metabolism in children, and sought to determine the metabolic differences between radium and mesothorium, using residents at the New England Center for the Aging. During his career, Dr. Maletskos has also served on many committees and panels and has membership in numerous societies, including: Journal Editor, Health Physics Fellow, Health Physics Society Trustee, Manomet Bird Observatory Panel on the Implementation Requirements of Environmental Radiation Standards (for High-Level Wastes), National Academy of Sciences Consultant-National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements Dr. Maletskos has published extensively on radiation biophysics, radiobiology, and radiation measurement and protection, as well as environmental assessment and health and other Radium and Isotope Committee, New England Deaconess Hospital

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Interview with Constantine J. Maletskos Setting: January 20, 1995, Gloucester, Massachusetts Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Karoline Gourley (DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments) Early Education and Career, (1920 to Mid ’50s) GOURLEY: Good morning. It is January 20, 1995. This is Karoline Gourley. I’m here with DarrelI Fisher and we’re here [conducting] an oral history with Dr. Constantine Maletskos in Gloucester, Massachusetts. FISHER: Thank you for allowing us to come. This is an interesting opportunity for us to learn more about your personal history as well as your scientific accomplishments. We’d first like to ask what brought you into the field of science and drove your interest, in particular, toward the radiation sciences and health physics. MALETSKOS: Well, the original interest for going into science was back in high school. Having attended the Boston Latin School, which was the first public school in the country, I decided that I wanted to go to MIT’ and had good enough grades to just walk in-not go through what was called the College Board business at that time; it’s called SAT [(Scholastic Aptitude Test)] now. I thought I would be interested, even back then, in doing something with electrical engineering in medicine. Why I got that idea, 1 have no idea at this stage in the game or then. Maybe. I started out in electrical engineering and decided that [it was] not really what I wanted to do, given the way they were teaching electrical engineering. I don’t [know] why I ha[d] this innate feeling toward it [(meaning biology)]. I knew I had to get something into biology, so I slowly worked my way from a freshman in Electrical Engineering-all the way into the Biology Department in time to be able to graduate, eventually, with both my bachelor’s and master’s [degrees] in Biology. That’s how things took place at that time; in the five-year course which was available to me at that time, you [could receive] both of those degrees [at the end]. In the middle of the senior year, for the summer between the two years, I wanted a job so I went searching around MIT and I ended [up] in Professor Robley Evans’s’ laboratory, which turned out to be a career-marking step. GOURLEY: When you first started with Dr. Evans, what was he working on? MALETSKOS: He had already come to MIT about 1934 or 1935 on invitation by Karl Compton, who was the president of MIT, to set up a nuclear engineering course, [which] would eventually become big and broad as it could be. At the same time, [Compton] set up a center, which was eventually called the ’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts In the early ’30s at MIT, Evans investigated the bioeffects of radium on dial painters in New Jersey and Connecticut. By 1941, Evans with others had set the first standards for a tolerance level for radium in the human body. The first “tolerance level” for radium was set at 0.1 microgram body burden: Evans judged that there would be no bone cancers below 0. I microgram =“Rain the skeleton. Later he served on the AEC’s Committee on Isotope Dishbution. At a 1967 symposium, he proposed that the AEC establish a National Center for Human Radiobiology so the AEC could follow up and combine all the radium cases being studied at MIT, Aro,onne National Laboratory, and elsewhere. On September 1, 1969, the center opened at Argonne, headed by Robert E. Rowland; Evans maintained a satellite office at MIT. In the early 1990s, Evans’s pioneering basic research earned him the Department of Energy’s Fermi Award.

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Setting: January 20,1995, Gloucester, Massachusetts Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Karoline Gourley (DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments) Radioactivity Center, in which all these new things related to nuclear physics, including radiation and radioactivity, would be disseminated in various fields. [In] that way you would get maximum effect from a place like the Institute [(MIT)] by producing students and scientists who would know a bit about this [new field] so that they could then apply it to their own particular research [in] the various different fields. The Radioactivity Center consisted of representatives eventually from six or seven departments at the Institute: Biology, Nutrition, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and that sort of thing. It was an Institute-wide center and one of the first ones [(research centers)] that the Institute had. So, the Institute [was] quite great in doing the center business, where you bring a lot of talents together and do At the time that I came on board, he [(Compton)] had already started his Nuclear Physics course. They were doing a lot of basic nuclear physics studies [at the Radioactivity Center]. He had arranged to get a cyclotron rence4 in developing, designing, the cyclotron in Berkeley[, would provide]. Evans managed to get the funds for it from the Markle Foundation. [And as a result,] the priority for that cyclotron, because of the Markle Foundation funding, was biology and medicine, not physics. Even from the very beginning, this business of getting involved with biological and medical aspects with people, animals, and that sort of thing was basically [involved with the initial] construction of that cyclotron, which is quite interesting. Which would have been about which year? The cyclotron probably got-I even helped run the cyclotron, so it was available and running in 1942. I think it was put together a year or two beforehand. It ran quite a bit and was used an awful lot during World War 11, when people didn’t even know what [was] going on in terms of what they were producing and what kind of experiments they were doing. One of the important things that they [(medical scientists in the greater Boston area) conducted]was blood preservation studies, at the request of the military. [Before the studies,] they could only store blood for about a ater of World War 111, but going [by ship] to the Pacific [Theater], you needed a lot more time. One of the first major papers that came out of the RadioactivityCenter, from the medical standpoint, had to do with this first M. Stanley Livingston. Ph.D. (born 19Oj), a physicist and research associate at the University of California Berkeley (193 1-34). Livingston later served as a professor of physics at MIT (1938-70). He figured prominently in the design of high-energy particle accelerators. U S . physicist 1901-58; a pioneer in nuclear physics who built and operated (with M. Stanley Livingston and Milton White) the first cyclotron in 1930 on the Berkeley campus of the University of California; established the University of California Radiation Laboratory in I936 and served as its director until his death. His ingenuity and drive made the Berkeley-based Radiation Laboratov a center of nuclear physics in the United States.

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Interview with Constantine J. Maletskos Setting: January 20, 1995. Gloucester, Massachusetts Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Karoline Gourley (DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments) work on blood preservation. It is very interesting to read that first paper, because it’s a classic paper on how to report [results]. Evans and the team of physicians from Harvard Medical School. This was a joint program, and they managed to extend the period [for blood storage] from one week to three weeks; that made all the difference in the world. And was that through radiation? That was through the use of radioactivity; they used radioactive iron to study, to tag the red cells, [and] to preserve them. You take the red cells from somebody by blood transfusion, tag the red cells, put them back into a person, and then see how those blood cells that you put back worked on the basis of whatever [medium] they had been stored in. It was just a trialand-error method until they kept on finding and homing-in on what eventually became the material [known as] ACD, acid citrate dextrose. What is also amazing is that they [used] not only one radioactive iron, they used two [radioisotopes of iron]’ in the final experiments; [and] they used a radioactive iodine6as well. So there were triple tracers exWith each extra tracer, you get ten times more information then you get from the first one. So by using three radioactive tracers, rather than one, they were getting a hundred times more information. What was really interesting is that they found out that in one part of the process the cells that you were putting back in were preserved nicely, but the medium was destroying the person’s [own] good cells. Can you imagine what So, how long into it did they find that? Well, they found it before it was ready to go out into the real world. Did this work take place during World War II? Yes, and the first paper’ was in 1946. It was a classic paper, which I recommend [that] anybody read to [understand] the whole aspect of how you [conduct] an experiment from the start of producing material, to using it, to developing the process, and to do all the dosimetry* that you could do in those days and with what you could compare it to see whether the dosimetry was reasonable in terms of what other exposures were available in those days. ’ See OT-46, “Early Studies of Iron Metabolism in Red Blood Cells Using Iron-55 and Iron-59,” in Human Radiation Experiments Associated with the US.Department of Energy and Its Predecessors (21 3 pages), Use of Two Radioactive Isotopes of Iron in Tracer Studies of Erythrocytes”: Journal ofCIinical Investigation the calculation of absorbed dose, using data from bioassay and other radiation measurements

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Setting: January 20, 1995, Gloucester, Massachusetts Interviewers: Darrell Fisher (Pacific Northwest Laboratory) and Karoline Gourley (DOE office of Human Radiation Experiments) You didn’t actually join this group until the 1950s? I joined them in 1948 formally. After 1942, I had to finish my [academic] year, and then I had to go into the army …