Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments: Interview with Colonel John Pickering (PP 33-40, 42-45, 53-60, 62-65, with Colon El Merritt)

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ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS Colonel John Pickering Albuquerque, New Mexico

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COL. PICKERING: I've had five chemotherapy treatments. I have one more to go. All too frequently some people use the word "terminal" ar,d I dori't choose to accept that. I am 76 and d half years old. I attended the University of Arizona first. I took a baccalaureate degree in chemistry and rnining engineering in 1.939, a masters in organic chemistry and metallurgy in 1940, and I started a Ph.D. in 1941 and got. drafted and went into Flying Cadets, so I didn't have a chance to finish until some time later, and 1'11. tell you about that. \ Later, I took a course in rillclear engineering at the University of California. I took a course in what's called high altitade physics - - more correctly it

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was meteorology - - for the Air Force at the University of Chicago. Subsequently, I attended the University of Chicago's Institute of Nuclear Studies while in the service, to again, participate toward my Ph.D. in whatever work I was assigned to do. That led to an experiment at Los Alamos, became secret, restricted data a subsequent experiment at Oak Ridge was the same, and the third experiment was the Teak and Orange High Altitude Rocket detonation on Johnston Island. So I have no Ph.D. degree. The dissertation, I presume, is still secret, restricted data, and why I was bitter for a long time. eliminated that. So make no mistake, I'm not sitting here as a genius. That's enough about me. I don't know your questions. I will give you my very best recollection with absolute integrity, and I think one of the steps that might verify that, I was one of the five founders of the Health Physics Society of America because we felt things were getting out of hand in the sense that biology and medicine were not getting a fair shake with some of the very fast-moving physicists. And so that point I want you tc know about,

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and that's on record, and of the five members - - I guess most of them are now dead. I don't know what kind of report you turn in, but if I have the tape, that's okay, just like the one I made for the Air Force. I simply do not want to go through the experience that I've had many other times should tell me what I've said, as that film did, and it it will be my best recollection. You've already answered who takes the notes and where do they go. If I have a copy, then you can send yours where you're supposed to because I kvow you have somebody to report to. I did ask Colonel Merritt about to whom do you report, and I understand it's to the President. So that's good enough for me. You're not just flipping it around. And then as we move on, there's some other little things, like I've read the NEPA paper, but I didn't get a full copy. I don't know if you had ANP [Aircraft Nuclear

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Propulsion] in there or Weapon System 125 or any of the other proposals that really made better sense as time went on. But be that as it may, if you didn't, sometime you may want to get in on that because it's not too bad MR. WHITTEMORE: Okay, part of this, to explain, as you said, the main purpose of this is for us to report tr> the Advisory Committee that will then report to the President. But, early on, one of the things the Advisory Committee wanted to do was not to just look incident by incident at experiments, but to try really to tell the story of what the world looked time. And that's why we're doing these extensive interviews; when people like yourself are willing to cooperate with us, and we appreciate that. And, also, we're having transcripts made. So these are designed to become part of a record of an oral history of what it was like to engage in this era about that time. And,

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personally, as an historian, I really appreciate having the opportunity to do that, and as someone who also has a particular interest in the NEPA project that I actually ran across accidently doing other research. I'm very eager to learn about that. COL. PICKERING: Yes, you should proceed through ANP and Weapon System 125 because, indeed, some of the concepts that you relate were changed in how you control a I1cruiset1and how you control a ltdash,lland I don't know that much about it, but I know where you can find it [Pickering clarification: detailed MR. WHITTEMORE: Right. That will be helpful. John Harbert, as you mentioned earlier, or as you noticed earlier with his own writings has an interest in COL. PICKFRING: Yes. MR. WHITTEMORE: So perhaps what I'd like to do is try and proceed roughly chronologically. I do have some specific items to pick up along the way. COL. PICKERING: Sure. MR. WHITTEMORE: But one of the things that I

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find intriguing, and I think other people find intriguing, is what it was like to be someone with training in chemistry/metallurgy and then suddenly find yourself working in a totally new world after the War. And maybe if you could relate that to the experience of the course you took in nuclear engineering and who taught it and what the spirit of the time was. COL. PICKERING: Well, from what I can say, the spirit of the time, when I left Chicago [Pickering addition - studying nuclesr chemistry], I was invited to the School of Aerospace Medicine, not even knowing what it was, okay? The Commandant was probably one of the persons that I met. 1'11 explain that in just a second. He wrote a letter, which is on file that you may see at the school, and I'll show you where to find all this stuff if you ever go down there. I dedicated everything I collected in my whole [Pickering clarification - entire research] career at the School of Medicine and left it, and I had cases built and it's now in the museum under lock and key. It's free to anybody who wants to go tinker with it, but not take it.

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REPP.WUCED AT THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES He said, "I have young physicians coming in. The War is still going on, and they haven't the slightest idea what's going on except what they learned in their internship. And I would like to set up a course that has something to do with nuclear weapons not a nuclear weapons expert, believe me, but I knew something about nuclear effects and I enjoyed teaching So I began teaching at the School of Medicine and I felt very comfortable doing this because I felt these people - - everybody gives critiques, but I'm never sure that they ever tell a God-damned thing except "I've got to finish out the blanks and get out of here and go get a beer or something." was a young officer. But they were positive, and I And so as that time went on, I began to hear about the research that they were doing there in various that had no interest to me, frostbite, but in looking at this, people in the North Sea, everybody that bailed out damned near died because of frostbite. So I began just

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roaming around the labs, and pretty soon Brigadier General Harry Armstrong, who brought me down to the school, was moved to Washington to ultimately become the Surgeon General and was replaced with a younger ?erson, Brigadier General Otis Benson. And he watched me for a while, and I don't mean any of this in an egotistical way, okay - - SO dismiss that - - and said, IrI want you to become the Director of Medical Research in the sense of the way you are expressing things to these young people [Pickering He said, 'I1 am. 1'11 take care o f the So I felt encouraged and stayed on, and it wasn't long before I began to hear a lot of little going on in the country, I guess I would generalize, in weapons research, okay? And one of these was some work we did at Los Alamos that you have probably read about. The title of the article, which was allegedly to be a

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dissertation, "Massive Doses of High Dose Ionizing Radiation," and it was using very rich [Pickering addition - concentrated1 sources of barium that were being "milked11away from lanthanum for purposes no one had, and Norris Bradbury, who was the Director Health Division could have this material if they wanted to look at some [Pickering clarification - biological/medical] effects that had been studied. So I went out one night with a group of scientists and took a couple of psychologists who had some mice that they had trained, and we found out after we exposed the mice they couldn't do a damned thir,g. I used a word that then became pretty common place in our little group. I said, "Geez, those animals are Dac1tated.I' It sFjemed like a logical word to explain events. You know, I hadn,'tpaid much attention. So we began talking about massive dose incapacitation, all of which you may have seen in some , of the references; I don't know. You haven't? COL. PICKERING: I wouldn't worry about it.

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But, anyhow, that went on, and the first thing you know, I had a pretty good monkey colony, a damned good one, about 500. COL. MERRITT: Was that the one in Austin? COL. PICKERING: It went to Austin. It was at Randolph first, and they were the little rhesus. We found them basically out of what used to be a part of India that became Pakistan through the British. We flew them ourselves and so had control. And we kept this colony going. It became in the Los Alamos/Oak Ridge medical circles, I guess, a reasonably acceptable COL. MERRITT: Also, some of those monkeys were actually loaned to Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. COL. PICKERING: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, and we stationed them there under our circumstances. So we felt thst we had a common denominator of mutual care and we had a common denominator of what we chose to do after clarification - scientific1 people began talking of the School, outsiders, the Scientific Advisory Board, and so

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1 forth - - we had a member on that board who used to be 2 here in Albuquerque. His brother was a Supreme Court 3 Justice, Sam White. You may know Sam. Sam's retired 4 now. He's back here. But Sam, like his brother, was 5 all famous, an MD, and an all American, and you name it; 6 he was no dummy. He came over and talked to me and said, IIYou know, you have some programs that may be of [Pickering about - - and I may have these a month or two out of sequence, but that's close enough for a 49-year memory - - the Slotin accident and A1 Graves who was the residual, and A1 was pretty much a "guinea pig," I think is the right way to say it. A1 was a nuclear physicist and his wife, Diz, was a nuclear physicist, and she ran generator] yielding some pretty good neutrons, about 14 MEV, and he had been exposed, presumably, to about 6 MEV 20 He had developed erythema, cataracts, and he 21 had hair loss - - all on one side, as he had looked over 22 Slotin's shoulder, if you've read abaut the

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accident - - if you haven't, I have it down at the school. I have pictures of a simulation, not the accident, and I have the Annals of Internal Medicine, where all 13 cases are written up, and if you haven't read them, it would be interesting to read them. Okay, their interest was maybe you guys could study cataracts, Our answer was, "Yeah, I think we could and we'd like to." I had some good ophthalmologists and I had good hematologists. are all youngsters out of medical college. finished their internships. certified, two in hematology and one in ophthalmology. Three of them were Board So we started doing experiments using the That generated a hell of a lot ofCockroft Walton. interest at Los Alamos. In the experiments you used No, we used monkeys. quoting ophthalmologists - - they have essentially every

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,have. They manifested this little iridocyclitis, they lost a little bit of their eyelash, you could follow the little vacuoles developed and they really and truly got a full-blown cataract, depending of course on the dose. So we kept lots of these guys. Then, of course, everybody wanted to get some interest [Pickering Effectiveness]. So we felt, well, we can do this with cobalt gamma rays just about as easily, and maybe we could do it as a combination [Pickering addition - i.e., - replicating] an accident, and then all of a sudden comes a bunch of other folks from around the country saying, IlHey, that may be what we're going to see in the so-called cockpit of the ANP or Weapon System 125." MR. WHITTEMORE: How did these other people learn of your work? Was this published or was it COL. PICKERING: Oh, a lot of it was published, but most of it was - - you know, in those days, I think what you need to know, the National

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Academy of Science was very generous inviting people to meetings. It wasn't just a damned closed corporation, I found it; it seemingly became many years later. I would get an invitation to go,'you know, who am I? Airplane people would go. Reactor people would problems]. Every guy in Washington went. Hell, they would just drop in off the street - - you know that as well as I do - - during their lunch hour or any other Rocket people would go who were trying to solve spread the news. number because somebody decided to classify it. seems to be the way they do things. Now it may be difficult to find the COL. PICKERING: Yes. It's crazy, but you live through it more than I do, I'm sure.

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And then if you go to the School - - and I would encourage.you to go there - - you will find a picture, not because of me, but in our little library is Dr. Lee Clark, who was the first Director of the M.D. Anderson Tumor Institute, now dead; Shields Warren, the National Research Council medical man really, at that time, who kept things going, and General Bensen. And I'm standing there telling them what I had been told about this part of the nuclear propulsion program. This became, to my knowledge, the beginning of a relationship between the National Research Council [Pickering addition - and the cancer …