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| EISENBUD: |
Yeah, right. Yeah. You go into Industrial Hygiene and look up
the toxicology of lead, fluorides, zinc fume fever—I could probably mention
some others. People [(researchers)] used to experiment on themselves, on
their children, on whoever they could get hold of. And I don't know of
anybody that was ever hurt, because this work was done by people that were
prudent.
Now, the problem with radioactivity is that you don't have a threshold.
I was just working on that basis. But the doses we're talking about are
very small. I don't know what the doses were in the plutonium cases. I
never took the trouble to look them up. But the kind of thing that they
did up at—what's that? |
| FISHER: |
Rochester? |
| EISENBUD: |
Well, I was thinking of the children's home. |
| FISHER: |
Fernald School [in Ohio]. |
| EISENBUD: |
Yeah, right. That was very, very important work they were doing up
there.
I can remember many discussions of, "How can we get information about
this or that and the other thing?' and always it would boil down—because
we were interested in children, children being more sensitive to many things.
Where do you get hold of children where you can monitor their diet for
a period of months? They have to be institutionalized. Well, you want them
to be institutionalized and you want them to be healthy—healthy, metabolically.
Well, that pretty much limits you, and that's, I suppose, how Fernald was
selected, although I wasn't involved in that at all. Never really even
heard about it. So I don't know where you draw the line on risk.
The only time I ran up against this problem myself was when we developed
a method of measuring the amount of radioiodine in a child's thyroid by
simply sitting them in a chair in a shielded room and holding a sodium
iodide crystal up to their neck, and, in about 15 to 20 minutes, we would
be able to tell them how much thyroid they have. We developed a lot of
information and published a lot of useful data.
Where did we get our kids? Well, I only had three of them, so—I mean, among
us we've probably got a dozen or so. |
| FISHER: |
So they were all the children of scientists involved? |
| EISENBUD: |
No, no. We went to the outpatient clinic of the Pediatrics Department,
and if we— |
| FISHER: |
In the city? Because you were up in Tuxedo [Park, New York]? |
| EISENBUD: |
No, no, this is when we—we were then in the city. |
| FISHER: |
Still? |
| EISENBUD: |
Still in the city. And we would talk to the nurses and explain that
we would like to know about some children that had normal calcium metabolism
and normal iodine metabolism, and so on.
And they would say, "Well, there's 12 of them over there," so
we would go over and talk to their mothers, sometimes through an interpreter.
The kids would walk across the street, sit in the chair in this iron room,
watch TV for 20 minutes or a half-hour, the mother standing right with
them. We would give them a lollipop, and the mother's thrilled that she
has participated in science. The child has got
a lollipop and has watched TV.
Then, one day, I was asked whether we had informed consent. It never occurred
to me that I would need it. |
| HARRELL: |
That's a similar controversy to what has evolved around the Hanford
monitoring program, or dietary study, they did on the normal population. |
| EISENBUD: |
Yeah. |
| HARRELL: |
There are people who are hysterical about that. |
| EISENBUD: |
I don't know. It would never have occurred to me that I would need
informed consent for that.
Well, fortunately, we already had all the data we needed, so, rather than
try to translate all of this into Spanish, which was the kind of people
we were dealing with in those days at Bellevue Hospital, we just quit. |
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