Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Interview with DR. Karl Morgan by Gil Whittemore and Miriam Bowling on January 6, 1995

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ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS Indian Shores, Florida Reviewed for Accuracy [Morgan additions and clarifications in brackets are contextual after the actual interview1

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MR. WHITTEMORE: Okay, this is an interview of Dr. Karl Morgan by Miriam Bowling and Gil Whittemore of the Advisory Committee Staff on January 6 , 1995, at Dr. Morgan's house in Florida. The purpose of this interview will be to create a transcript that other people can read and get an understanding of the various events that Dr. Morgan was involved in, and with the understanding Dr. Morgan will be given a copy of this transcript to review later and also that this transcript is one that should be available to the public. So if there are items that might still be of a classified nature, we'll find another way of discussing those items with the Committee. Perhaps we could start by your describing how you became involved in the Manhattan Project and 'what health physics was described to you as being. Your original training was as a cosmic ray physicist and how it was you came to be involved in health DR. MORGAN: Would you like me to begin with my college education?

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DR. MORGAN: Should I briefly go into that? Well, I got my doctorate in physics under Dr. [Walter M.] Nealsen at Duke University in 1934, and became a professor at Lenoir Rhine College in Hickory, North Carolina. And during the entire period I was a professor there, I did cosmic ray research jointly with Duke University. In those studies, I did experiments deep underground, in caverns, on high mountains, Mount Mitchell, Mount Evans and so forth, and became very interested in those studies at Mount Evans, I became [Jason] Sterns, the head of the Physics Department at the University of Denver, and casually I happened to mention that one of my ambitions was to find a job out west because I liked He perked up and was very interested. And he said, llWell,I've always wanted to move east, so lets change jobs.I1 So, we corresponded on that and made arrangements for him to take my job as the

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Director of the Physics Department at the college and I would take his job there. Well, during February and March of 1943, all the correspondence and all communication started to cease. None of my letters were answered. And I became very provoked and just thought well, something's happened in the meantime that Dr. is no longer interested in coming east, and I was about to forget it. Then suddenly I began to get phone calls and letters from Chicago urging me to come to the work, but they were sure that I would be very interested and I could make useful contributions. There was some interesting work related to They could not divulge the nature of For example, I was the only person in my part of the world that had ever used Geiger counters at the time and measurements of ionizing radiation [with them]. And obviously, this is an important part of the program. Well, I had discussions with my major professor, Dr. Nealsen and with Dr. Lothar Nordheim,

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1 the theoretical physicist at Duke. 2 And one of them suggested well, maybe they 3 [had a secret program which] approved them at 4 Chicago. It had something to do with atomic energy, 5 getting energy from mass, from matter. I used to 7 IIIf I could convert this calcium into energy hold up a piece of chalk in my classroom, would say, according to Einstein's theory, it would supply all the energy we need, electrical energy, in this part of the town for months to come.I1 But of course we could never do that. We can't get the pressure and temperature to make this conversion as is possible in some parts of space. So I became more and more encouraged and finally, my curiosity got the best of me and I got on the train and went to Chicago. We didn't fly by plane in that period. This was in the late winter When I got to Chicago, shortly afterwards I went into the office of Dr. Compton and there I was introduced to Dr. Robert [S.] Stone, the Associate Director. And Dr. Compton, of course, was

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That was essentially a code name as a cover-up. And early in the discussion, they said, I started toward the door and I was very concerned. I said, "Well, there's been a terrible mistake. I've never even heard of cosmic -- of health And my friend Stern said, "Well, hold on, Karl. We'd never heard of it either until a few I days ago. We realize from Dr. Stone here that we have a very serious health problem and that we feel that it's a problem mostly of physics. So we're setting up a small group here in the Ryrson [H.M.] Parker and Carl Gamertsfelder are other. members of the team. We're calling this group So that was the beginning of health physics as a profession. Initially at least, it was

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a scientific - - it became a scientific and 35,000 professional health physicists throughout the Today there are over world. I was very proud of health physics in the Physics Society and organized the international group [the International Radiation Protection Association, IRPA] and became the first president of I was the first President of the Health But I fear today that the majority of health physicists feel that they have to choose between two objectives. people from radiation. health physicists take the latter as their main One is protecting the The other is protecting the And a majority of the applied I state my evidence on that is that since retiring from Georgia Tech - - perhaps I mentioned earlier that after leaving Chicago, I went to Oak Ridge [Tennessee]. I was there for 29 years. And then when I reached forced retirement [at age 651, I was not offered the one dollar a year

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job because I had become a little outspoken on some things [going on at ORNLI I thought were not proper. And anyway, I wouldn't have accepted the job because I wanted to get back to teaching and to' research. I had a few offers in Washington, but that was, I'm afraid, too politically inclined. So I accepted a job at Georgia Tech. I wanted to stay in the south. the most part, was very worthwhile I think. And my stay there, for Well anyway, the health physics today, I feel, has become an organization primarily to protect the nuclear industry. that is the fact that after leaving Atlanta and Georgia Tech, and in fact a couple of years before leaving, I became rather active in trying to help people injured from radiation exposure. discovered that thousands will gladly testify for nuclear energy, the defense, but none for the person with radiation injury, the plaintiff.] And my evidence for By the time - - well, up to the present time, I have offered testimony and tried to help something over 150 persons who allege radiation

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injury. In most cases, it's been a dismal failure. Initially, we were successful in a few cases. Dr. John Gofman and I were the sole witnesses for the plaintiffs [in the Karen Silkwood case]. And in the [Krurnbackl case, I won where there was plutonium exposure and a victim with Stewart. I and Alice Stewart, were the sole [expert] And a few years later we were successful. [Victor Bond of Brookhaven National Lab was sole defense witness and] I was the sole witness for the plaintiffs following the Three Mile Island accident. We won a decision of Judge Rambo and it provided what has become about -- it's approaching now with interest $20 million to do research, independent research, on the effects of low level radiation and studies of instrumentation and fall-out and problems of this sort. This case was carried by the Berger [law] firm in Philadelphia, and they formed a so-called Public Health Fund (PHF) and asked me to be chairman

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of it. And this group, the Public Health Fund group, has monitored the expenditure of this money. The program [of the PHF] that I think is most rewarding is one still underway by Dr. Alice Stewart in England who is doing an independent study of the effects of radiation exposure [of workers] in What she does is try to relate the readings on the film badges worn by personnel at these facilities [AEC and DOE] beginning in 1943 up till about 1975 and determine any relationship between radiation exposure as indicated on film badges and what the person has died of as determined by records obtained from the hospitals and the death MR. WHITTEMORE: Now in 1943 when you began, what were the research tasks that you were DR. MORGAN: In 1943 in Chicago, we had now, as I indicated, four people to start with: Wallen, Parker, Gamertsfelder, myself and Jim Hart joined the group [later]. Our problem there was to

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[develop the science of health physics, but] we had to start essentially with nothing. There was a little bit of literature indicating that the radium dial painters had higher [cancer] incidence than one would expect, an incidence of malignancies [and some data on the mid lethal radiation dose for mice]. And so we were concerned to make sure that no one working with radiation would receive very large exposures, doses of the order of many hundreds or thousands of I could use about ten different units of radiation [exposure here so I will try] to confine our discussions to roentgens, which was the unit at that time. And maybe without thinking I'll switch over to some of the others that are more currently But anyway, we were aware of this [radiation] syndrome [at very large doses of radiation], and we were determined to avoid that. Dr. Stone, who was Director of Health under Dr. Arthur Compton, the Director of the Manhattan

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1 Project, insisted that this work had to be done safely and Compton agreed with him on that. And they imbued in me the impression that we had an extremely difficult problem. Dr. Stone put it this way. He said, "If you could get together all of the radium in the world from the hospitals and physics laboratories in 1943, it would be about the size of a golfball.ll [the radiation in a pile we are building produces radiation equivalent to that from thousands of tons of radium.] And so this -- and with that, of course, [knowing that large] numbers of radium dial painters And we knew of - - the other thing we were [very] concerned about, of course, was skin erythema. The dentists and some of the doctors had gotten reddening of the skin and had had difficulty there. So up until about that time, the most common unit [of radiation dose] was the erythema dose, which was very vaguely defined. It would be somewhere, depending on the energy, ranging from about 50 roentgens to 1,000 roentgens. It would be

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less, of course, with the higher doses because most of the energy would go through the body rather than be absorbed in the body. And so I was impressed by Dr. Stone, Robert Stone, that he and Compton were determined that this work be done safely, even though they had plans to build the pile someplace unidentified in which the radium equivalent would not be two pounds, the size of this little golf ball, but would correspond to millions of times the available radium throughout the world. And around these piles, they were going to build thick concrete [walls], at least six feet thick, to protect people operating on the outside. This seemed like an almost impossible problem. But to even make matters worse, they were going to produce a new element called llproduct.ll Sometimes Itproduct, called it [product] 94 and sometimes [product] 239, but )Iproducttlwas the more It later became known as plutonium. And there were two known things that could be used as

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1 [nuclear] weapons. One was uranium 235, which is in 2 low concentration of natural uranium. And the new 5 And they indicated, Dr. Stone and Compton, 6 that although this sounded like a completely 7 impossible problem to be working in close proximity 8 to a substance that was millions of times more 9 radioactive, millions of times more curies than a l l were being made from natural uranium, uranium 238. 11 physics in labs and hospitals [of the world], 12 nevertheless, they were going to do it safely. 13 And Dr. Stone was very adamant on this and 17 Dr. Wallen worked primarily in the development of 18 the fiber dosimetries, taking for example, spider 19 webs and sputtering silver on them to get a very 20 light conductor. He became very proficiently in 22 Dr. Parker and Dr. Gamertsfelder worked the radium that had ever been brought together in insisted throughout our studies that we have the work done safely without any undue risks. Well, you asked what did we do at Chicago?

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primarily in the development of the gamma and beta1 ray film badge. meter, a small electrometer [Rondenserl that would And all of us worked on the pencil2 have the capacity in physics terms of about one or4 And my major study there was working on6 neutron dosimetry. I had a radium beryllium source7 of neutrons. I had one of the strongest radiuma that time. I think the radium was about 20010 milligrams of radium, mixed in beryllium, which gave11 me the an intense neutron source.12 I was very cavalier. I was primarily a13 physicist and certainly not a health physicist at14 the time. And I estimate now that the dose I got15 from the testing of neutrons would have been somewhere between 5 0 and 100 roentgens. Compare to a member of the public today in a lifetime.19 The present 2rem/y is not for the public, but for workers [radiation workers], and of course much less [is permitted] to members of the public

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today. Well, some of my friends say, well Karl, if low level radiation is so horrible, why are you Well, I think you'd have to ask God to get the true answer. I can only speculate. But I believe that -- well laughing now, I answer this to my friends that I chose the right parents. that, I mean that I believe that you're [able to survive large exposures due to the efficiency of] the reticuloendothelial system that you inherit. The immune system is a very important part of your And [as I explain to my students] some people have developed an immune system that can make early recognition of aberrant cells. had, I guess, close to 10,000 students in my lifetime, most of them in the field of-cosmic radiation [health physics]. I was a adjunct professor at Vanderbilt and UT …