Human radiation studies: Remembering the early years: Oral history of pathologist Clarence Lushbaugh, M.D., conducted October 5, 1994 Page: 15 of 53
This report is part of the collection entitled: Office of Scientific & Technical Information Technical Reports and was provided to UNT Digital Library by the UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
Interview with Dr. Clarence C. Lushbaugh
Date of Interview: October 5, 1994; Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Interviewers: Roger Anders & Darrell Fisher, DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments
Assisted by Ann Sipe
was to put this in animals. At that time we injected popop in mice and
found, much to our horror, that mice became very cold. We subsequently
found out that what popop did to mice and rodents was, it made them
unable to regulate their body temperature, to keep up their body
temperature when being refrigerated. If you took a mouse with popop in
him and put him in the refrigerator, he became the same temperature of the
refrigerator. So if you took a hold of him as a mouse, he became the same
temperature as you.
We thought this was applicable to the therapy of prostatic cancer. This was
a very good idea, but it turned out that it wasn't. It was obviously the kind
of thing that needed a whole lot of work done by some kind of a
radiopharmaceutical company. So in order to do that and maintain control
of it, we thought the AEC should get a patent of this stuff and patent its use
so that if it was investigated, the investigator would then have to report to
the AEC what they found. An AEC official then met with me in Los
Alamos, and felt that the best way to do this was the way we had done the
thermistor probe and to just publish it and let it go out to the public domain
as a fact in a published article. It was.
Early Animal Studies at Los Alamos
FISHER: You did some early studies at Los Alamos on a couple of interesting areas:
the response of skin to beta radiation and the response of monkeys to acute
gamma radiation.LUSHBAUGH:
Los Alamos is often concerned with the use of radiation in human beings.
The area that I worked in, we didn't use human beings, except we did use
patients, in that the patients were referred to me as the pathologist at the
Los Alamos Medical Center. They were referred by other physicians.FISHER: Or for cancer treatment.
LUSHBAUGH:
For various kinds of treatment, for thyroid uptake and various other studies
that we did. These were patients that did not react to therapy. There was
once an aboveground atomic shot where a radioactive cloud drifted over
southern Utah and northern Nevada. Cedar City [Utah] was one place
where we had sheep. One of the sheep was sent to us in Los Alamos, where
we called her Cedar City Sue. This sheep came from a flock from around
Cedar City. This is how we got started on the beta radiation. We found out
that all these animals had rather bare ears and they developed scabby
excoriations" of ears, which was actually due to a virus and was not due to
the fallout itself. The fallout was such that we subsequently [had] plaques
that were made for us, by New England Nuclear. We put these on the wool
of the animals, and found that it took something like 40,000 rep, which was
equal to a rad, to actually get radiation burns of the skin. The lesions of the
ears were due to a virus, which apparently was a well-known sheep disease.
I had to spend a great part of my young life at the Federal court in Salt Lake
City, Utah, educating the judge on how these lesions occurred. Since at thatsites where skin has been stripped or otherwise removed
11
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This report can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Report.
Human radiation studies: Remembering the early years: Oral history of pathologist Clarence Lushbaugh, M.D., conducted October 5, 1994, report, April 1, 1995; United States. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc672291/m1/15/: accessed June 5, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.