Human Radiation Studies: Oral History of Radiologist Earl R. Miller, M.D.

This is the transcript of two interviews with Earl R. Miller, a radiologist who joined the Radiology Department at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco in 1940 and stayed there until he retired in 1974. Two interviewers, one from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Archives and Records Office and one from the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, questioned him at his home in San Rafael, California on August 9 and 17, 1994. The Department of Energy ran the project and recorded thirty interviews between September 1994 and January 1995.

Miller says a visiting professor of radiology recruited him in early 1943 to head radiation safety for the Manhattan Project work in Berkeley. His biography lists him as Director of Health Physics for the Berkeley Division of the Manhattan Engineer District from 1943 to 1945. He gave the job two half days a week, leaving San Francisco at noon and often running until 10, 11 or midnight. The work was blood counts on staff, checks of their radiation badges, and rounds of the labs. He says he never got paid for it.

Much of the interview covers iodine-131, a radioactive form of iodine taken up by the thyroid. Miller says a Berkeley colleague called to offer him the material, which was made on Berkeley's 60-inch cyclotron, and that an internist who specialized in thyroid disease supplied the patients while Miller gave the dose. Small tracer amounts measured thyroid function. Larger amounts treated an overactive thyroid, and thyroid cancer patients received 100 millicuries per dose. He says his first published paper on radioiodine came out in January 1948.