DOCUMENT M


	
		ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON BIOLOGY
			and MEDICINE



			     -on-

		     January 13, 14, 1956

			Deleted Version
			   1/28/94







		    U.S. ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION
		     NEW YORK OPERATIONS OFFICE
		    HEALTH and SAFETY LABORATORY
			70 Columbus Avenue
			New York, New York


some work on fish samples, preferably I presume, taken more
or less at the consumer level to see that the levels remain
at about what we found for Castle.

	Now, there may have been hotter fish found in here
right after the test, but in term,s of the actual --
probably the most toxic of the isotopes still, we are only
dealing with a few per cent of the permissible levels so
far.  This may not hold, but that is our best estimate to
date.

	MR. EISENBUD:  Thank you, John. Gentlemen, the
adjournment time 5:15, it is now 5:00.  I had hoped to be
able to make a few summary remarks and project a little bit
of this into the future, but I don't need to do this now, i
can do this tomorrow.

	DR. FAILLA:  It might be better to do it now.

	MR. EISENBUD:  I want to re-emphasize that the program
you have heard today is a program that is in progress now.

	If you heard it six months ago, it wouldn't be very
different with one exception.  None of the items have been
reported in internal reports.

	We have a few things that we are thinking about for the
immediate future and I would like to mention a few of these.

	We think that one very intriguing study can be made and
plans are on the way to implement this -- "Uterik" Atoll is
the atoll furthest from the March let shot where people were
exposed got initially about 15 roentgens and then they were
evacuated and they returned.

	They had been living on that Island; now that Island is
safe to live on but is by far the most contaminated place in
the world and it will be very interesting to go back and get
good environmental data, how many per square mil; what
isotopes are involved and a sample of food changes in many
humans through their urines, so as to get a measure of the
human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.

	Now, data of this type has never been available.  While
it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the
way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also
true that these people are more like us than the mice.  So
that is something which will be done this winter.

	We are very much impressed by the fact that this may be
the last decade maybe only the last few years in history
when it will be possible to really get some good data on
natural radiation.

	The natural background has not been really disturbed
yet.  It still reads the way it always has in my estimates,
but it is changing fast.  In ten years from now it may be
too late to ever know what people were exposed to back in
the aboriginal days of 1945 and 1950.

	I think also that with the instrument, with components
that have become available within the last year or so, it is
quite feasible to make these low level measurements over
large areas, relatively inexpensively.

	We are going to take worldwide, we hope, documentation
of background both as respects gamma radiation and the
preponderance of natural isotopes and Leonard Solon is going
to undertake the gamma background study and John Harley and
his staff, the isotope abundant study.

	We think that this is something -- well, what we are
going to do is try to have, a plan ready in the next few months 
so that we can present it for possible international cooperation.

	Included in such a study for example, would be the
quality of the natural radiation which has never been really
measured.

	Then, Mr. Blatz has been concerned over the general
problem.  I know he has been concerned, Doctor Failla for
many years of how you expressed the dose in relation to this
and how particular do you evaluate the soft components of
radiation so that we are going to take a look at the whole
of our basic concepts of this measurement in which
everything is expressed in one unit regardless of energy
which may vary quite a bit, anywhere from two thousand up to
a few million.

	This will involve some better information about the
gamma spectrum of radiation as it occurs not only in
military situations, but in industry -- how much of it is up
near the 2.2 of radium of how much of its is degraded down. 
It's never been measured and that is going to be undertaken
starting soon.

	As regards the long range plans in the laboratory.  I
think it's a curious thing and as a historical reason for it, 
we really don't have a charter.

	We started out as a sort of - just a local laboratory
in the New York Operations Office, and more recently, in the
last few years, we have been working for every Operations
Office.

	We regard ourselves, and I think we are similarly
regarded by Donovan and others, as a sort of an operating
arm of the Division of Biology and Medicine but this doesn't
appear on paper.

	We do these things, we get huge sums of money with
which to carry out these programs, but we have to describe
our mission, and I think for the first time it is possible
to describe it because civilian application program is
involved and the kind of things that we have been doing for
contractors rather successfully, I think for the past nine
years are what we can do to for the long pull for the
licenses as the Commission undertakes to implement its
responsibility in the health and safety field.

	Somebody is going to have to provide a central check
point, analytical facility and instrument calibration
facility -- most of the  things we have been doing are going 
to have to be done to some extent for the licensees.  On what 
scale, we don't know; it just depends on how big the Atomic 
Energy gets.

	We certainly will continue this fall out monitoring
program longer than we ever anticipated we could do it,
because, even if the testing stopped now, we would continue
to have fallouts certainly for a decade.

	There's a continuing program there which we regard 
just as a one-shot proposition which would be over once the 
tests are over.

	We are very much interested in the economics of
radiation reactions and some of the studies that have been
described to you today, particularly this morning, are
important.

	We will continue to design programs - to design
projects of that type and also depending to some extent, on
the cooperation we get from the contractors involved because
when you go in to this relationship for this kind of a job,
you are challenging some of the administrative wisdom,
telling them they ought to burn these bales of paper out in
open fields instead of wrapping them up and sending them
to a warehouse.

	This is not easy to do, but we will try it.

	The last, as just something to think about, the small
Atomic Energy Programs that are being developed around the
world, are going to need some place where they can go to get
basic information of the kind that we have got here.

	I was rather impressed by one visitor we had - a man
named Ahmed, who was Chairman of the A.E.C. in Pakistan.  He
had been over the country by the time he came here.  He had
gotten to all the National Laboratories, he had seen most of
the reactors that were allowed to be shown, seen all the big
accelerators and he was very much impressed and I showed him
through our laboratory in about an hour thinking that it
would be boring after having been to Argonne and Brookhaven. 
And then we went to lunch.

	At lunch he said, "would you mind if I came back to
your laboratory this afternoon and handled some of those
geiger counters"?  An I said, "sure, come on back."
	It turned out that his mission in this country was a
very simple one.  He had two thousand dollars to spend; it
was his first A.E.C. appropriation; he wanted to know how to
do it and decided he was going to buy two thousand dollars
worth of geiger counters for his geologists.  And here we
are taking a man like that, we showing him God knows what.

	He came back here and he spent all that afternoon 
and part of the next day and this impressed me with the 
fact that , "by golly, we are the shirt-sleeved kind of 
people that the overseas laboratories can get this kind of
information from."

	Well, if they want to, they can take a scaler and
operate the way our people do it in the afternoon, using
survey instruments and the kind of things they will have use
and not sending them over to see these big reactors.

	This capsule is the kind of thing we see for the
future, but we have a very cloudy crystal ball in this
business.

	I certainly appreciate the opportunity to present 
this program to you and I hope you