INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY AUERBACH AND DAVID REICHLE

Parts 1, 2, and 3

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

October 2001

Transcribed by Jordan Reed

[Part 1 begins]

MR. REICHLE: Hello, I’m Dave Reichle, and I’m here with Stan Auerbach. In a few

minutes we’ll both introduce ourselves a little bit more formally. But the reason we’re

here is, my good friend Stan Auerbach has just told me that he’s going to be moving to

Nashville to be close with some of his family, and I thought it was a shame to let him

get out of Oak Ridge and away from the Laboratory without getting an oral history and

tapping his memory of the origins of the environmental research programs at the [Oak

Ridge National] Laboratory [ORNL], and I have a hidden agenda. He played such an

important part, personally, in that history to get some documentation of the events that

occurred, and his role and activities in it. The environmental sciences at the Laboratory

is one of the largest environmental programs at any of the national labs. It’s grown to a

point where it has an international reputation as well as national. It’s one of the more

outstanding environmental and ecological research programs in the world. That didn’t

occur easily. The leadership primarily from Stanley and the unique events along that

the way that caused this to happen and caused this to happen at Oak Ridge, I think is

a fascinating story that Stanley has to tell, that we need to capture. So Stan, I’ll turn

things over to you.

MR. AUERBACH: Okay. At the risk of being somewhat pedantic, I thought I would

give you a few references which cover the history of the Laboratory, or the history of

environmental science. The first one is the history of the Environmental Science

Division, which was written at the 50th anniversary of the Laboratory. It’s not that one.

And it’s ORNL EM-27-32, you can get a copy of the Lab records. Then an additional

one, was done earlier, from 1989 Lab Review which is on the Biological Sciences.

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There are several chapters dealing with the origins of Environmental Sciences. The

one that deals with particularly with the problems is the lead chapter, which I wrote

then, and follows what are descriptions of the scientific programs. Then there is

another interesting one called, dealing with the history of the research in the

Environmental Science Division, called Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A

History of Contemporary Ecology. It was written by a man named Stephen Bocking,

published in 1997 under the Yale University Press. That deals with ecosystem

research in ecology, and deals very, very thoroughly with the development of ecology

here at the Lab, my strategies and motivations covering that particular document.

Lastly, I think Professor [J. Newell] Stannard at the University of Rochester wrote a

history of radiation biology, which in he included a few chapters on the development of

radioecology in the United States. So, those are some formalistic writings, and today…

MR. REICHLE: But also you’re TM report.

MR. AUERBACH: That’s the one I’m talking about. The history of the Environmental

Science Division.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: That’s the blue cover.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: This is sort of a preface, the one you had shown us that covered

the history of the Laboratory. Like many, many sciences, Environmental Sciences at

ORNL had its origin and its problem and the problem was atomic energy and the

growing realization that in a place like this that byproducts of atomic energy were being

released into the environment. This problem began to emerge in 1946 to 1947 as the

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Laboratory worked on fuel elements in particular and the treatment of fuel elements

beginning a rise to radioactive waste products. The individual who then began to worry

about that in particular is Dr. Karl Z. Morgan who was then the initial director of the

Health Physics Division. Dr. Morgan then, as well as also through his career, was

profoundly concerned about the impact of radiation, radioactivity on man, and later on

the environment, and he was a dedicated individual who tried to do something about it.

Well, in the ’45, ’46, ’47 era, we began to release waste to White Oak Creek, out into

that area. Dr. Morgan began to worry about its resulting impact and possible dangers.

Prior to that time, under the Army Engineers, the Laboratory had constructed a number

of settling bases and other receiving bases to hold these effluences. Nevertheless,

there was still a certain amount that had to be released, and it was released into this

drainage creek called White Oak Creek. Then from thence, it went down into the

Clinch River, and people began to worry what kind of impact that would have.

Instrumentation was very crude at that time. We were just learning how to measure

beta-gamma rays with instruments. Nevertheless, the Health Physics Division began to

undertake periodic samplings of White Oak Creek at the mouth of White Oak Creek

and the Clinch River to see what kind of radioactive materials and what quantities were

being released into the public environment. Then they, of course, saw that there was

quite a bit being released. So working with the Oak Ridge Operations Office and TVA

[Tennessee Valley Authority], K.Z. Morgan arranged for an ecological survey to start in

1950 under the staff of the TVA. The scientist in charge was Dr. Louis Krumholz who

was an aquatic biologist at that time. He was employed to…, he wasn’t employed,

arrangements were made through the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] top office to

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fund him and his staff to do a survey. Now, some ideas of difficulties at that time were

that there were no, in the ‘40’s, the Health Physics Division kept track of what was

being released by going out and taking samples in a water bucket. Didn’t have any

fancy sampling materials. They’d bring it back, analyze it for gross beta and gamma

activity, as well as what isotope they could measure directly and arrive at some

preliminary estimates as to the amounts going in to the Clinch River. Am I talking to

fast, by the way?

MALE VOICE OFF CAMERA: No, you’re doing great.

MR. AUERBACH: And the amounts being released were sufficient for Karl Morgan to

be concerned. Well, Dr. Krumholz and his staff did a three year study and

demonstrated that there was uptake of radioactivity by various components of the

aquatic ecosystem that were around White Oak Lake. In particular, there was

considerable uptake of phosphorus 32. Being an element that biologic refusal to

stimulate, he began to see the building up of these concentration factors.

Nevertheless, Dr. Krumholz began to publish some reports which, I guess, the

Laboratory viewed as being somewhat alarmist and not being sufficiently scientifically

founded. As a result, when the contract was up, Dr. Krumholz’s program was to be

terminated. Now, at the same time, going on in parallel with this, the Health Physics

Division took over the role of concern on what to do with radioactive waste products

and how to handle that. The Laboratory was, much of the Laboratory’s waste products

stemmed from the work in the Chemical Technology Division, working on methods for

treating reactive fuel elements to recover the uranium 325 or the plutonium to be

reused, at the same time, processing the radioactive materials that were primarily

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waste: strontium 90, cesium 137, zinc 65, ruthenium 106, to name another few. In that

period then of 1949, ’50, various organizations began to come to the Laboratory.

[Inaudible 9:46] have some of the people getting training in this new problem of

radioactive waste. In particular, the Public Health Service, the Army Corps of

Engineers, and some organizations sent people here to work on the problem. The

Army Corps of Engineers was interested because they were concerned about a

nuclear war and how they would treat drinking water, assuming it would be

contaminated. William Lacy was sent here by the Corps and he devised a system for

clearing water of radioactive materials which could be mounted on trucks. So in case

of nuclear attack, the Corps of Engineers could send fleets of these trucks around the

United States to decontaminate drinking water. The Public Health Service had people

in here learning how to, again some of the same problems, related problems, people

like Conrad Straub, and a few others who came. Meanwhile, Morgan seeing this

problem area, created a program in radioactive waste engineering disposal within the

Health Physics Division. By 1950, this was a fairly viable organization which was

working sort of side-by-side with this ecological survey. Well, in an internal reason, I

guess, Dr. Morgan felt that the time was right for the Health Physics Division to have a

stronger organized program in radioactive waste research and engineering. We

brought over from Y-12 the chief health physicist over there, a gentleman by the name

of Edward Struxness, and made him chief of what was then called the Radioactive

Waste Engineering section of the Health Physics Division. It included a small number

of the Lab’s staff: a gentleman named Roy Morton; in 1950, they hired in a young man

named Ken Cowser, who was at that time called a sanitary engineer. Struxness felt

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that it was necessary to establish an ecological program to do research on the

environmental impacts of radioactivity. Now Struxness during the war, had attended a

summer institute at Northwestern University for advanced training in his Master’s

degree program. In it, he happened to take a course in ecology given there by a

professor named Orlando Park. Well, he was extremely taken with the subject of

ecology presented by Professor Park. He was an accomplished lecturer, and a teacher

to students. Well, then Struxness took over the responsibility and began to build his

programs on radioactive waste in the 1950’s, he began to realize the environmental

biology of radioactive waste, or ecology, was married at the Laboratory, simply had to

get involved with it. To do that, he remembered these stimulating lectures by Professor

Park and he contacted him and brought him down to the Laboratory to sort of consult

with him on how to develop a program in radioecology. This took place in the 1952,

1953 era. Professor Park laid out some ideas and concepts, and was calling for a

program, or combination program of fundamental research in ecology tied into dealing

with radioactivity in the environment. In early 1954, I was teaching at a university in

Chicago, Roosevelt University. I had gotten my PhD under Professor Park and I was

doing some post doctorate research in his laboratory. He contacted me, only he didn’t

tell me too much. It was all very secretive. There was a new program developing at

ORNL and he was recommending me to be a part of that program.

MR. REICHLE: As I recall, Stanley, there was an interesting story of where he told

you…

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] You want me to tell that story? Dr. Park was like most of

the American public then, considered everything dealing with atomic energy to be a

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deep national secret. I found out later, to get taught, people were sort of thrilled in a

kind of scary way of being led into this [inaudible 15:10]. I guess they didn’t want to talk

about it. So he called me one day, and he said, “I have an opportunity I need to talk to

you about. Get in your car, and we’ll meet down 25 miles from where the university

was in an abandoned steel mill area, at night.” [Laughter] We drove down there and he

told me about this new program, top secret. He can’t talk to me except under these

circumstances. So I said, “Fine.” He said, “I’m also recommending another scientist,

Dr. Joseph Cannon [sp?], who, he had not been a student of his, but he knew well, and

he was at a science museum in Chicago. Dr. Cannon was an expert in insects. In this

case, they were mites. Dr. Park had been a researcher in insect ecology. I was a

researcher in arthropod ecology. He was a researcher in arthropod ecology. [Robert]

Van Hook was a researcher… So we set up a chain of this ecological pattern. So, he

said, “I’ll turn your name in then, and I’ll turn in Joe’s and you should hear from this Mr.

Struxness sometime soon.” So in April, around ’54, I got an invitation to come down to

ORNL for an interview, along with Dr. Cannon. It was around the middle of April, we

came down. We were picked up at the airport by the Knoxville transport that we had

then, if you remember that. Maybe it was before your time. We were taken to Oak

Ridge. Now it turned out that the Guest House, Alexander Hotel, was all booked. So

we were put in what is known as the Montclair Apartments. These are kind of a

slaterly-looking place off Jefferson Circle. I don’t know, do you know that area? We

were put in there for that night and the next few days, with great apologies from

Struxness. They just had no room. So that evening, Joe and I walked out of there, and

we looked around. We looked over at the Garden Apartments, which then looked like a

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Soviet-style housing center. We were hungry. So we walked over to Jefferson Circle,

to Jefferson Drug Store, sort of sat down. They had high steps there. I thought, what

are we getting ourselves into? It didn’t look very appealing. Then I thought to myself, if

I don’t go through with this, [inaudible 18:03] would never have a job, Van Hook would

never have a job, and everybody else wouldn’t have a job, so I better go through with

it. [Laughter] So we went, and came out to the Laboratory…

MR. REICHLE: That’s a bit of hindsight now. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: I met the director of Personnel and he looked at me, I looked at

him, and I recognized him as being a former professor of Organic Chemistry at the

University of Chicago. I had taken his course in Organic Chemistry in 1941, and I didn’t

do very well. It was [Arnold B. Johnson 18:44], but anyway he didn’t remember me in

detail. We went through the interview, Struxness took us out to see the first radioactive

waste experimental design they were building. Waste [inaudible 18:57] number one,

which was displayed then, and outlined to me what they were going to be doing there,

and how it was critical that we get an ecological program underway, working [inaudible

19:10]. So, he, this was April, said, “Would you be able to come here by the end of

June?” I was planning to get married the middle of June, but I said, “That’s fine.” So,

[Inaudible 19:33]. Well, June came, I got married, my wife and I. She was a librarian at

the Chicago Natural History Museum, [Inaudible 19:45] museum. I resigned from the

university. I had scheduled a summer class I didn’t do, and we both moved into an

apartment and began to wait. Well, June went by, nothing, heard nothing. July went by,

Park had called me. He was down there for the summer. He wanted me down there so

we could work together on the starting of this program. I began to put a frantic phone

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call into the end of July. It turned into, to Struxness, and it turned out that Dr. Cannon

was having trouble getting cleared, not because of his own activities, but apparently

one of his family had been involved in some organization, and that was all you needed

at that time. So, it began to go into August. My clearance came through and we

promptly moved down here. Dr. Cannon’s never came through and he resigned from

being interested in this. He went onto the University of Kansas where he founded an

institute of [acnerology 21:02], which is a disease organization. We would have made

an interesting pair. We were both about the same size. He was kind of a, looked like

Edward G. Robinson in the movies, and I looked like me. It didn’t work out, and

perhaps just as well because he was dedicated to a specific niche. So I came in, got

there the end of, August 31, that week. Park had about another two weeks here. He

said, “I’ve started a series of experiments. I’ve outlined some other things, and I want

you to keep in constant touch with me as we develop these.” Well, he and I had done

research on a form of terrestrial microcosms that existed in decaying trees. [Inaudible

21:54] which, trees they often decay. They have holes at the bottom. In there, the

decaying wood, it provides an excellent habitat for certain kinds of microorganisms,

insects, and effectively they developed their own little community there. He thought this

would be a good way to start getting data on the impact of radiation on semi-organized

communities. We just needed data. We had no idea how much radiation was required

to damage a little community system. The radiobiologists were working on mice, rats,

cows, so they had all kinds of data gathered. Over at Brookhaven, they were working

on the effects on higher plants, but no one was approaching it from an ecological point

of view, looking at how it affected the community. So these little, which we called tree

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holes became a, kind of a fun kind of thing, were the sources of these kind of

materials. To work with these kind of materials, you have to determine what was in

there, what kinds of insects, how many of them, and way back in the early 20th century,

an Italian biologist by the name of [Antonio] Berlese devised a simple technique of

extracted materials from such materials, [inaudible 23:26] a funnel with screens on it

and a heat source on the top. You put the materials in there and you let it stay for a

week or two and all the organisms migrate down into the collection. The Italian’s name

was Berlese, so these were called Berlese funnels. With the, being there with

Struxness whipping the thing at top speed, Park had a whole bank of these funnels

created, about 15 or 20 of them beautifully done. Nothing like what we had at the

university, but that was because of the shops here. He had been going out, collecting

materials on the reservation…

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. AUERBACH: …the most distinguished professor you’ve seen: grey mustache,

very pompous, grey hair. But he often put on, with a few of the others, a good jazz

player, had his own jazz band. In the Health Physics Division, he immediately got the

support of the applied health physicist, a fellow who went around doing the routine

monitoring, and the chief of the applied health physics section, a man by the name of

Jim Hart. Jim was a fellow West Virginian, worked at DuPont, to come here, and

Morgan had made him chief of the section. He was a crafty character, and Park,

working with him and he worked with Park, he got tremendously impressed. Park, he’s

a sport. So he and his staff would go out with Struxness and Park and they’d go out in

the woods. Park would lay on the professorial ecological disease. Later I learned from

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Park, those boys are very good, and they haven’t had their hands on excellent

moonshine whiskey. [Laughter] Apparently out in the field, [inaudible 26:02] Dr. Park

would tell me this and [inaudible 26:08]. You’ll like Jim. He’s not been acquainted with

marvelous Tennessee moonshine. I always had a quart of moonshine on me. Hart

was, he was good. He played the role of simple country boy, but he was anything but.

Every day at noon, in his corner of the Health Physics Division at headquarters,

building 2001, the infamous Quonset Hut at the top of the hill, he would decide over a

game of hearts he played every noon, that was his way, he had his sub-chief there,

and that was his way of controlling, was over a wisecrack game, but they played very

serious. So he introduced me to be a part of that. I could perceive that he was a very

valuable person to learn how to operate in his laboratory. He had very little to do with

the basic physics in the Health Physics Division. They tended to be focused on their

research. He had this whole laboratory to worry about. He used to be very forthcoming

with advice. The thing I remember [inaudible 27:42], a couple times he called me, said,

“Stanley, you’re probably going to be some kind of program director here. You’ll be

employing all kinds of people, and you have to learn how to plan to deal with these

people if they turn out ot be unsatisfactory.” He said, “My policy is to spot this, and over

a period of about two years, set the stage for their eventual elimination of my program.

Instead of [inaudible 28:14].” I said, “That’s good news.” It turned out that I never had

the time or the opportunity to do that, although one of my future employees did it very

well. Not him. [Points to Mr. Reichle] [Laughter] But that year, in there, I got started on

these two tree hole studies, which was basically again looking at basic radiation data.

At the same time, Park had recognized that we have to worry about food chain transfer

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of radioactivity. He had written a proposal to do work with carbon 14. It was a very

excellent proposal. Carbon 14 was then beyond the technical, my technical

background. The division lab [inaudible 29:15], and I, so that I threw out. He also had

some idea of doing a natural food chain using box turtles. He had a container full of

box turtles. I didn’t want to get involved in that either. That was a tough time for me. I

was newly married. I was putting in 50 to 60 hour weeks down here, trying to get

caught up. I had to get caught up in radiation biology, which I never studied, and

fortunately the Biology Division had a course going on in radiation biology. I had to go

over there a few times a week. I had to get caught up in isotope chemistry, which I

didn’t know too much about. I had to get caught up in health physics. I had to get

caught up in math. So I was trying to do these, and I was doing a lot of 60 hour weeks

trying to keep up with all these. Well, this tree hole work was going on. I’d do that.

They gave me a technician then. He said these technicians in the Health Physics

Department are not college educated. They are simple folk who have gotten these

jobs. They will do anything you tell them, consistently, and unless you tell them how to

do it, they will keep doing it until you tell them to stop. So we had some assigned

technicians who would look at these materials, count the organisms, identify them, and

give me a database. Well, about that time Struxness was really a superb group leader

in the old fashioned sense. His responsibility was to keep track of what you’re doing,

find out why you’re doing what you’re doing, and give advice. So, once a week, I’d

meet in his office. I’d give him a complete rundown of what I was doing and he in turn

would ask questions, push me to do something else, which I hardly ever did, but

anyway, the subject of earthworms came up. And earthworms, when you thought

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about it, were logical things to be concerned about in our radiological waste program.

Radiation was in the soils. Earthworms worked the soils. Do they accumulate

radioactivity? If so, to what extent? We’d modify it. In fact, Charles Darwin had shown

how earthworms build up soil by working it through. So he wanted me to do an

earthworm experiment. I hadn’t been here about six months, and he said we ought to

do it on strontium 90. [Laughter] All I knew about strontium 90 was that it was a real

bad actor. “Oh, we’ll help you. You get it organized.” So I designed it. We were going

to do it in the laboratory in the hood vent. We had earthworms. Well…

MR. REICHLE: Where were you, at that time, in terms of laboratory?

MR. AUERBACH: We were in building…

MR. REICHLE: 2001.

MR. AUERBACH: …2001. Down there at the end. And strontium 90 is dangerous

stuff. He said, “I know, but don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of you.” So one, I had to

prepare the soils, which meant they had to be identical. I’d bring in soils, grind them,

we had a grinder, pulverize them, and homogenize them. Then we’d add the strontium

90 to it. Well, I was scared to death. So, I wore, you know, the white coveralls, taped

my wrists, rubber gloves, masks. Then I would add the isotope to them. I needed

earthworms. There were two logical sources. One, both [inaudible 33:13] and one was

the rather common little one was called a red worm then, genus alabothera [sp?

33:21], and the other was [inaudible 33:24], which are hard to come by. But I found out

where they were. We put a purchase order in for these worms. The Purchase

Department had never seen anything like that, but nevertheless, we got the worms.

And I started the experiment with introducing the worms into pots which contained

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different quantities of the isotope. Let it run. It ran, I took the worms out, analyzed

them. I let them clear the testing and analyzed what I measured. It was an interesting

experiment that I was being pushed [to do], and I wrote it up in the report, the health

physics report. I felt I didn’t have enough materials for a paper. So I wrote it up. About

30 years later, we had lots of contacts with British, the Brits over at Harwell

[Laboratory, Atomic Energy Research Establishment]. One of the guys, I forget his

name, wrote back to me, says, “How come when you got started [inaudible 34:36]

earthworms.” He said they were doing something. I wrote him back, “Dear Joe, sorry to

disappoint you. Here are copies of the reports I did back in 1956 on earthworms.” He

said, “Okay, I can see. I would be surprised if you hadn’t looked at that one.” Well, one

day, that was in 1954, end of ’54, beginning of ’55, and Struxness called me in again.

Well, he called me and we met every Monday. He would probe me: what I did, why I

did it…

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. AUERBACH: …the Metallurgy Division has gotten a big new program to deal with

reactors. They needed expansion space. [Alvin] Weinberg and company had decided

to give part of the 2001 [building] and I’d have to be moved. I want to go back a minute

because another incident occurred which was one of my most [inaudible 36:08] in my

career. As I said, Morgan and Struxness were totally dedicated to the program, were

busy selling it, harped to Weinberg. Weinberg was uninterested, and every opportunity

they had they tried to sell it. It turned out, somewhere around September, or October of

1954, I’d only been here about two months. They had their visits from a Dr. Isidor Rabi

to the laboratory. Dr. Rabi was the chairman to the advisory committee to the Atomic

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Energy Commission. They were, I guess, the key scientific body that sort of approved

and disapproved of what was going on at the Laboratory. Morgan and Struxness

convinced Weinberg, Dr. Rabi has got to be told about this new program, radio

ecology. [Laughter] I was concerned enough with trying to get Dr. Weinberg to be

happy about it. One afternoon, they brought Dr. Rabi up to the laboratory I was in, in

2001 [building]. They marched in. Weinberg, Rabi, Morgan, Struxness. Here’s me,

telling him there’s this marvelous new program in ecology [inaudible 37:35]. Stan

Auerbach here is going to be our lead scientist. This guy was like God. So I started to

chatter. I was sitting on a stenographers stool, and I got so nervous, suddenly the stool

flew out from under me and I was flat on the floor, on my butt. [Laughter] Well, these

guys just stood by nervously. I got back up, but I was ruined for the day after that. I

never told you that story. [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: Never told me. I thought you were going to say something else.

[Laughter] So, you never briefed them?

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 38:21] generalization. Then some months later, to add

fuel to the fire, to make me feel very uncomfortable, the laboratories and the system

associate directors, were like we have now. Dr. Weinberg had picked for a physics

thing, a bright young physicist who had come to the Laboratory a year or two before,

by the name of Sharpie, Robert Sharpie. Robert Sharpie was the epitome of the overly

bright, sharp, totally, he knew everything that was good to know, which is why

Weinberg [inaudible 39:03]. I guess you could say [inaudible 39:08], although he

forced the Oak Ridge schools to have a new curriculum in mathematics [inaudible

39:14]. He was up one day, came up one day to look through [inaudible 39:20]

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Struxness, and he kindly reminded me sort of a child’s [inaudible 39:24]. He played the

role of captain [inaudible 39:32]. So I began to talk to him about the sum of tracing

radioactive [inaudible 39:41] mathematic. “Very simple,” he says. “All you need is a

differential equation, put these in your system, and you got it.” [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: Sounds like he was a physicist.

MR. AUERBACH: He was a physicist. Yeah, oh yeah. A very good physicist. Going

back then…

MR. REICHLE: Let me interrupt you.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: Stanley mentioned a reference of Newell Stannard, and we don’t have

this in our library. I had, with Stan, done a history of ecology in the ’50’s, a year or so

ago, for an IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] meeting, and I think we got it on

interlibrary loan from UT [University of Tennessee], or it might have been Vanderbilt

[University]. I think it’s been reprinted by, oddly enough, Battelle Press in Columbus

[Ohio], but it would probably be one, I know your budgets are always stretched, but it

really is a fascinating book because it goes into the origins of all the different programs

in biology and the environment in all the different, what are now national laboratories.

Stan’s is just a microcosms of the events that were going on everywhere. It was a

difficult job explaining to physicists, who were trained to know all the answers, that

there were problems that they didn’t know the answers to.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: I think the prevailing inclination at the time was we don’t have the time

to worry about these things because the war effort was very present. Or the other

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concept was, we’ll just put it out in the environment and it kind of gets diluted and you

don’t have to worry about it. It’s a fascinating history as you look at Hanford

[Washington], here, and some of these other production plants and how the

environmental problems started appearing in the soils and water, and the beginning of

ecologists who started to address those problems. The only other thing, Stanley, if

someone on the outside who looks into us as we talk here about insects and

earthworms, you get the constant question why were these crazy people worrying

about such esoteric animals, when we have the protection of people as the ultimate

objective. Insects were tremendously valuable laboratory research tool, and they were

being used in universities across the country, as ecologists began to explore things

such as population dynamics, because you could breed and rear large colonies very

easily. Much more easily than you could with mammals. They were also excellent for

experimental studies of food chain accumulation of radio nuclei. So they were really

experimental models in the first wave of understanding the radiation effects of

procomtity [sp? 42:38], fertility and the population dynamics [inaudible 42:41] insects.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: And not in mammals. The definitive work that then got into

relationships, the band progressed through animal systems, and mammal systems. So

a lot of this was really pioneering work. I’m sorry to…

MR. AUERBACH: It’s okay, no [inaudible 43:00]

MR. REICHLE: …interrupt you.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 43:01]. Well in the summer of 1955, and I had…

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MR. REICHLE: You realize we’ve gone three years in 45 minutes here. [Laughter]

They were worried we’d have enough to talk about. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: The summer of ’55 was coming up. I was made aware by my

supervisor that, two things. One, I had to be prepared to move out of my laboratory,

somewhere in ’56. At the same time, Ed [Struxness] felt that we had not taken

advantage of one of the Laboratory’s summer opportunity program, where you hired in

college faculty for three months to work on a particular problem, and which turned out

to be a very useful program. So, he wanted me to see if I could locate a number of

people to come in and work on the program during the summer, and start broadening

the perspective. Doing that, and I was still concerned, as Dave here points out, like any

baseline radiation relationship [inaudible 44:25] natural organisms. I made contact with

people over at UT who were interested in aspects. One of these was a young

entomology professor, a professor by the name of Henry Howden, a dynamic,

hardworking guy, and he had a particular specialty in beetles, which were the so called

dung beetles. So he’d go around and work on dung. [Laughter] This kind of stuff will

come back…

MR. REICHLE: Named for his reputation at the Laboratory. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: Well, Henry was an expert in these. He set up a program irradiating

them. I was also interested in the impact of radiation on microbiota, on bacteria. I’d

been reading enough to get some ideas of what the, using the standard bacterial

cultures where, how they responded to radiation. We needed information on how

natural colonies of bacteria would react. How much dosage was required to produce a

significant impact. So I located a bright, young graduate student in microbiology,

19

whose name is Robert Davis. I can’t remember where he came from, but he came in

and he outlined the program. It was a very simple one. He cultured bacteria out of a

very natural media. He then subjected them to various levels of ionized radiation, to

see what kind of growth he got. Then I also wanted to get started on the uptake of

radioactivity by agricultural supplies. I knew the agriculture department had a program

with strontium 90 uptake by agricultural products. [Inaudible 46:29], but I wanted to try

a little more things. I learned that the University of Missouri was one of the leading soil

departments in the country, and I looked through the applications, and there was a

chap there by the name of Victor Sheldon who wanted to come here. So I contacted

him, got him hired, and quickly designed a program on uptake out of plants. We

brought him the plants. I think the end was strontium 90 probably. So we had all these

things going in the summer. I was meanwhile trying to do the other things. It was

hectic. I also needed to get a replacement for the man who didn’t come, and Park

came up with a chap by the name of Charles Rohde who was a professor of biology at

Northern Illinois State University. Charles was up for a sabbatical leave. So he

[inaudible 47:35] Parks. So he came down. He was also a specialist in acarina, mites.

[Inaudible 47:42] using these organisms as entities, and the population response to

radioactivity. They cultured fast. He’d look at these. I immediately started a project on

studying the impact of radioactivity on populations of other sole organisms called

colimbula [sp?]. They are little tiny organisms that breed rapidly. I set up a series of

studies, experiments where these were being graded and the population was then

being tracked. One of the reasons for doing that is that population ecology was very

popular at that time. In ecology, we’re trying to determine what is the basic rate of

20

increase in the population. They had developed a mathematical technique for

determining, not merely how they increased, but there had to be some genetically

controlled rate of increase. That’s what we were trying to get. So I started these. So

that summer was another very hectic one, had all these people working. At the same

time, Struxness told me, “Well, you’re going to have to vacate this laboratory, and we

think you’re going to have to move to Y-12.” I said, “Why?” “Well,” he said, “there are

several reasons. One, we don’t have any space [inaudible 49:20]. Secondly, I think the

lab manager feels you’ll be closer there to the Biology Division. And you may be able

to develop some working relationships.” By then I already knew about Alexander

Hollaender, and I didn’t want any working relationships. [Laughter] In fact, I think the

manager’s idea was maybe I was persuing a phase of biology that maybe I ought to

redo part of the Biology Division. But Alexander Hollaender, this didn’t fit his game

plan, ecology, applied science. He wasn’t interested, but the Health Physics Division at

ORNL also had an applied biology project at Y-12 under Struxness. They were there,

again doing data on body uptake and transfer of radio nuclides in mice and white rats,

trying to get a better understanding of the transfer radioactivity using mammals, from

one organism to another, that they were working on. He said, “Well, we’ve got a place

over there in a building that houses the Y-12 technical library. It’s a vacant space and

metallurgy will provide $25,000 for you to remodel it into your laboratory.” This building

was called 97-11-1. It housed the Y-12 technical library [inaudible 50:50], and it had a

lot of unfinished space. He said, you can design it anyway you want. I had never

designed a laboratory. So I came in there… I hope I’m not digressing, David.

MR. REICHLE: No.

21

MR. AUERBACH: The X-10 had a coordinator over there who sort of facilitated your

activities. He watched over the Physics, Engineering Physics, and I guess, the Fusion

Program. His name was [Guy or Sky ?] Barker, and he was one of… A very, very nice

guy. One of these guys, he sort of helped you, didn’t want to get in your way, did

anything he could to facilitate. So I told [Sky?] I’ve never done anything like this. He

said, “Well, I’ve got to go to the Engineering Department over here. You figure out

what you want. You’ve got enough space here I think.” He says, “You have $25,000 to

spend, figure it out.” So I looked at it. I could see where I could get in about three

laboratories built in there.

MR. REICHLE: Today you couldn’t paint an office for that. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: Well, so, I tried to look ahead. I decided I had built three labs, but I

ought to design, try to make use of them. I thought they should be general purpose

laboratories, and I contacted the Y-12 Engineering Department. They were delighted.

They said, “We’ll help you any way. By the way, what are your specifications?” Well, at

that point I knew I was in trouble. I said, “Well, I had to have it pretty scientific and

esoteric, otherwise, it wouldn’t [inaudible 52:51]. So, we’ve got to have a constant

temperature and constant humidity in all these laboratories.”

MR. REICHLE: Mistake number one. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: Well, no that was the easy one. [Laughter] So, they sent in an air-

conditioning engineer, a guy by the name of Phil Braimen [sp? 53:06], who I got to

know. A really delightful guy. I liked to have a maintained temperature of 75 degrees,

year round, and 60 percent relative humidity. [Inaudible 53:16]. “Oh, I’ll work on it.”

Then equipping it. I had to do a lot of my own [inaudible 53:26] in the sense of what I

22

wanted. I looked in these laboratory catalogues. I think it was Kewaunee [Scientific] or

some other one. I’d read in their literature and it’d say, “Are you planning a new

laboratory? Contact us and we’ll send down our laboratory sales engineers to help

you.” So I did that. I got on the telephone and called them, and they said, “We’ll be out

in two days.” Two guys came down and I outlined the space and I said what I had in

mind. “Give us a day or two,” and they came back with a few sketches of what I would

need. Then I… Again, they were kind of general purpose laboratories. Kewaunee

made laboratory furniture. So the engineers at Y-12 came around and said, “Have you

decided what you need?” I said, “Yes. I had engineers from Kewaunee. Here are their

plans.” They turned green.

MR. REICHLE: Mistake number two. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] So, but they knew what I wanted. I didn’t get Kewaunee

furniture, but I got that design.

MR. REICHLE: That design that was made in our shop?

MR. AUERBACH: No, no.

MR. REICHLE: No?

MR. AUERBACH: No, these were bought commercial.

MR. REICHLE: Kewaunee?

MR. AUERBACH: There were three labs.

MR. REICHLE: It wasn’t Kewaunee furniture?

MR. AUERBACH: No, it wasn’t Kewaunee. [Inaudible 54:55]

MALE VOICE OFF CAMERA: Can we take a break?

MR. AUERBACH: Sure.

23

MR. REICHLE: There is an interesting set of stories that Stanley may or may not be

heading into, which you ought to bring out, is growing up in a world where engineers

were trained to develop reactor components, and reactor pilot plants. And these

environmental folks are asking for simple things.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah. [Nods head affirmative]

MR. REICHLE: And what you ask for, it’s just like the Department of Defense. A nickel

box, and you get a $5,000 crate.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, that’s right. That was the problem. They continually…

MR. REICHLE: Escaping crafts.

MR. AUERBACH: Escaping crafts. It’s the simple things. Are you ready?

MALE VOICE OFF CAMERA: Yes, I just need to change…

MR. REICHLE: Change.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh, sure.

MR. REICHLE: Is there a coffee pot around the corner here at all, do you know?

[Break in video]

MR. AUERBACH: ...ecology, in the applied division of Biology and Medicine. He knew

[inaudible 56:10] projects at several laboratories. [Eugene] Odum had a contract with

them beginning in 1950 with them to do baseline studies at the Savannah River Plant.

MR. REICHLE: Savannah River.

MR. AUERBACH: Hanford was busy worrying about…

MR. REICHLE: Fission at Columbia.

MR. AUERBACH: …aquatic systems and these kinds of things. So he convinced Park

to work through the Ecological Society and lay the groundwork for pushing the AEC in

24

a formal program. So, he financed Park, make a round trip around the country, visiting

various establishments that had some kind of fallout study program. He had the real

authority to ask Park to do this. So, Park being Park took it. He went around and said,

“I’m coming to you in New York [inaudible 56:59] I’d like to know what you’re doing.”

This resulted in a fair bit of flack floating into ORNL. “Who is this guy that you’re

sending around? What authority does he have to come and ask what we’re doing?”

MR. REICHLE: The security was high at these other facilities.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 57:18] territorial.

MR. REICHLE: Territorial.

MR. AUERBACH: They were… ORNL had [inaudible 57:21].

MR. REICHLE: You bring up an interesting point and I think it came out in that paper

for IAEA we wrote, if it ever gets published, on ecology in the ‘50’s, or when it gets

published. It’s interesting that Struxness tried to develop a formal environmental

program in then AEC, that it eventually got developed in a division of Biology and

Medicine.

MR. AUERBACH: Right. Didn’t eventually, that’s where it started.

MR. REICHLE: That’s where it started. I have a coffee cup coming here, and I’m going

to… Thank you, Julie. But the research program and the funding got established on a

side of the house in AEC where the basic science programs were.

MR. AUERBACH: Right, right.

MR. REICHLE: But that the origins of the environmental programs in ecology, as you

just noted, started at the production plants.

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

25

MR. REICHLE: Hanford in the Columbia, Savannah River which was a production

facility.

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: And Odum was kind of doing all kinds of esoteric…

MR. AUERBACH: Right, right.

MR. REICHLE: …non-applied things, and what turned out here, I think, initially was the

terrestrial components of the program…

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: …first.

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: All though Krumholz had been doing the aquatic. It’s kind of an irony to

me that the problems were in the applied side of the house.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, also, they had a program at UCLA [University of California,

Los Angeles] in tracking fallout.

MR. REICHLE: Yeah. The traditional areas where the rest of the basic sciences were

done, were not at these production plant facilities. They were at Brookhaven, Argonne,

Berkley, where the… what evolved into the Molecular Biology…

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: …and Physics programs.

MR. AUERBACH: Now, I should mention another contribution that was simulated with

Park, and that was to get the Ecological Society of America, which was then, as is

now, the premier basic society for that phase of science. We got into… Park had been

president of the society and an active officer. He got them to establish a committee on

26

radioecology, and he got appointed to this committee a number of key leading

ecologists at that time. He got them briefed, and then the division of Biology and

Medicine at the AEC at that time, was run by a chairman who was really a [inaudible

1:00:03] and this was… I’ve forgotten his name.

MR. REICHLE: John Wolfe?

MR. AUERBACH: No.

MR. REICHLE: It would be before John Wolfe.

MR. AUERBACH: John Wolfe is not in that. Charlie… I can’t remember, but he was a

physician, smart, pugnacious, and he, they arranged for him to brief their committee.

He had come to Washington, and get briefed by the DBM, Division of Biology and

Medicine, on what they were going to do. They should do something. This is around

May of ’55. I was advisor there to Washington, in that, before they were out of

Germantown, they were down in a little war building. [Inaudible 1:01:00] and I think

Struxness came with me. We got rooms at the Mayflower. Today we couldn’t get

rooms at the Mayflower. [Laughter] Then I think it was $25 a night we could stay at the

Mayflower. We went out there and I met the members of the committee, [inaudible

1:01:17] and they got briefings from all of us. I had to give a talk on what I was trying to

do, and at the finish of it, there was a statement to the chairman saying [inaudible

1:01:37]. “Well, I agree with you.” He said, “In anticipation of this, my staff has been

looking around the country for an individual who might be interested in taking a

leadership role in our department. In reading your report, we have found such a

person, in Dr. John Wolfe, at Ohio State University.” So we all looked at each other,

and nobody knew John Wolfe, much less heard of him. He was a plant ecologist. He

27

had written a number of interesting papers, but he was not into what I call the

mainstream of science. So, he was introduced, and he would now be developing the

program. He was an interesting character. He reminded me of some famous member

of Congress during the ‘50’s, but I can’t remember his name. [Inaudible 1:02:32]

features, kind of gray hair, tall. And he was in charge of the program. Fine. We were

happy. We had an ecology branch. Now switching back then. I was, back to ORNL, I

was doing research with people working in the summer, and Struxness then brought in

another niche to me. “We’re going to be draining White Oak Lake sometime in the fall

of 1955 because we are finding that it’s too hard to control the releases from there.”

We’re uncertain about what happens if the lake fills up. The lake had nearly flooded a

couple of times, and we felt that it was losing its capacity to store radioactive materials

from the Laboratory. So, after doing many health physics studies and all that, they

were going to drain it and just keep a standing pool, and the dam would be upgraded

so they could then monitor it more efficiently. I said, “Fine.” “Well,” he said, “I want you

to start thinking about that.” So I said, “All right.” Finally, at the same time in the fall of

’55, I got a visit from John Wolfe on his first inspection tour. He said, “Stanley, I’ve

been looking at your program documents, looking at the Laboratory. I think you’re

going to have to think about switching more to the field because what you’re doing can

be done at any university laboratory [inaudible 1:04:24] radio isotopes and radiation.

I’m going to have, I’m setting up a program [inaudible 1:04:32], Emory [University] and

other places that want to do radiation. I think you need to think about more in the field.”

I said, “Okay. We’ll phase out the laboratory work.” At the same time, a lot of things

happened simultaneously. I needed to get a replacement. Well, Dr. Rohde was a

28

specialist in mites. He wanted to do a culture on [inaudible 1:05:15] Columbia, and he

kept coming around, and one day, I took him out on the road, the road from Gallaher

Road from K-25 out to the connection of [US] 70. There used to be a little bar there.

Jim Hart going back [inaudible 1:05:35] at 4:30 would hold court there, stop off for a

beer on your way home. “Stanley, you’ve got to come out here.” So Stanley came out

there, and we did this court at 4:30 and he had one of his guys [inaudible 1:05:49] a

little house there. This guy raised chickens. So, I introduced Rohde into this weekly

thing, and that was no problem. Rohde liked his beer. And we went out to the chicken

house and we looked down where the chickens were, and on the floor, and the chicken

feces were crawling with mites. I think that we got [inaudible 1:06:19] cultures in it. So,

I said, “Yeah, great.” He said, “I know those kinds of mites.” So he began to bring back

chicken manure to Y-12.

MR. REICHLE: You see the legacy that we had to live with in later decades. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: They proved very, you know, he got millions of them he could

radiate. [Inaudible 1:06:50] chicken manure. So these things were doing fine. Charles

was irradiating over in the Biology Division [inaudible 1:06:59]. One day Struxness

came over. He was coming over less frequently. I could pretty well run it on my own.

He came over to talk to Rohde and myself, [inaudible 1:07:12] explained to him what

we were doing. He kind of turned pale. He didn’t say anything, went back, and about a

week later, “You know Stanley, you’re putting me in an awful position. You know

what’s going to happen when word gets out that you’re doing a chicken shit

experiment. [Laughter] You’re irradiating chicken manure.” So I said, “Ed, all right. I’m

going to get this study done,” and so forth. [Inaudible 1:07:53] ’55 [inaudible 1:07:54]

29

drained White Oak Lake. Again, somewhere in the middle of the early ’56 era, Rohde

had to go back to school, and looking around, I got a recommendation from a fellow,

Dr. [Dac] Crossley from the University of Kansas, coincidentally was also a mites

specialist. We hired him down. Dac came down, but I didn’t hire him for the [inaudible

1:08:28]. I had looked at his resume and thought he had lots of statistics and

mathematics. I said that’s what I’m going to need. I’m not that much of a

mathematician. So he came down, started in the later part of ’55. The lake had been

drained and he was to help me with the colimbula statistics we were trying to get at.

You may remember, Dave, one of the parameters ecologists were enamored

[inaudible 1:09:04] intrinsically great of natural increase are…

MR. REICHLE: Growth rates.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, well…

MR. REICHLE: Intrinsically…

MR. AUERBACH: Population [inaudible 1:09:11]. I thought we had enough data to

isolate that. So Crossley and I did do the math. We did come out with sort of a crude

rate of R in the population. This is the first radiation [inaudible 1:09:26]. We got it

published in Science [Magazine], and we scooped [Inaudible 1:09:40]

MR. REICHLE: Right.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 1:09:42]. But I began to know I would have to start

working on White Oak Lake. I was worried because this was a whole new kind of

endeavor. I told Wolfe, [inaudible 1:09:59] more money, more money [inaudible

1:10:05] and I mean, by then I was at Y-12 and trying to operate from there. That was

a 12 mile trip to the lake, but… Can you shut the camera a minute?

30

[Break in video]

MR. AUERBACH: So I began to plan for the lake, to have people work out there, and I

went out in the spring of ’56, to look at this [inaudible1:10:40], put the other stuff away,

and Crossley and me talked about it. You have to set up an experimental area. The

plants were starting to grow on the lake bed and were becoming very lush. I had Henry

Howden there as a consultant, and some other help. I said, “Well, if you’re going to

make an experimental area out there, you’ve got to grid this someway. You’ll have to

install steel fence posts every ten feet or so, mark it so you can grid the area, and have

focal points.” [Inaudible 1:11:18] “I ain’t got enough money to do that.” The labor pool

was charging me a fortune to go out and install those fence posts. They only worked

15 minutes a day because of radiation, or 20 minutes a day. I said, “We’ll do it

ourselves.” So I ordered fence posts, standard fence posts. Crossley and I, I forget

who our technicians were. [Inaudible 1:11:44] and some others [inaudible] some high

school students [inaudible]. We all wore pencil meters and dosimeters in our badges,

and the dose rate out there then was about 10 milirads per hour. Today you wouldn’t

even dream of getting [inaudible 1:12:08]. So we went out there and I had a graduate

student in health physics, as a cheap response for his Master’s, do a study of the

radiation fields in the lake bed, plot them, etcetera, etcetera [inaudible 1:12:22]. And

we found the dose rates ranged from, you know, two milirads per hour near the shore,

up to close to a rad per hour in some parts of that lake there. We laid out about a three

acre plot, three acre plot, all gridded, to give him a chance to do something. It was the

spring of ’56, we did that. In the summer of ’56, the vegetation on that lake bed grew

like something in one of the fairy stories, grew up [raised hands]. Henry Howden was

31

about 6’ 2”, and these plants were up to the top of his head [inaudible 1:13:10], and, of

course, the logical thing, that would be that the radiation was stimulating it, but it wasn’t

the radiation. The soils were loaded with nitrogen and phosphates from the releases at

the Laboratory. It just flourished. And we started a project of determining the success

of insects down there. Crossley was doing that by using [inaudible 1:13:35] and I

began to bombard John Wolfe with calls for more money. “You want me to work out in

the field, I need more money.” They obliged. I… Then at that point, we began to switch

from doing radiation studies, because they were being discouraged, and began to work

more and more on uptake, turnover, transfer of particular radionuclides,

bioaccumulation, etcetera, etcetera. Crossley began to devise a technique for

measuring the turnover rate of nuclides in insect organisms, trying to determine the

bioaccumulation factors, and trying to determine the amount of radio isotopes that

were being moved through the food chain as a component of the total radioactivity in

the lake bed. There was a lot of radioactivity in the lake bed. What came into the

[inaudible 1:14:40] insects was, very little of it was turnover [inaudible 1:14:43]. There

was no bioaccumulation of strontium or cesium. The same kind of… Crossley devised

a technique later, when we worked with David when he came down, on mathematically

measuring the turnover rates in the population, determining how much they really are

moving. It was a hot summer. We all had to go out there in coveralls, taped up, while

we did this work. The… I want to digress a second [inaudible 1:15:21]. We had written

a paper on colimbula. By the end of 1955, February of 1956, ’55 maybe, Struxness

said, “You’re going to give a talk at our information meeting.” These were the years

when Alvin Weinberg sat down in the front row and listened to everything, knew

32

everything everybody was talking about. And if you made a mistake, you quickly

learned about it. [Inaudible 1:16:02] pure physicist, spot a little equation with the wrong

numbers. So I got up. The only thing I had to talk about then were these public

colimbula studies, as well as some of these other tree hole studies showing how the

population reacted to the radiation at different levels. Weinberg, after I got through, got

ready to walk away, said, “Now, wait a minute Dr. Auerbach, I want to ask you a few

questions.” Struxness turned white. [Laughter] [Inaudible 1:16:35] I said, “Yes, sir.” He

asked me a number of questions [inaudible 1:16:40] well. Eventually, he goes, “What is

the meaning of all this and what’s its use?” So, I stammered around and tried to deal

with these questions. I wished then that somebody who was off stage, would just take

a shepherd’s crook and just yank me right off. [Laughter] But anyway, I got off the

stage finally, and Struxness said, “You were a disaster.” [Laughter] “We’ve got to do a

new program now.” I said, “All right, we’re beginning one with the lake bed.” And it was

a valid set of questions for that time. They were kind of basic science questions and

here we were supposed to be worried about the impact of radioactivity on the

environment. So, we decided we were going to switch all our activity to the lake bed,

except Struxness had me, started me on a monitoring assignment around the waste

pits which were leaking ruthenium a few years later, trying to discern that. So, I thought

to myself, you know, what can we do? This was… ’55 had been the first International

Atomic Energy meetings in Switzerland, and we didn’t have anything to give. Gene

Normand had a paper on general work, and Weinberg felt, sooner or later, we’ve got to

be at that. The Laboratory had to be well represented at that. So, I thought to myself,

you’ve got all this strontium 90 and cesium out here, let’s do an agriculture experiment.

33

The upper lake bed above the waste, below the waste pit, lent itself to a more, I felt, a

more homogeneous area with higher levels. So we gridded that, and between Crossley

and I, we laid out an experiment using several different strains of corn. We raised corn,

different varieties of it. And designed it so that we could see where the different, the

differences in the uptake accumulation. For me, looking back in time, it was amazing

how quickly we could get things done. There I had the lab techs do the gridding work.

They did that. We needed a water supply for the plants, so we could use it.

Somewhere I had seen an ad for surplus military water tanks like the rural fire

department use. They open up wide. They’re made of black rubber. You fill them with

water and it pumps right out of them, so thousands of gallons. Well, we had two or

three of those set ups, filled them with water, so we then pumped it. We needed to get

the corn seeded. I want to record this on the movie, if you will. I needed a particular

design. Well, there was a technical group over at the Biology Division that serviced

everybody. Sal Carker [sp? 1:19:48] was one, but a chap named Marvin Kastenbaum.

He was new, and I was using him for some statistics. I said, “Marvin, we’re going to do

a design, test the uptake by several varieties of corn. We need to get a design so it’s

properly fixed up in the field so we can sample it.” [Inaudible 1:20:10] Marvin

[inaudible] helping. He said, “Sure.” So he comes out there with [inaudible] rubber suit,

and rubber coveralls. The temperature was between 95 and 100. I meanwhile brought

out a cameraman from the department to photograph this. So I set up on the bank with

the photographer [Laughter], and these two guys were out there…

MR. REICHLE: In the sun.

34

MR. AUERBACH: …in the sun, with strontium 90, seeding the things. Marvin never

forgave me. [Laughter] He said, “This is the last time I work out in the field.” But we got

it seeded. We ran the experiment. We got enough materials. We got some interesting

data on accumulation of strontium 90 and cesium 137. Well, there was no other place

in the world quite like this, except in Russia. We didn’t know about Russia [inaudible

1:21:10]. We wrote a paper and we submitted to the next international conference,

Energy Agency conference [inaudible 1:21:20] and the next information meeting, I

presented the data. And at that time, in agriculture, checking fallout, somebody had

come up with the strontium 90 accumulation, simplified it. We call them sunshine units.

Sunshine units. We were getting in the [inaudible 1:21:48]. So I thought I would be

cute, and said, “We’re doing both. We’re doing cesium 137 also. So we have the

sunshine unit. The cesium units we’re going to call moonshine units.” [Laughter] Big

roar, everybody accepted it. Weinberg was enthralled with it, just enthralled with it. So

that’s the kind of stuff [inaudible 1:22:13]. So we then continued on lake bed studies.

David got introduced, I think. Was the lake bed still here when you got here, or had it

been filled again?

MR. REICHLE: It was filled again.

MR. AUERBACH: Okay, it was filled. And we mapped the lake bed. We did studies on

the pattern of vegetation. That essentially put us in business. Meanwhile, I employed

another man by the name of Paul Dunaway. We needed a mammologist. We wanted

to look at the effects on the rodents that were being introduced and were abundant in

that area. So we set up a field study on the accumulation of radioactivity by native rats

and the native mice. So he had that going. We hired in a young, brash, young

35

[inaudible 1:23:12] new guy. He went to one of the southern universities, came from

New Jersey really. His name was Steve Kaye [inaudible 1:23:24] director of the

physics division. He’s a wild ass biologist. I still was being concerned about the forest.

We were in the center of a forest, and I was concerned about us being able to do more

mathematical, because I read the ecological literature, and there were a few people

starting to worry about mathematically describing [inaudible 1:23:50] in mathematical

terms. I happened to be an Ecological Society meeting in 1957, I guess it was. I went

to that meeting, a plant ecology meeting. I did it somewhat reluctantly because most of

the plant ecology meetings, such as I went to, ecologists were showing lots of

Kodachrome pictures of forest and fields and inferring from these pictures, this was

what was taking place. There was no mathematics. There was no soil. They were

strictly stripped. And I had… [Inaudible 1:24:36] session with, there was a young chap

talking on biogeochemistry on the secession of plants in the Indiana dunes. His name

was Jerry Olson. As I listened to him describing how, over a period of time, how the

mathematical formula processed and keeping track of, I thought this guy is talking the

way we’ve got to go. So, after the meetings, I contacted him, asked him if he’d be

interested in the position. He said, “Yeah, I think I would.” You remember the

Connecticut Agriculture experiment?

MR. REICHLE: That’s right. That’s right.

MR. AUERBACH: And so I sent the application [inaudible 1:25:30] give their opinion of

it [inaudible 1:25:35] and I got back with the supervisor, [who had done a] completely

negative write up on this man [inaudible 1:25:45] etcetera, etcetera. Well, the way they

had [inaudible 1:25:48] he was brilliant. So we hired him. This is around 1958 or so. He

36

immediately had a good grasp of what he was trying to do here, how we could use

isotopes and so forth to measure the transfer rate of the [inaudible 1:26:07] over the

longer term. All he had was an analytical computer to work with. We were getting that

going. Then…

MR. REICHLE: This was 1957?

MR. AUERBACH: ’58.

MR. REICHLE: ’58.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah. Now, somewhere about that same time, Ed Struxness called

me in. He said, “We’re worried about the Clinch River.” We’ve released all these

radioactivity materials: cesium, ruthenium, strontium. The Health Physics Division has

done an annual sort of survey going up the river to the Tennessee [River] where they

simply measure radioactivity on the bottom of the river using a detector system, where

it gets dropped off. And they caught some of the releases through the dam, but

meanwhile, we have released all that activity in one fell swoop when we drained the

lake. I persuaded the DOE [Department of Energy], the forerunner of the EPA

[Environmental Protection Agency], which is the Federal Water Pollution Administration

to all participate in a joint program on the Clinch River. Ed was a superb guy at

bringing together different groups to work in these areas. He said, meanwhile, he had

hired Frank Parker, who was a very bright engineer from MIT [Massachusetts Institute

of Technology]. Then they were called sanitary engineers, but he was really, the

forerunner of the present… They don’t call them sanitary, they call them environmental

engineers. And Frank… We’ve also hired some controls people. I saw [inaudible

1:28:00] work out there. I utilized a professor from the University of Missouri, whose

37

name was Ellis Graham, for two summers. Some had realized and characterized lake

effect soils, how much was there at the time. So, he convinced me, we ought to have

soil. So I [inaudible 1:28:20] Tsuneo Tamura and Don Jacobs were graduate soil

people. Don Jacobs did very well at the University of Illinois, and Tamura, I don’t

remember where he was from. Well, they came and I guess… They came and Ed

Struxness even [inaudible 1:28:43]. So he convinced them to transfer over to the

program he had. [Inaudible 1:28:51] with me. [Inaudible 1:28:52]. I… Ed called me in

one day, he said, we’re doing the Clinch River Study…

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. AUERBACH: …ecological community at the university kind of what I needed.

Well, Gene Odum, who I think I was using as a consultant then, said, “Well, we have a

guy finishing here. I think he might fit your bill.” He has an undergraduate training in, I

forget, biology or wildlife. He had a Master’s in game biology and worked as a warden

for a while. He just finished his PhD in aquatic biology dealing with productivity, stream

nutrients, etcetera, very nice chap. “I think you could get him if you’re interested.” So, I

said, “Give him the material.” We brought him up, and he grasped it. His name was

Dan Nelson. So, he began to… I’d go, here’s the problem. He’d grasp it. We had to

organize a program of ecological research in parallel with the water pollution guys.

One of the first things we had to face was a fish problem. Everybody heard about the

fish. The applied health physicist would occasionally bring in fish and we knew that the

fish were accumulating material. How much, how significant it was to the fish, how

much activity could be picked up. So it became necessary to track, and catch, and test

these fish. So Dan set up a program not too similar to what Krumholz had done at

38

White Oak Lake years ago, but for a different purpose. He would go out and catch a

fish, he would tag it with a number, and make the contact. The fisherman who would

catch it were asked to send in a form with the number on it, where they picked it up.

This began an insight, for example, how many fish, what kinds of fish were going down

the Clinch River, how long were they there, as opposed to remaining up in the Clinch

up near the mouth of the White Oak Creek. We would do a hazardous survey with

health physics. They had to know the sources that people would eat and how much of

it was radioactive fish. At the same time, we also were bringing in fish to count for

radioactivity and measure their body parts. And Dan, being an old fisherman himself,

he also wanted to know how old these fish were. You can tell the age of a fish by

looking at his scales. They have rings on them, like… So we got a scale-counting

apparatus and some technicians. We would keep some of the fish that were tagged,

release them, measure their age, and some, of course, were measured for

radioactivity. This produced a very useful body of data as to the potential health

hazards of stuff in the Clinch River through the downstream population. It was the first

study of its kind that was run by Struxness and Parker on the Clinch River study. Then

there were two or three fundamental documents, papers that were prepared by K.Z.

Morgan and Ken Cowser, and the others, taking all this data and looking at it in terms

as a health physicist would look at hazards in the Clinch River. [Inaudible 1:33:26], and

what they showed was that based on the health physics standards of the time, there

really was no major hazards problem.

MR. REICHLE: Yeah, that’s the study, the Clinch River and the Columbia River study

that Hanford was running…

39

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: …where, still are, the two classic…

MR. AUERBACH: Studies.

MR. REICHLE: …aquatic radio ecology studies ever done.

MR. AUERBACH: That’s right.

MR. REICHLE: I don’t think there have been any since.

MR. AUERBACH: No, I don’t think…

MR. REICHLE: There weren’t any…

MR. AUERBACH: Well, Savannah River had been doing some on tritium [inaudible

1:34:00].

MR. REICHLE: Right.

MR. AUERBACH: The other off shoot of that was, aside from the…

MR. REICHLE: Again, these were applied studies…

MR. AUERBACH: They yielded basic information.

MR. REICHLE: These essentially were used to establish release standards from the

Lab.

MR. AUERBACH: Right, or [inaudible 1:34:21].

MR. REICHLE: Fence post man radiation effects.

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: And off sight transport. They were used for years.

MR. AUERBACH: Now the, dealing with the public. The public wasn’t understanding

these things. The Public Health Service was monitoring streams all over the United

States, and they showed [inaudible 1:34:44] in Chattanooga had the higher strontium

40

90 levels of any of those streams, which they thought would come from the Lab. All

this was very tricky because at the same time, around 1960 or ’61, the fear over

weapons fallout was growing in the United States. Soon the public began to hear a

term they had never heard of before, pooche [sp? 1:35:14] [inaudible].

MR. REICHLE: Now, things are taking a shift here because up until this point, the

driver for environmental studies was waste disposal…

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: …due to the early separations…

MR. AUERBACH: Right, right.

MR. REICHLE: …work that was going on at the production facilities related to the

production of the bomb.

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: And so it’s the early ’60’s, very early ‘60’s.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: I guess the AEC became sensitized to weapons testing.

MR. AUERBACH: That’s right.

MR. REICHLE: Fallout impacts, which begins a whole new…

MR. AUERBACH: A whole new…

MR. REICHLE: …problem set to deal with.

MR. AUERBACH: That’s right.

[End of Part 1]

[Part 2 begins]

41

MR. AUERBACH: …things that brought it about, you know, pediatricians and other

people began to worry about strontium 90. The British had been working on strontium

90 neutron transfer and [inaudible 00:17]. One of the things that we began to worry

about, and luckily ORNL, was the transfer of strontium 90 through mother’s milk to

children. As I began to analyze, one of the [inaudible 00:35] was a program that

analyzed baby’s teeth with strontium 90. We didn’t do that, but they did that. And

they’re trying to get this data together, and to look at it. They discovered in certain

areas, a baby’s teeth were higher in strontium 90 than in other areas. It has nothing to

do with waste. One of the highest areas around the city of St. Louis. So they went out

there and began to look at sources of milk and discovered that the milk was coming

from milk sheds, from water sheds. The waters around St. Louis received high inputs

of water from drainage, the drainage bringing in the strontium 90 to the pastures where

the cattle were feeding. The cattle were receiving more strontium 90, passing it to their

milk. The babies born around St. Louis, their first teeth had more strontium 90.

MR. REICHLE: Hmm [affirmative].

MR. AUERBACH: That brought into common use another ecological current, the food

chain. So, people then learned about the food chain through that. And of course,

[inaudible 1:43] resulted in a more [inaudible 1:48] weapons testing. Those were very

interesting years. Morgan, Struxness was clearly driving at me to do more and more.

They were doing bomb testing in Nevada. They wanted to, you know, “We’re going to

be establishing a big health physics tower out there to test somethings. Don’t you think

you’d like to come out and do some work in the desert?” I said, “No, Karl, I have my

hands full. I don’t [inaudible 2:20].”

42

MR. REICHLE: Stanley, you didn’t mention this in your introductory list of reports, and

I underscored the one on by Stannard, really an important reference document, but

you did mention K.Z. Morgan’s influence on…

MR. AUERBACH: Oh yeah.

MR. REICHLE: He’s also written a book a couple years out, which I suspect we have

in the library. I know I have a copy, which is a history of health physics.

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: And primarily centered on his career here at the Laboratory. So that’s

another…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, he mentions in there the ecology.

MR. REICHLE: …important reference document.

MR. AUERBACH: He took great pride in it and he should.

MR. REICHLE: So, we’re up to what, ’60?

MR. AUERBACH:’61, ’62.

MR. REICHLE: Are you still at Y-12 or…?

MR. AUERBACH: Well…

MR. REICHLE: …you moved back to ORNL?

MR. AUERBACH: Well, meanwhile, we were doing work on forests. Olson was doing

work on forests. He was inoculating trees with various isotopes.

MR. REICHLE: And himself. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: And himself. [Laughter] Should I tell that story? That’s a famous

one. Jerry paid a great deal of attention. He’s a great [inaudible 3:32] person, but he’s

not that [snaps fingers] sort of equipped. He has this program set up for all of us to do,

43

for Struxness to do, and [inaudible 3:40] where he would deliberately inject trees with

isotopes, and then measure the uptake, so on and so on. He would use…

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] He became an instant case in the Health Physics

Division. He didn’t do any lasting damage, but he made quite a stir, created a lot of fun

and poked at us ecologists. Those guys were bona fide cases for stabbing ourselves in

the finger, but he started this program, and then we got a graduate student from UT

named John [Witherspoon]…

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. AUERBACH: …studies we were doing. In 19… Dac Crossley was doing similar

kinds of studies on the fourth floor, introducing radio isotopes, determining their

movement, developing his technique. Nelson had the river study underway. It brings

up another funny story. I saw that, I had been down to Savannah River for one of our…

and they had been working on a small lake there, and they did a lot of aquatic work. I

saw they had a houseboat they worked off of. I said, “Well, if we’re going to do all that

work in the river, it would be very difficult to use row boats to haul fish nets. We need

something. So I put in a requisition for a small houseboat that we could use.

MR. REICHLE: The background for this goes back to our early, if I can interject again.

MR. AUERBACH: Sure.

MR. REICHLE: …goes back to our early comment about asking for a nickel product

and getting a $5,000 result.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

44

MR. REICHLE: But also propensity of this place, never to buy what was commercially

available, if you could make it yourself here.

MR. AUERBACH: That wasn’t the case here. That wasn’t the case here.

MR. REICHLE: They didn’t have houseboats commercially available.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh, yes, they did.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, I put in a bid for a houseboat. I think it was about $2,500.

Herman Roth was then the Deputy Manager of the ORO [Oak Ridge Operations]. I

knew him well. He sent back word to Sam Shoup. He said, “We’re not going to

approve that. Auerbach would be having beer parties up and down the river. Forget it.”

So, I went back…

MR. REICHLE: So that’s why you couldn’t go outside.

MR. AUERBACH: That’s why I couldn’t go outside. [Laughter] So, I got together with

the extraditer. I said, “Well, let’s build it ourselves.” So we built it ourselves. I told them

to go to work. I knew what I wanted. It wasn’t a big, fancy boat. Got the specs for it,

and put it out to bid for construction. It was essentially a working barge with a little

place… So, Barney Hensley did that. The guy who bid on it was down at a boat place

in Clinton. He built it. It was coming along. One day, I…

MR. REICHLE: It looked to me, from the old pictures, about a 20 foot long…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, 20, 25 foot long…

MR. REICHLE: …float boat, but it had an enclosed cabin.

MR. AUERBACH: A little enclosed cabin, working steering.

MR. REICHLE: …on the top. And it had pontoons.

45

MR. AUERBACH: Pontoons. I took my wife out there one Sunday drive, and showed

her the boat we were building. She went out and looked at it [inaudible 7:47]. “This is

never going to float. It’s too heavy.” I said, “No, Dear, don’t worry.”

MR. REICHLE: This was a librarian by training.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 7:58]. [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: Even she can see that.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: This was built of stainless steel.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh, no. No.

MR. REICHLE: No. that’s what I hear, from the roof.

MR. AUERBACH: No, it was iron.

MR. REICHLE: Iron.

MR. AUERBACH: Iron T beams, six inch T beams with four inch cross tie beams. So it

got built. It was taken over to the 7500 area. Shops.

MR. REICHLE: Yeah, 7000 area.

MR. AUERBACH: 7000 area, where they equipped the little cabin with different kinds

of controls, a lot more than just a boat. There was a lot of publicity going on. So I told

Ed and Morgan, Weinberg, everybody else. We had already built a place on the Clinch

River, a mooring where we could put the boat in. Everybody could see it. [Inaudible

8:59]. So, it had been delivered to the 7000 area. They put it on a truck and took it out

to mile 21 on the river. We were all sitting there. They lowered the boat into the

impoundment area, and the boat promptly sank. [Laughter] Ed Struxness turned white.

I turned bright red. Weinberg…

46

MR. REICHLE: Another embarrassment in front of Weinberg.

MR. AUERBACH: Weinberg grinned. And all I thought immediately was in 1909, the

Russian Navy [inaudible 9:41] had built two or three battleships. I think either before, it

was before the Russian Japanese War, up there in, near Leningrad, in the shipyard.

They promptly turned over before they were launched.

MR. REICHLE: Top heavy, yeah.

MR. AUERBACH: So we hauled that boat out. Struxness kept waving his finger at me.

And we had to have something done about it. The Engineering Department politely

refused to do anything about it because they had nothing to do with preparing the

specs. Dave had a research engineer by the name of Bill Boegly, William Boegly who

had joined the group, a PhD engineer who was working [inaudible 10:31]. We got a

hold of Bill. I said, “Bill, can you do anything about this?” He said, “Yeah. I can look at

it.” So we had the boat weighed, calculated the diameter of the pontoon that would be

necessary to maintain its stability, sent it back to the builder, said here is the number of

pontoons you need to put on it, which he did.

MR. REICHLE: I knew something was stainless steel. It was the pontoons.

MR. AUERBACH: The pontoons were stainless steel. And we put the boat back in the

water and it worked fine. [Inaudible 11:03] 1000 area. It was strictly a work boat. I

equipped it with two of the highest horsepower motors we could get to move around. It

served well for the next 25 years, until it was retired. But every program I started had

some kind of interesting… Then… We’re up to 1962. Olson, meanwhile, had been

working on these various ideas for, based on the trees [inaudible 11:38]. What we

need to do is a whole forest, contaminate a whole forest. So we looked around the

47

reservation, and the Health Physics people were building a research reactor way back

in the wilds of the reservation, and he found a stand of trees, which were growing, it

was obviously a sink hole [inaudible 12:04] filled up, and had a homogeneous soil type.

There were all of the liriodendron or tulip poplar, and he said, “Why don’t we set it up

so we’ll inoculate that forest with cesium 137, in amounts proportionate with the size

and diameter of the tree? I propose we follow the turnover that we have of this thing

over time.” And I said, “Well,” said, “Why not?” I said, “You do the calculation for how

much isotope you need for each tree, and we’ll build a platform out there for you to

work.” The platform was simpler than using steel, allegra scaffolding, and putting

boards down. I don’t remember whether I had [inaudible 13:01] and company do it or

the craft people. Maybe it was both. By then I was also tracking war surplus fuel that

was available. I had gotten a war surplus coastguard cutter for the river, and I thought

to myself, when we’re sampling a tree, we need one of these basket trucks so I can go

up like what the fire department uses, and I talked to the surplus guy here at the Lab. I

see some of that in the military, the missile [inaudible 13:37]. So we got this huge

truck. Immediately, the crafts people were, “You can be doing your work, and we

should be driving it.” So, these guys wanted to drive for us. I said, “No, you will position

it for us. Put it in place. If we need to move, we will get you out there.” It was about

eight feet long, like a big power ladder for the fire department. We used that, and

Olson had counted the amount of cesium 137 necessary for each tree depending on

its volume. He and I and his technicians went out one day. We had already developed

a technique for inoculating the trees. Each tree was inoculated [inaudible 14:29] of it.

The experiment was started.

48

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. AUERBACH: Jerry was not one, it was easy to get to write things up. This was a

unique experiment. It had not been done before and it hasn’t been done since. So, I

wrote the first draft of it, wrote it up. We published it in Nature [Magazine], and it has

been a key paper. The other day, at lunch, he [Jerry Olson] was telling me, it’s now

been 40 years since we did that experiment, measured the amounts later, predicting

the turnover. In Europe now, they are quite interested in that. They’ve dug it up and

this is the only place where they can compare a controlled amount of cesium 137

injected into a forest with what they are finding as a result of the Chernobyl event in

Russia. He said, “We really ought to get out and remeasure it again.” I said, “Jerry, I

tried to do that two years ago. I haven’t been able to get [inaudible 15:40]. Now I’m not

sure we have the capabilities.” But anyway, that was another keystone event.

Meanwhile, [inaudible 15:48] was doing more and more [15:50] stuff, and we were, the

year of 1964 was going by, and I was still growing, and essentially adding people. Did

you come in before [George] Van Dyne, or after Van Dyne, David?

MR. REICHLE: I don’t know. Almost simultaneously.

MR. AUERBACH: Almost simultaneously.

MR. REICHLE: I…

MR. AUERBACH: What about Bernie Patten?

MR. REICHLE: I think Bernie was here.

MR. AUERBACH: Well, anyway, I was looking for mathematical models in ecology. So

was Jerry. We spotted one who had had one paper in a journal. Mathematical

modeling was not popular among ecologists.

49

MR. REICHLE: I suspect that George was here because Jerry had that Ford

Foundation grant.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh yeah.

MR. REICHLE: It had already peaked by the time I got here. So I suspect they came in

a couple…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, that’s right.

MR. REICHLE: …’62, ’63…

MR. AUERBACH: Jerry…

MR. REICHLE: …’64.

MR. AUERBACH: Jerry’s ideas on mathematics in ecology caught the attention of the

Ford Foundation. They came down here. [Inaudible 17:04] became the head of ORAU

[Oak Ridge Associated Universities], [inaudible 17:06] and he wanted us, he wanted

Jerry to take a grant for $90,000, which is a fair amount of money then, and to work

with him further. We can’t do it. We discovered that the Ford Foundation couldn’t give

money to the Laboratory because Carbide was operating the property. So we got

ORAU to take the money and feed it to us. With that, Jerry brought in some other

students for modeling, and we got the program going. Meanwhile, [inaudible 17:43] I

had found Bernie Patten, and he spotted a chap who had just gotten his PhD in

agricultural physiology, the study of cows and how they eat, George Van Dyne from

Colorado State. Here’s a guy who would be probably very useful, although he is an

agriculture guy. So we interviewed George and he was interested. By that time, I had

another scheme in mind. I wanted to have a large scale field study of contamination,

that was introduced by us and machines. And we had already cleared the 0800 area

50

by the river. You know where I’m talking about? Where our air pollution studies all are,

down there? [Inaudible 18:44]. It had originally been a pasture, and back when they

were planting pine trees all over, they had planted there a lot of [inaudible 18:54]. I and

my staff laid out plans for it, since we were never going to put up big gamma [inaudible

19:03]. We were never going to do that. We, I wanted to contaminate a larger area. So

we continued the idea of contaminating a five acre plot with cesium 137. If that hadn’t

been done, I’d probably be hanging in effigy five years ago. Yet, at the time, we were

already getting concerned more and more about nuclear war, the long term effects of

using these materials, of fallout to be laid down on the landscape. What better way to

determine by creating an artificial test site. The Office of Civil Defense was doing

something like that using decontaminated, laying down stuff in preconstructed little

villages that were artificial, and dumping radioactive sand on it. Trained people in

decontamination and clean-up. So we prepared a detailed proposal to contaminate this

five acre… You need to change the tape? Okay. Go ahead.

[Break in video 20:14 to 20:52]

MR. REICHLE: …box. So I have to take my computer in, the Gateway, a second time.

I have a wife that will be waiting for me at noon.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: But she’s used to waiting for me.

[Inaudible talk off camera]

MR. REICHLE: [Laughter] She knows what I’m doing. She’ll be prepared. Okay,

excuse me.

MR. AUERBACH: Where did we leave off?

51

MR. REICHLE: You were at Van Dyne and Patten and mathematical ecology.

MR. AUERBACH: I was designing that monumental five acre contamination

experiment out at the 0800 area, which we estimated to cost to do it, $75,000. We

filled out a hazard report. We had remote control tractors. We had people who were

doing samples, who had to do it…

MR. REICHLE: Now that was designed to simulate fallout, so we’re... Is that what you

were talking about, 0800?

MR. AUERBACH: It was really designed strictly to [inaudible 21:51] contamination.

MR. REICHLE: The 0800.

MR. AUERBACH: The 0800 area, not the later one.

MR. REICHLE: Not the pines with the simulated fallout, this is preceding that.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh, yeah. About seven years.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: This was going to cost about $75,000. We put together the proposal

and DOE was quite interested in it, but [inaudible 22:21] didn’t come up with funding,

or have enough money. Just as well. That was the legacy the likes of which… The little

pines caused problems, five acres of which… But Van Dyne, Jerry Olson… Jerry was

already, we already had them in joint teaching programs with UT, the Ford Foundation

teaching fellowship that was started by Alvin Weinberg. Does that ring a bell with you?

No. He got money from the Ford Foundation to set up a teaching program which Lab

staff members went over and would teach courses at UT. They’d reimburse 30 percent

of the total [inaudible 23:15]. Jerry Olson got one of those appointments and he came

over, and back and said, you know in botany, which is the one we were using, they

52

were interested in [inaudible 23:29]. So that was another reason for hiring someone

like [George] Van Dyne, and somebody like [inaudible 23:36] Richards. Also, the two of

them formed, prepared one year courses, each teaching a quarter such as ecology. It

was the only program found in the country. It was graduate students who came to work

out here. It was another example of leadership. We also organized a radioecology

summer institute at ORAU then, which ran two or three years, each isotope and its

techniques. Again, [inaudible 24:10]. I’m trying to get these little bits in before you’re

arrival because you’re going to talk after that about, a couple things about 1970, if you

don’t mind.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: And I haven’t gotten to the new building yet. That’s another story,

and after David gets…

MR. REICHLE: You can interject on mine, okay.

MR. AUERBACH: The only thing again, the literature here, [inaudible 24:38] was

published in one of the Lab documents. So we did it as a division document

summarizing. It was called “Auerbach’s 20 year [inaudible 24:48]”. It went through all

the buildings [inaudible 24:52]. Let’s see, anyway, this portion of the other wing was

built, finished around 1960, ’61, and Health Physics Division moved here leaving

vacant 2001 [building], with Struxness ever mindful of the need for expanding ecology,

got the Laboratory to turn over that space to me and moving back from Y-12. It was

ideal for us [inaudible 25:25], and I think [inaudible 25:28] what they called the

Research Committee then, Alvin [inaudible 25:36], some of the others, we needed

$120,000 to remodel it, but they agreed. We reorganized the rooms, put in the

53

showers, things like that. We got the place moved into. So we really have a first rate

research facility.

MR. REICHLE: Wasn’t there an interesting story of the move?

MR. AUERBACH: You want that interesting story? Okay. Meanwhile, we had quite a

little set up at Y-12. We had built in the library, and I also got started a library by buying

the library of a deceased ecologist [inaudible 26:21]. I found the estate wanted to

charge about $1,500. So, I put in a requisition. I had to go up and meet for approval,

Clarence Larson, who was then President of Union Carbide. He approved it, so we got

that library in our possession. We then remodeled 2001 [building]. Well, we got it

remodeled and it was time to move. I had a very large organization [inaudible 26:57].

The conclusion then was all equipment that was connected to water or to electricity

had to be disconnected and loaded by the appropriate craft. All other equipment had to

be loaded by the laborers of that craft. Then at X-10, it had to be unloaded by the

same kind of craft so that we could use it. So, two months in advance, I said to Dac

[Crossley], they’ll be here at Y-12 [inaudible 27:33] and by then I knew my way around

the place, and I also knew that I could get in. I was under a lot of pressure [inaudible

27:49] this time. In fact, somewhere about that time, my wife insisted, we bought new

fishing poles for her birthday so that I’d get to [inaudible 27:58]. But anyway, that day

came around, and well, where are our loaders? Well, they’re not here. We can’t get

them today. So, I made them [inaudible 28:13] load up the trucks ourselves. We

disconnected, put the boxes on trucks. Our own trucks. And we rolled over here to X-

10. Somehow word had gotten over here to X-10 and there was a union, what do they

call the guy?

54

MR. REICHLE: Steward?

MR. AUERBACH: Steward out there. And there was no [inaudible 28:35]. Okay. Let’s

start unloading. He stood there with a piece of paper, every box we unloaded, he wrote

me a grievance. So I got the world’s record for grievances that day.

MR. REICHLE: How many?

MR. AUERBACH: 57, I think. [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: So that’s a challenge you offer forward, huh? More grievances in one

day than any other employee at the Laboratory.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 29:00] union guys. I understand he’s got three. One or

two, all right. So we unloaded, and started filling our [inaudible 29:13] in the quonset

hut [building 2001], got the programs organized and it was much more convenient

work. We had [inaudible 29:25]. We were close to White Oak Lake, White Oak bed.

We could do a lot of those there. And we expanded. Crossley was developing in to a

good ecologist, somewhat reluctantly [inaudible 29:50]. Olson, tried to get him to write

papers [inaudible 29:57]. The Clinch River Program under Dan Nelson was doing

great. The mammal program was underway, and had Steve Kaye for a while there

[inaudible 30:11]. We were doing great there. This was advanced stuff, a different

approach to mammals. They said the head count that you do in ecology, we began to

do blood testing on these. There became a review and the Division of Biology and

Medicine came down and spent about three hours with all the labs in the program. This

was a bunch of physicians with laboratory-type biologists. [Inaudible 30:39] you’re

going to talk about your program. So I talked to them about our research on rats and

mice in the field, what the parameters were, and they were tickled pink [inaudible

55

30:51] ecologists could do this. Meanwhile, we were expanding in invertebrate work,

[inaudible 31:00] work. I had hired in, upon [inaudible 31:05] recommendation another

post-doctoral graduate who was very bright, very good. He turned out to be another

disaster [inaudible 31:14], and I won’t name him. Somewhere about that time, we had

to make contact again with Orlando Park because I needed another student. He said,

“Well, I have one here. He’s the best student I ever had. His name is David Reichle.”

David, I’m going to let you talk now. [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: I’ll come back to the geniuses of the new building.

MR. REICHLE: Okay. I guess I remember my association starting with the Laboratory.

I had finished my undergraduate work in Ohio at a small college, Muskingum College

[now University], and started graduate school at Western Reserve, which is now Case

Western Reserve [University] on the path to get a degree in microbiology working with

DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid]. Just before graduation, I had been in an automobile

accident. I was a passenger with a good friend and we were hit by another car, and the

driver of the other car was killed. It was a pretty messy accident. I think I was still

suffering from the after effects of that as I started graduate school, but I decided

quickly that living in downtown Cleveland, with the buses running under my little one

room that I was renting next to a drugstore, and in the medical school working on

microbes looking out a window at a brick wall, this was not what I wanted to do in life.

So, I called back to my major professor back at school and he said you ought to quit

worrying about following the path that you think you ought to, where the fields were

going. Microbiology was a big field. He said, “Do what you enjoy.” He said, “You

56

always enjoyed field biology and there’s a good program at Northwestern [University].”

My folks, by that time, had moved to Chicago. He said, “That’s back in your own

backyard.” So, I went back home. I think my poor father was about ready to have a

stroke because he kept wanting to know what I was going to do, and I said, well,

maybe I’ll go into the Army. I don’t know what I’m going to do. So, I went out and

interviewed late in the year, I think early August with Orlando Park. He said, “Sure,

fine, if you want to come you can, but I have nothing for you. The teaching

assistantships are gone.” I had had a fellowship from the Danforth Foundation which I

hadn’t used, and called them up and they said sure. Fine. So a measure of the dollar

at the time, I had a lucrative fellowship of $1,500 a year and on that I went to

Northwestern and with no teaching requirements. I started into research right away,

and I did my Master’s in one year. I started in 1960 and somewhere around the spring

or the fall of 1961, you came up to give a seminar. Maybe you remember the exact

dates better than I do. I was either finishing my first year, or beginning my second.

Stan came up and gave the departmental seminar and he talked about this cesium

forest that you had labeled here, and the movement of the isotope in the environment.

I was enthralled with that topic. I decided that that was what I was going to do a thesis

on. I started to pursue the possibilities of working on my thesis here at the Laboratory.

The problems I ran into at Northwestern at the time were insurmountable. The Big Ten

had actually organized as a conference on academic basis not on an athletic basis, to

allow people to switch between schools for degrees which you couldn’t get out of the

system. The problem was if I was off site in Oak Ridge, then I was paying off sight

tuition and the university wasn’t making as much money. The system was not

57

designed to allow you to escape and get a degree without paying full tuition. So, I

couldn’t get down here to work on a thesis and I thought my next strategy has got to be

to finish my thesis as quickly as I can and come down here on a post-doc. So, Stan

had put me in contact with Dac Crossley who was supposed to be my mentor and I

guess group leader when I eventually got here. With him, we worked on a proposal

and I applied for an Atomic Energy Commission post-doctoral fellowship. It’s not clear

to this day what role Stanley played in that, but I do know that, I don’t know when the

proposal was turned in, but I do know that in the winter of my final year, 1964 at

Northwestern, I came down for an interview. You had wanted to interview me. Dac said

this was the crucial element. I had to make it through this interview with you, and I flew

down reading my undergraduate physics book trying to understand the basic elements

of radiation and the atom. I remember coming into town on a shuttle from the airport

that you talked about, and they dropped one passenger off at the Andrew Johnson

Hotel in Knoxville, and must have come up Clinton Highway to Edgemoor [Road]. They

were building Bull Run Steam Plant. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I remember

all these construction lights and that was my first introduction to Oak Ridge. I stayed at

the Alexander [Inn], came out for my interview with you. I had asked some questions

about what Oak Ridge was like, about what living conditions were. They were all

prepared for me, because they had one of the technicians in the afternoon going to

show me Oak Ridge, so I could go back to my wife and tell her what things were like.

And something that Stanley didn’t say, one of his strategies in gaining recognition, he

had many tactics, but his strategy was to gain recognition for ecology at the Laboratory

and keep it in the forefront of all the upper bureaucrats’ eyes. This seems fairly

58

chauvinistic in the current era, but back in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, they used to have an

annual ORNL beauty queen contest. Women today just love this, but Stanley had won

it more than anyone I knew at the Laboratory. I’m not saying that was one of the

prerequisites of the hiring of this technician, but he had several…

MR. AUERBACH: Beautiful.

MR. REICHLE: …beautiful technicians. One of which was assigned to show me the

town. So, we’re leaving and we’re going in the west end of town and I’m asking

questions. She’s apparently telling me about East Village, and West Village, and the

Garden Apartments, and she says, “We’re just going by the Garden Apartments now.

Let me show you my apartment.” I thought, this has got to be a security test. [Laughter]

This has got to be a morals check, or something here. Anyway, we made it through,

but Stanley’s comments on the rigors of hiring and the secrecy at the time was

interesting. I got my AEC post-doctoral scholarship and came down here in June, late

May of ’64. I was told by Stanley that you couldn’t be a modern ecologist without

having a lot of mathematics and calculus. He was in his phase of mathematical

ecology at the time. He noticed that I successfully avoided that in my graduate

education. So, he insisted I take calculus. So, I had to sign up for night school at the

high school. The folks at the Mathematics Department here at the Lab taught calculus.

I got to pay for that myself because I wasn’t an employee.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: Today either you’d have a personnel suit against the manager for

inhuman behavior or something, but in those days, the bosses challenged you, and if

you were interested in working, you kind of responded. So I spent two years here on

59

this post-doc. It was administered through ORAU, which was then ORINS, the Oak

Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. Another thing Stan said was before you could even

come out here, you need to go into this course you help set up on radioisotope

techniques. So I spent two months during the summer, June and July, in radiation. It

was an excellent course though, and for years afterwards, a number of people that I

worked with in university collaborations were folks that… The top people at universities

were coming and learning radioisotope tracer techniques. Odom was there. Elliot

Williams, Wigert [sp? 41:03], all these people had come. McArthur, Macintosh was

there. So I started working out here then somewhere in late summer. The first thing

Stanley told me was I was assigned to work in the cesium forest and my objective was

to get some papers out of this project because Olson hadn’t published anything. You

published the one article on it, which were preliminary results. So my instructions were

clear. To give folks an idea about how flexible things were at the time, I learned in

subsequent years there were things called 189’s which predated our BFP’s [Basic

Funding Proposal?] of today. And I was covered by two of those, but it wasn’t only until

the first year’s results where I was asked to contribute results, as you reported back

each year, that I even realized they existed. I was told I had to spend half my time

working on the cesium forest, getting the results out, and half the time working on

radiation effects on insect population. And that was it. I’d spend the summer, six

months working in the woods, and when it got cold and wet, I’d come inside and spend

the next six months working on the radiation effects.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 42:27] group to work on.

60

MR. REICHLE: Yeah. It was kind of flexible. Just before I came here, my major

professor who, only by I guess, circumstance… I don’t think Stan would have been

back at Northwestern giving a lecture if Park hadn’t invited you to come back and do

that. My hearing that lecture is what stimulated me to come here. Just before I left

Northwestern, Orlando was a teacher and all the students had become teachers.

Ecology at the time wasn’t a well-recognized field of endeavor and most ecologists

came out and taught general biology courses. Most of the students had gone to small

colleges. One day, he called me in and gave me this lecture, and I didn’t quite

understand it for a while, and he was asking me if I had been provided the resources I

needed to go out and teach. I didn’t understand what he was saying, and he finally,

kind of impatient, and he said, “I assume you have been making slide collections from

all your lab courses that you have been taking, pilfering a slide, so that when you got

off to your small college and had no resources, you’d at least from all your courses in

histology and developmental biology, and plant anatomy, you’d have slides to set up

under the microscope for the students to look at.” In his mind, I was coming here for a

couple years and I was going to leave and go out and teach like all his other students

have, except Stanley. His eyes kind of drifted off for a while, and he said, “You know,”

he said, “That’s why I think Stan Auerbach has been so successful at Oak Ridge.” He

said, “He was always my best thief.” I think he meant thief in a context of maybe an

Army procurement officer.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh yeah.

MR. REICHLE: The ability to get a lot done with little resources and not going to let

operational constraints slow you down.

61

MR. AUERBACH: I want to interject, at the same time, he told me that Reichle was his

best student. I didn’t disagree, and he was certainly right.

MR. REICHLE: So, I got here, started out working on radionuclides moving in food

chains in the environment, mainly using insects, but we were using soil organisms. We

were working in canopies of trees. We were looking at how the cesium was moving out

of the trees in the leaves and the roots and the soil. So we were really looking at a bio-

geo-chemical cycle in the forest of cesium. And I’d always had some interests in what

ecologists call energetics, or metabolism energy flow in ecological systems. So a lot of

the work we were doing was beginning to look at the food requirements of organisms.

It turned out to be, tracers were also useful, because if you knew the concentration of

the isotope in the food elements, then by looking at the body burdens of the animal,

you’d know how much they were eating. So we were really on the forefront in this area

of ecology, being able to estimate and measure what food consumption rates were of

animals in forests and fields. It had never been done before. We were using these

isotope techniques in reverse. About 1967, a program had been gaining momentum

internationally, called the International Biological Program. I had gone off to my first

international meeting in Poland. It was an organizing meeting. I think my supervisor

had been warned by Stanley, I was not to get involved in any of this new finagled stuff.

Remember I had to get those publications out on the cesium forest? It wasn’t very long

thereafter, things started getting organized in the U.S., and Oak Ridge put in a major

bid to be a key player. Stanley became the director of this program, and NSF [National

Science Foundation] funded the Laboratory both to do research and to coordinate a

number of university centers. This was the first attempt at a large scale modern

62

ecological ecosystem research, I think in this country. Now Stan, you may want to add

some perspectives…

MR. AUERBACH: I do.

MR. REICHLE: …on those organizational [inaudible 47:46].

MR. AUERBACH: Jerry Olson had gone to these meetings and this was just his kind

of thing [inaudible 47:55] bring all the people together. The program was aimed at

being, studying the biological basis of global productivity. But this was in the, late

1960’s.

MR. REICHLE: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. AUERBACH: [Lyndon B.] Johnson was finishing his term. Had [Richard] Nixon

been elected yet? He was elected in 1968, Richard Nixon. Vietnam overall had driven

out [inaudible 48:34]. This had turned out to be a very surprising President in some

respects. He believed in the environment, politically he believed in environmental

issues. He was the one who created the Environment…

MR. AUERBACH and MR. REICHLE [in unison]: Protection Agency.

MR. AUERBACH: NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] got approved by him. All

these environmental laws that… The Clean Water Act amendment of 1962 had been

approved by him. He was a very astute politician at reading the public will, unlike

Lyndon Johnson who didn’t read anybody’s will [inaudible 49:16] his head. [John F.]

Kennedy didn’t have a chance. So, we had brought up this idea that we didn’t make,

the Europeans had it. The National Academy of Science had created a committee and

this kind of activity was just stuff for Jerry Olson. Foreign travel, productivity. I forget

the… [Inaudible 49:47] that I was an official of the Ecological Society. I was the

63

secretary and probably the only person in the society with unlimited use of a long

distance telephone. So I could do things on the telephones. We went to Washington

and talked with Congress people. We finally got some hearings going, testing for the

needs of this. Nixon was very reluctant to support more university research. He had

[inaudible 50:14] universities are doing nothing but research and neglecting their

teaching. So [inaudible 50:22]. This never became public, but that was the message.

Anyway, they created this program. It got $15 million from the appropriations. It was a

lot of money in 1967. Funds from the National Science Foundation, it was miniscule.

Meanwhile, we were all admonished, and turned some programs to support this. Well,

AEC then, with great reluctance, said it was okay to… [Inaudible 50:52]. The National

Academy set up a committee to oversee at the U.S. National Committee. The

Ecological Society was included. [Inaudible 51:03] the other half [inaudible 51:07]. And

Olson came back in [inaudible 51:12]. Reichle was getting [inaudible 51:13]. This was

about ’67 or so.

MR. REICHLE: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah.

MR. AUERBACH: By then, George Van Dyne had left, was hired away at Colorado

State.

MR. REICHLE: And was starting the grassland…

MR. AUERBACH: He started a grassland program.

MR. REICHLE: …prairie grasslands.

MR. AUERBACH: Jerry… Bernie Patten was the key modeler, had gone to Georgia.

Eugene Odum was hired away [inaudible 51:43]. He was hired away. Patten. He hired

away Crossley. And he tried to get Mark [inaudible 51:54]. I wish he had, but he didn’t.

64

[Laughter] Anyway, so we were kind of in a rebuilding stage. I know we didn’t have

much of in the way of proper modeling. Our key strengths were, in certain aspects of it,

residing in David, who was by then, it was perfectly clear he was a superb field

experimentalist [inaudible 52:18] with mathematics and he had a great leadership

qualities, and he was headed in that direction. We had already started building then

Walker Branch watershed under Dan Nelson, which was a unique…

MR. REICHLE: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. AUERBACH: …aspect, which you wanted to throw into it. Our weakness was in

modeling. Now, you know, we were sort of the pioneer. Well, very fortunately, a chap

by the name of Robert O’Neill heard Reichle and Crossley give a seminar at some

meeting. It was…

MR. REICHLE: AIBS [American Institute of Biological Sciences] meetings at Illinois.

MR. AUERBACH: Illinois.

MR. REICHLE: It may have been ’65 or ’66.

MR. AUERBACH: Where they tried their techniques for measuring the esoteric,

energetics in insects using radioisotopes. And according to O’Neill, he said he followed

you around all day after that paper was given…

MR. REICHLE: That’s true.

MR. AUERBACH: …trying to pin you down, “Can I come to Oak Ridge? I don’t care if I

don’t get a dime, I want to come there and work under you.” So he… Anyway, we got

some kind of contrived fellowship for him.

MR. REICHLE: I went to Jerry Olson and said, “Do you have any Ford Foundation

money?” And he said, “I have half of a post-doctoral fellowship left.” He said, “All I’ve

65

got is $4,500.” I called up O’Neill and he said, “I’ll take it.” So, he packed up and his

wife, and moved down here on that. That’s how he got started. But this period of time

was really, I think, the turning point for the division. Stan was taking over leadership of

the eastern deciduous forest, was my own geographic region for this big NSF grant,

which really had monumental impact in the years that followed. It put the division on

the map nationally and internationally. It also established the ecosystem research

program that NSF has to this day. The line item funding that came for those, and a

legacy that this Lab has always shared unique to any of the national labs, the ability to

get funding from NSF in the environmental-ecological area because of this

relationship.

MR. AUERBACH: Let me interject here. The National Science Foundation, more then

than now, was strictly created to support academic science, individual sciences. And it

was, that’s why I used to say you could hear it come out of my hands. The idea of

them giving money to the Atomic Energy Lab was simply inconceivable.

MR. REICHLE: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. AUERBACH: But they had an administrator there by the name of Harv [inaudible

55:14] who was in charge of all the biomedical research funds. And he was a guy who

had been around Washington a long time. He was perceptive and he read that ecology

was a coming thing at NSF. So he backed, once the appropriation got approved, the

$15 million got approved primarily because a lot of ecologists testified for the program

and Nixon then agreed to let [inaudible 55:41] to support the program.

MR. REICHLE: This established a unique way for us to work with academia because

NSF said we’ll continue to put money into Oak Ridge as long as you use a significant

66

portion of that funding, invest it in subcontracts with university scientists and bring

them in, graduate students, visiting professors. I think it was maybe 25 to 30 percent of

the total funding they wanted moving that way. It set us up beautifully that we became

friends of the academic community. So there were resources that they could get from

us, rather than being competitors. So one of the real advantages we’ve had through

the years, in working with the academic community and being supported by the

legislative battles, is that they’ve always kind of looked at us as collaborators and

friends rather than a competitor and enemy. But at this time, this whole new field of

ecosystem science was exploding with the IBP [International Biological Program] and

the NSF funding, which started in ’67. Stan was playing the role of coordinating the

whole university laboratory research program in the eastern United States. I put in a

bid to have a research site here. There were other research sites at Duke, University of

Wisconsin, Rensselaer Poly Tech, called that at that time in New York, and the

University of Georgia working with the forest service at Coweeta Hydrologic Lab. So

that created an opportunity for me and some folks to get into ecological, forest

ecosystem research building on the cesium forest. We got into looking at one of the

main themes of the IBP, that was productivity. So we got into the problems of looking

at how do forests grow and metabolize. It’s basically a study in energy flow and carbon

fixation in the atmosphere, and carbon released in respiration. So we started really

studying the metabolism of forests. We were doing photosynthesis in the tree leaves,

respiration on roots, growth rates of trees, losses due to insect and animal feeding.

And what we were doing, unknowingly at the time, is laying the ground work. We were

building mathematical models to simulate this and crudely predict futures based on

67

changing assumptions. We unwittingly were laying the groundwork for the greenhouse

effect, global change programs that looked at life in an enriched CO2 [carbon dioxide]

atmosphere. In later years, the data produced by these IBP sites: us in the forest, Van

Dyne in the grasslands, the deserts, and internationally in the tropics and other sites,

with a sense of data that DOE and the other agencies used to model the breathing and

respiration of the surface of the earth and vegetation in exchange with the atmosphere,

which is a story down… It’s kind of a fast forward, but while I was getting involved in

this and Stan was managing all these activities, his plate was getting full, which was a

great opportunity for leadership for me and my group. He allowed me to hire a

graduate student who was working on his degree at the Lab under John Witherspoon,

by the name of Frank Harris. Both Frank and I remember you shaking your finger and

saying, “For one year, and one year only.” He came from UT and we don’t want too

much incestuous inbreeding in the program.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 59:55].

MR. REICHLE: Frank and I did a lot of really fun and exciting research. He left after 10

years and went to NSF, and now more recently has become my successor coming

back here as associate director. Stan was also going to hire another fellow, Clarence,

who I’m not going to mention names, Styron. We couldn’t understand what you saw in

Clarence, although he could program an already programmable calculator. This was

your fascination with computers and mathematical ecology. And I went to Dan Nelson.

Clarence had always driven Dan crazy, and I said… You know what, Stanley, I don’t

know if I’ve ever told you this. I said, “You know what Stanley’s about to do?” He said,

“What?” I said, “He’s going to hire Clarence Styron.” Dan says, “Oh my God, no.” And I

68

said, “How he needs to be hiring is [Robert] Van Hook.” Dan says, “That’s right.”

[Laughter] So Dan took the job on, to persuade you that Van Hook was the person to

hire. So Van Hook came on and Van Hook kind of picked up the elemental cycling

activities. Isotopes had moved into trace elements, hazardous chemicals in general.

That was ERDA’s influence on the program. I moved off into the metabolism of forests.

You were trying to coordinate, hold together the IBP. The other big impact that was

hitting was NEPA. NEPA came in 1969. The Calvert Cliffs [nuclear power station]

decision. I think you then turned back to Dan Nelson to help in a lot of that, but we got

directives from DOE, AEC at the time, that all the aquatic research programs were

deceased. All the researchers were going to start writing impact statements. And you

were hiring also [inaudible 1:02:04]. So maybe you want to talk more about that. That

was another significant change in the environmental program.

MR. AUERBACH: I’ll come back a little.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: You want me to [inaudible 1:02:14]. You mentioned Styron. That

brought up another thing. In 1961, Alvin Weinberg was always [inaudible 1:02:27] civil

defense. He invited me and Alex Zucker, himself, to participate at a National Academy

of Science maintenance study on the civil defense needs of the United States. In ’61,

the Cuban Missile Crisis was just ahead of us, the bombs were being tested

everywhere. There was a big argument in this country, whether we should have a

strong civil defense, or a weak civil defense. The rationale was that a strong civil

defense would only irritate the Russians more, and challenge them to do better and

bigger weapons to hit us. A weak civil defense, they’d look at us as no great threat to

69

them. They therefore would be less prepared [inaudible 1:03:15], but they were very

well prepared because they built [inaudible 1:03:19]. So we had this big conference up

at Woods Hole [Institute] with the other scientists and people around the country.

People from the Office of Civil Defense were sponsoring it. So Alvin tapped me and

tapped Alex Zucker and he came up. But the key one was Eugene Wigner. Wigner

believed in civil defense. He was a supporter of it. Well, I and my family moved up

there for three months. My wife wasn’t at all enthralled about… She had four babies

about then. So I got [inaudible 1:04:05] there. And it was a very interesting set of

circumstances. We got detailed debriefings on the projected fallout patterns given

various types of strikes to be given on the United States, the casualties, and how we’d

be able to deal with them given different assumptions about different types of civil

defense [inaudible 1:04:30]. There were police chiefs there. There were economists

there. All kinds of social scientists. We got lectures from different people using their

assumptions. A gentleman, John Wolfe, who I mentioned earlier, was then chief

ecologist, was asked to give his prognostication on what the country would look like

after a major civil defense attack. Well, he scares them to death. He saw fires raging

from one of the coast to another, buildings crumbling, the whole area contaminated,

never to recover. So, I was faced with that. I already had some feelings about that, and

I began to argue that that’s too dire a prediction. There are too many variables, too

many likelihoods of different things happening. The civil defense people were already

aware of our programs here, two or three of them. In fact, they invited me up to Civil

Defense headquarters…

[Break in audio, video continues]

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MR. AUERBACH: …understanding some of the [inaudible 1:05:57] the dose and the,

for the quantities. And so we set [inaudible 1:06:07] three months, and finally Wigner

and I, we’d argue, he was only concerned with crops. He didn’t understand that

decision. We came together in a book, in a chapter where we both tended to agree

that there are too many environmental variables. There were different degrees of

sensitivity. It would be wrong to predict Armageddon hitting the country ecologically

after a major… 30,000 mega [inaudible 1:06:39]. There would be areas which it would

cover. I already noted that in the bomb tests at Eniwetok [Atoll] [inaudible 1:06:51], the

way they explode these huge weapons, after a year or so, the native wild rats came

back in greater numbers than before. They had simply gone underground, under rocks,

shielded from radiation. They proceeded to eat all their food sources. The population

grew. The ecologists, there were too many things that took place that wouldn’t have

happened. It was an interesting summer. It resulted in Wigner pushing the AEC, who

was very reluctant about this kind of publicity, to start a program in civil defense here at

the Laboratory, a project, a civil defense project. I, meanwhile, had been called out to

go to lectures at various, meeting with civil defense people, and giving talks on what I

perceived as most effected ecological problems. I was called down to Arkansas, Hot

Springs, talked to a bunch of civil defense people who were headed by a retired

lieutenant general who acted as everybody was his staff, you know. I gave my talk. It

was all right, and soon defense people said, “Could you set up a long term kind of

project with some ecological-kind of perimeter testing given a post-attack kind of fallout

situation?” What immediately came to mind was our five acre one, but they didn’t have

that kind of money. But they did have a facility out at California where they

71

manufactured artificial fallout of varying degrees of intensity. They were using those in

mock villages. They put it out, trained people in cleanup, fire hose [inaudible 1:08:45],

said we can prepare fallout, contaminate anywhere you want it, said if you prepare it

with cesium, sure. [Inaudible 1:08:56] and could you design a set of long term

experiments, sure. So we created the idea of creating a series of plots out near the

Clinch River, 10 by 100 meters, 1,000 meters square, with steel plates sunk in the

ground, a pin, large square pin. We contaminated four of them with cesium 137, the

other four would be controlled, started them at zero. We were going to use a lot of

activity, 10 curies of cesium 137, about two-and-a-half curies per thousand square

meters of plot. We organized for it. [Inaudible 1:09:50].

MR. REICHLE: We’d come out and watch you.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] [Inaudible 1:09:57].

MR. REICHLE: I wasn’t allowed to work out there because I had to work with the

cesium forest…

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 1:10:01]

MR. REICHLE: …and get results out for Olson. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 1:10:05] [Laughter] Well, we set up. There are a lot of

pictures of that around the Laboratory. [Inaudible 1:10:11] engineering people modified

a lawn mower, fertilizer spreader, took the motors, they were remote controlled, put

them on tracks so we could run them over the plots. We fill it with a certain amount of

isotopes. It was distributed over that plot in an easy way. So we contaminated four of

these, each with about two-and-a-half curies of cesium 137, up to 10 curies, and had

72

four controlled plots. We all, in the pictures, we’re all clothed and garbed. One of the

times I was controlling it…

MR. REICHLE: I’m glad you’re going to tell this story. [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: They went out and did the radiation measurements and look at the

uniformity of the distribution of the fallout. All the three dimensional radiation profiles

were square, edges flat across the surface, little variation. In the corner of one plot,

there’s this one peak. I remember asking somebody, John Witherspoon, I think, “What

happened there?” He said, “That’s when Auerbach took the control. He said, ‘Let me

try this for a minute.’” [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: That’s probably not the way you were going to tell that story…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, well…

MR. REICHLE: …but that’s reasonably accurate.

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 1:11:34] controls. There’s a blip. We started that

experiment, and I needed somebody full-time to operate, collect data, who had some

experience in radiation background training. This Clarence Styron he was talking

about, had graduated from Emory University…

MR. REICHLE: Under Bob Platt.

MR. AUERBACH: …Bob Platt, who did radiation effects work. Had his PhD. He was a

reserve, ROTC, and he was due to take his two year reserve position in the Army,

through the Office of Civil Defense, which is part of the military, I got him assigned to

Oak Ridge for his military service. It didn’t cost me a dime.

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MR. REICHLE: I didn’t know that.

MR. AUERBACH: He took over that. My only problem was the Defense Department

couldn’t understand. At the end of the year, they wanted a, you know, “how was he

doing” kind of sheet, a report card, a military report card. So, I decided to… And I tried

to make it an accurate one, you know, he’s very good at this or that. I was talking to

some friend of mine who was in the reserve. He said, “If you don’t give him 95 and plus

in every category, he’s through.” In the Army, everybody’s got to get… So, anyway, he

wrote some papers. He was here at that period of time. I want to pick up another

thread right here, and that’s the new building. After I moved back to X-10 in ’61, and

Karl Morgan would have weekly or bi-weekly meetings with the section chief, staff

meetings essentially. They were now getting [inaudible 1:13:33] east wing. Karl, who

sometimes got things out of the air, said, “You know, we really need a whole [inaudible

1:13:43] like the Physics Division. Physics got one, [inaudible 1:13:46] got to use it

over there. 4500 is all right, but it isn’t ours.” He said, “Stan, you’ve been designing

labs and buildings.” Somewhere there’s a report, I think it’s in “Auerbach’s 20 Year

Statement”. Anyway, he said, “Why don’t you start thinking about a new health physics

building?” That’s all I needed in my spare time. Well, I knew that the Engineering

Division had a planning group, and I contacted the guys, by the name of Wells Stanley,

and Mitch Carter. Turned out Wells and I joined the same car pool. Both peaches

[inaudible 1:14:33]. We got together and started talking. They were very interested,

that’s their role. As we talked, I talked about this and that, said, “We now have a

consulting architect to help you plan.” Finally after meeting a couple of weeks, Wells

said to me, hearing what we were doing, he said, “Why are you trying to build

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something for the whole health physics. There are so different many pieces it’s going

to be tough to put together a logical design. Why don’t you think about your own

program?” I have an architect, and we started talking. That was one thing that got me

in perpetual disfavor with K.Z. [Morgan]. But he got over it. So, I started to meet with

him, yeah. Do you live in Oak Ridge?

FEMALE VOICE OFF CAMERA: [Inaudible 1:15:23].

MR. AUERBACH: Well, it wasn’t long, wasn’t much… About that time, [inaudible

1:15:34] with the round building.

FEMALE VOICE OFF CAMERA: [Inaudible 1:15:36].

MR. AUERBACH: [Inaudible 1:15:39], which is very controversial. In doing my

reading, I discovered that at the University of California, at Berkeley, under the AEC

auspices [inaudible 1:15:53] by the name of Melvin Calvin, they built a round building

for the research program out there. I began to think about that. Somethings got to be

different about ecology. We can’t just be a regular building, another 4500 type building.

And I visited several places [inaudible 1:16:13] university buildings, talked to the guys

there. I got some good advice, so much in fact that we designed the laboratory. There

will never be, they will always be so specialized, they can’t be transferred to anything

else. You design it. So, I went to Europe. On my trips I looked at their ecology labs,

went around, and I finally decided, I happened to be down in Coral Gables, Florida, on

some kind of visit…

[Break in video]

MR. AUERBACH: …as fast as we can, given all the usual bureaucratic circumstances.

So, we headed into the 1960’s with a, I’ll call it a Laboratory management mandate in

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support that we can go, we could move ahead, make it into a big program. Weinberg

wanted it sort of done out of the National Laboratory, big science scale, bringing

together lots of disciplines, the works. And so the 1960’s really was the decade, I’ll say,

of our most pronounced growth in that period of time, scientifically, intellectually, and

organizationally. Now I realize things came later, but in that… We went essentially

from two people on up to a large group of individuals. The… As Dave has narrated, the

International Biological Program was, amalgamated in the mid-‘60’s, was a major jump

for ourselves. We had brought in two modelers, Bernard Patten and George Van Dyne,

with Jerry Olson, established the first systems ecology training course at the University

of Tennessee. A number of these things were moving in that direction. White Oak

Lake, although the bed was being, had been reflooded in part, provided some research

for some of our aquatic scientists, looking at details like chromosome damage in

certain kinds of insects. The Clinch River program was underway. And yet, we didn’t

have, we had the cesium forest which was a unique project bringing together our

terrestrial people, we didn’t have a single project that one could come to the

reservation and say, “We want to see this project.” A number of the other labs like

Brookhaven [National Laboratory], University of Los Angeles in California, some of

these universities had established these big gamma fields where they would radiate

systems and give data on how these various natural systems, forests, grasslands,

deserts, would react to radiation. I remember we had some staff meetings once a

week, where we would try to brainstorm different things that we could do. I didn’t want

to get into a gamma field basically because it would have been a “me too” effort, if we

did that. The International Biological Program was sort of hatching, but it wasn’t, in the

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early part of the ‘60’s, wasn’t there. Well, the Clinch River Program that Dan [Nelson]

had been dealing with was starting to wind down. In one of these meetings, Nelson

brought the idea, “Why can’t we try to do a watershed program?”, which is getting

popular in the United States, somewhat parallel to the one being done in Hubbard

Brook, New Hampshire, I guess it was, by scientists there. So, I said, “Can you find

such a place on the reservation?” So he and our new forest physiology ecologist who

was hired away from TVA, helped fight pine beetle disease that was wiping out the

trees on the reservation then, as they did now, again in town. They decided to scour

the reservation and find a suitable watershed situation. They found that upper White

Oak Creek… Was it White Oak Creek? It wasn’t White Oak Creek, it was…

MR. REICHLE: Walker Branch…

MR. AUERBACH: Walker Branch.

MR. REICHLE: …Creek.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, Walker Branch Creek lent itself to being built into something

like a research facility also. So, [Jim] Curlin and Nelson put together a 189, sent it to

Washington and the chief ecologist John Wolfe liked that thing. It brought together

elements of aquatic and terrestrial science, and tied into what impacts water, the

stream. So we got the go ahead to build that. I remember he gave us about $60,000,

capital money to build this facility, which consisted of a pair of dams which have V-

notches in them, which allow you to calibrate and measure the amount of water that

flows over it. We built in automatic staging things, and it was a state of the art facility

out there in the woods. At the time, I had to pull our engineers in to help design it,

which served two purposes. One, to give them the experience, and two, to

77

demonstrate to them, that ecological field apparatus of the most modern kind was as

challenging as some of the other things they do in the laboratory. To contrast with

them, I took them out where the Applied Health Physics section was monitoring the

contaminated water at White Oak Creek, and using a weir to do it. They had built a

weir made of plywood with a V-notch and stuck it in the creek, where this was a very

big sophisticated one. So, that got underway, and that brought together, particularly

some of the aquatic scientists to work on it as well as some of the terrestrial scientists.

That gave us, essentially, two big field facilities that we were working on. The cesium

forest, where we ran a terrestrial one, and the watershed, which brought together the

aquatic scientists and the terrestrial scientists. We had, I don’t think we had done much

with the 0-800 yet. Anyway, that got underway. We were still doing radioecology, and

all this led toward us becoming a site in the International Biological Program. Dave,

you want to take it from there?

MR. REICHLE: I got some notes down here. Leading up to the International Biological

Program, which I think he was kicking off in about 1967, I want to slide back just a

couple of years. I came here in 1964 on an AEC post-doctoral fellowship. I think where

we broke last, I was talking about that, and worked here for two years on the cesium

forest, under strong directions from Stanley to get some publications out of this project,

that he wasn’t able to get out of some of my predecessors who were working on it, and

worked very hard. During this time, my group leader, a fellow by the name of Dac

Crossley, had another young post-doc working with him. One day he came up to me

and said, “Do you know Ed,” who was the name of the other post-doc, “who is your

yardstick? Stanley Auerbach has said he’s your yardstick.” I thought, “What in the

78

world is a yardstick?” And he said, “That’s who he’s measuring you against. One of

you is going to survive here and probably the other one won’t.” I thought, “Oh my

gosh.” This guy had come out of Savannah River. He had a PhD from the University of

Georgia, worked under Eugene Odum, who was a renowned ecologist at the time, and

went around constantly babbling about respirometers, radiotracers, energy flow, and I

thought, “I’m in trouble.” Some months later, my group leader came in, just beside

himself, and Dac turned to me and said, “That fool.” I said, “What happened?” He said,

“Well…” I’ll tell you this story. We used to keep all our isotopes for tracer studies in a

vault…

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: …and had one person, John Witherspoon, who controlled the vault of

isotopes. That was our quality control. Before anyone could check any out to use them

in experiments, either in the lab or in the field, you’d have to go to John with a work

plan, tell him what isotope you needed and how much, in what quantities. Ed had

come back and said, “I need some cesium.” John had said, “What isotope? 137? 134?”

He said, “Doesn’t matter.” He said, “How much do you want?” And he said, “About a

quart.” [Laughter] Ed got banned from ever using isotopes again, I think, and my group

leader, Dac Crossley says, “Now I’m in trouble with Auerbach, because he thinks none

of us know what we are doing.” I just quietly said to myself, “You’ve got a chance.”

[Laughter] “Now to keep your nose clean.” By the time I got hired in in 1966, ground

work was beginning for the IBP project that came in, which was one of the defining

changes in the programs in what became a division. We need to pick up that formation

of the division a couple years later, Stan. The division had a strong reputation in both

79

aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems: the Clinch River Project, the thinking that was

beginning to develop on Walker Branch, the prior radioecology work on the White Oak

Lake bed, and the cesium forest. And forming international was a program called the

International Biological Program, modeled on the International Geophysical Year, the

IGY, and other [inaudible 1:27:04] a number of different international science

programs. This was promulgated under the understanding the productivity of world

ecosystems for the obvious benefit of human welfare. The Americans kind of

augmented studying productivity alone in the ecosystems of the world to getting in to

understanding the processes that controlled this. The National Academy [of Science]

took up the lead, organizing committees. I’m going to fast forward on this. So, they

organized around biomes in this country and internationally, and NSF became the

vehicle for funding. A number of biomes were selected and directors chosen for the

eastern deciduous, the grasslands, the deserts, the western coniferous forests, and

even one for the Alpine, and one in the tropical [inaudible 1:28:12] U.S. people

participated in. Stan was selected by a committee to be the director of the eastern

deciduous forest biome, coordinated out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, mainly

because of our reputation and staff expertise in looking at large scale systems, and

being able to use radio tracers to understand these ecological processes, like

respiration, photosynthesis, and element cycling. The eastern deciduous forest biome,

understand, had four research sites initially: the University of Wisconsin, the

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as it was called then. They were both aquatic sites.

Rensselaer on Lake George and University of Wisconsin on… Help me, Stan, what’s

the famous series of lakes…

80

MR. AUERBACH: Lake, Lake Wingra.

MR. REICHLE: Wingra. And [Lake] Mendota was an earlier one that [inaudible

1:29:15] in. Two terrestrial sites were Duke University Experimental Forest and

Coweeta Hydrologic Research Station of the Forest Service, research there being

composed primarily by the University of Georgia scientists. About a year… Excuse me,

Stanley’s role was to coordinate these research sites and he developed a team of

modelers building on some systems ecology, which, programs, which he had

developed. People capable of doing the integration and analysis of these different

research sites, hierarchically, aggregating the data and the beginnings in this country

of being able to discuss environmental processes and phenomenon at regional, or

landscape scale. In those days, those were called biome studies. After about a year,

some of us who were on the research side of the house, were growing frantic. I was. I

could see these university sites proposing to do research that we had already started

on, and felt we knew more about what we were doing than they did. Yet the role at that

time for Oak Ridge was only the biome analysis. We came in a year later with a

proposal, and to our good fortune, the four universities voted to allow a research site to

come into the program in Oak Ridge. We built off of the cesium forest, very quickly,

using the Walker Branch watershed as our main focus for a lot of our work. We spent

five years or more studying in great detail the carbon metabolism of the forest,

photosynthesis, respiration, water-gas relationships, decomposition, mineral cycles,

metabolism of forest systems. This was, at least in my mind, one of the significant

accomplishments out of our lab because it set us up about another half dozen years

into the future as the issues began to be raised about CO2 from fossil energy

81

production and the potential for change in the climate. You hear a lot about that today,

but it’s hard for maybe some folks to realize that DOE has had programs in this area

for over 20 years. We were one of the very first elements of that program and the roles

that were assigned to us were those of the global cycle of carbon. That is, the carbon

dioxide that is emitted from fossil fuel plants into the atmosphere, how much remains in

the atmosphere, how much is picked up by the oceans, how much is picked up by the

terrestrial biosphere, and where does it go. It is a matter of taking what we knew

through the IBP about the gas relationship and metabolism beneath the systems and

extrapolating it to global scales. We served DOE for a number of years as the

coordinator of all the global carbon cycle programs, maintained the subcontracts,

talked with university collaborators, became a fundee from the National Science

Foundation to continue work on carbon cycles in forests, as kind of a legacy from the

IBP program. The IBP, which we talked about earlier, was a line item project, but it

very quickly became the foundation for the National Science Foundation general

ecology and ecosystem programs, and that I think has never been forgotten by NSF

because this Laboratory has maintained relationships and still receives funding from

NSF for environmental research. There is no other national laboratory for what DOE

has received. So, a lot of that early work, I think, has led up to what we are doing now

on global change and the programs have matured even further beyond just the cycle of

carbon, but now is getting back into some fundamental ecological questions of how

does the change in climate temperature and water relations effect the biosphere, the

trees, the ecosystems. So the feedback on climate change with its impact on ecology.

My role in this is… We’ll get back to Stan, but I’ll fast-forward. I had the good fortune of

82

working with Stan all my career. He served as both a boss and a mentor. He retired in

’86.

MR. AUERBACH: Stepped down in ’86, yeah. I didn’t retire. Stepped down from the

division directorship.

MR. REICHLE: That’s right, in ’86. I was fortunate enough to replace him in 19…

February of ’90, I moved to associate director of the Laboratory, Bob Van Hook then

tooking over the Environmental Science Division, and then I followed Stan into

retirement about a year and a half ago, in April of 2000. I’d like to add a post-script at

the end of what life was like working with you, but I don’t want to distract from the

intellectual discuss…

MR. AUERBACH: We’ll wait on that.

MR. REICHLE: …we’re having here. I want to turn the ball back to Stan in a second.

There were a number of significant things happening as Stan said, in the ‘60’s. One

was our emergence as a major research center and the use of radioisotopes as tracers

to understand ecological processes, and far on the forefront of anyone else in the

world doing work like that at this time. The IBP, which we got, used as a base for a lot

of our experience in the radioecology program, gave us a tremendous opportunity to

look at global issues, getting involved with the National Science Foundation. But there

was a third key factor happening, and that was the National Environmental Policy Act

[NEPA] of 19…

MR. AUERBACH and MR. REICHLE [in unison]: ’69.

MR. REICHLE: …and its impact that it had on the division. And that’s a subject

Stanley knows well, and I’ll maybe let you pick up the NEPA…

83

MR. AUERBACH: Okay.

MR. REICHLE: …[Inaudible1:36:09].

MR. AUERBACH: Again, we’re going to do this back and forth. I want to go back to

this IBP program and my role as the director. The Laboratory had used that. As the

director, we were now supposed to be a central coordinating system, that all the data

were to flow into here, and we were supposed to sort of manage the data and work

with it. Well, that was also a difficult hurdle for university scientists to accept. Dave said

I was the manager. The term manager is anathema to a university scientist. So

instead, I was director. [Laughter] Because they don’t like managers. One of the things

that we did…

MR. REICHLE: [Inaudible 1:36:57] get a little humor.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: The university community referred to Stan as the gnome…

MR. AUERBACH: Of the biome.

MR. REICHLE: ...of the biome. The G-N-O-M-E of the biome.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] Sitting on that pot of gold.

MR. REICHLE: That kind of describes the reaction to supervised science.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] Well, one of the things they had to do was provide us

reports, copies of their data sheets. We used our coordinator for mathematic modeling,

Bob O’Neill, to work with them. We established an information center library in the

headquarters, which turned out to be the forerunner of the information centers around

the Laboratory. As a matter of fact then, that was expanded later in to, where DOE

along with Engineering Physics where Betty Maskewitz ran an information center, and

84

I set up one and brought in another lady to manage our new information center. This is

just about 1970, and I’ll get over that in a minute. That was the beginning of the female

revolt at the Laboratory, and around the country. But when we ended last time, I also

said I wanted to talk about the genesis of the new building. We had been in our

building up here more than, I don’t know, six months or so, and in Karl Morgan’s

monthly staff meetings, they were over in the new 4500 [building], he said, “Stanley…”

MR. REICHLE: You mean, you’re back in 2001 [building].

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, we’re back in 2001. We were a section of the Health…

MR. REICHLE: [Inaudible 1:38:35] 19…

MR. AUERBACH: ’61, ’62, ’63. We were a section in HP [Health Physics]. I had a

weekly staff meeting, and Karl said, “Stanley, you know, Health Physics really ought to

have a building of its own. And you seem to be the only one here with experience in

building and remodeling. Why don’t you look into us getting a joint building, a new

building?” And I thought to myself, “Oh my God.” I said, “Okay, Karl, I’ll look into it.”

And I was riding in my carpool then with one of the engineers over in engineering,

Wells Stanley, and I told him I’ve got to get in touch with engineering about looking into

a future new building. He said, “You’re talking to the right guy. I and Mitch Carter form

a unit in engineering and the concern with long range construction planning.” He says,

“And by long range, we find that you have to start thinking 10 years ahead of time, if

you want a new building.” So I said, “I’ll come down and see you.” He said,

“Furthermore, we have an architect on retainer who can help also.” So, I agonized and

agonized, and I went down and saw him. He said, “You’re environment is a growing

area. It’s going to be tough to put together, conceptually, a building that’s a health

85

physic building and an environmental building. Why don’t you just work on an

environmental building?” I said, “Okay, I won’t tell Karl.” Karl’s over there. So he and I,

and Mitch Carter, and then the architect that he brought in began to talk about a

building, what it would entail, had a [inaudible 1:40:11] myself. And I was always

concerned about, in, sort of in big science around the Laboratory, trying to have people

in contact with each other. Not often cornered. I happened to pick up, I don’t know,

some document somewhere, a newsletter from the University of California, where with

AEC funding the University of California had a distinguished chemist-scientist, by the

name of Melvin Calvin, and I looked at a picture of his bioorganic chemistry building,

and it was a round building. I said, “Uh-oh.” Meanwhile, the high school in town had

two round buildings added to it, which the people in town didn’t like. I don’t know if

you’re an Oak Ridger or not. No, you’re not. So, I began to look into and think about

that. And I happened to make some trips around the country and I ran into a round

building down in Coral Gables, Florida, which was a, occupied by a big accident law

firm. You know, one of these that makes the millions. They took me on a tour. It was a

beautifully laid out building, and it worked fine. I visited other laboratories, saw what

they were, and I was determined to come up with something unique. So, I and the

architect worked on it. I had to give him my ideas of what I thought should go into it, a

futuristic building that I thought would be an ecosystem research building. And it was a

round building. We put out a book on the design of it. I don’t know what happened to

the big picture of it, but this is a little picture of it, here.

[Pointing to a picture on the cover of a book]

MR. AUERBACH: Can you see that from here? I don’t know if he can…

86

[Camera zooms in; picture of a round building]

[End of Part 2]

[Part 3 begins]

[Camera zooms in; picture of a round building]

MR. AUERBACH: Unfortunately, when they did a color rendition of it, it got the

nickname of “the wedding cake.” We were going to stash it up here, up on the hillside

here above 4500, and I took the ideas to the Engineering Division. They looked like I

had just got out of a straitjacket from someplace. I said, “Why?” “Well,” he says, “round

buildings, we don’t build round buildings. They have all kinds of complications.” Well,

we had put out a beautiful color brochure of the proposed design of the building, the

layout. Of course, Alvin [Weinberg] got the first copy. He was intrigued. Everybody else

had one. Karl Morgan was unhappy with me. [Laughter] We made sure that the

administrative wing was down on the ground floor away from everything. The library

was up in the top floor with windows all around it, so they could see everything out

there. Then there were these labs. So, the building, when Weinberg saw it, he

authorized money for conceptual design. They went with it. And the more these

engineers worked on it, the more intrigued they were with it. They had to do new

calculations for supports, new stress things, all kinds of new challenges. And it would

sure be an energy saver. So, we prepared our formal proposal, and sent it to DOE. I

think the estimate then that came back would be $11.5 million to build that building

then in the mid-‘60’s. I guess the message came back from Wolfe indirectly, said, “We

like it, but there’s no way we can fund such a building down there now. Your program

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isn’t large enough to begin with to mandate such a building.” So, it went on the shelf. It

got the nickname of “the wedding cake” building. I used to have a big colored painting

of it somewhere. It was in your office finally. I don’t know where it went to. That sort of

went into the 1970’s. Then in the beginning of the 1970’s, the concern was, more and

more of the country was becoming environmentally concerned about particularly

nuclear energy, coal, you know, the birthday had showed up in 1970. And the AEC

was forced to undergo writing impact statements on all new reactors. In looking at

those, we became aware that one of the problems, everyone did, was the hot water

effluence coming from these proposed power stations. There was a lot of hot water.

They were big controversies already. So, Dan Nelson and I began to talk about that,

and what could we do here? Jim Liverman, who was our, then an associate director

of… came into be associate director of the Laboratory, was urging us to do something,

and we decided, thinking it through, that we needed to become here a center for

experimental work on this problem, as opposed to being another field survey group. So

we proposed to get a new research facility just for those studies in aquatic sciences.

Then Dan began to, I said we got to find a site to put this building on. Well, we already,

with the blessing of local DOE chief engineer, Leroy Jackson, who was a terror to the

rest of the Laboratory when it came to construction, turned over meek as a sheep

when we brought this in. He said, “Well, this is an environmental area. Dr. A, if that’s

what you’ll like, we’ll support you.” We proposed to put it up on the hillside above here,

overlooking 4500 [building], overlooking the pond, and I could get up on the top floor

and look down here at everything. Well, we came down to worry about the aquatic lab.

We needed a source of water other than our drinking water system, our process water

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system. We sent out and did some well surveying, and discovered there were a

number of wells over north of 4500 [building] that could provide adequate spring water

to service this laboratory. Unfortunately, they were over toward the west end of the

Laboratory, and to try and run water lines from the wells, always to the east end, would

have been prohibited. So we took a look down at the west end of the Laboratory and

there was a site there. We quickly designed this elaborate aquatic research laboratory

for studying both thermal effects and the effects of pressure in the systems on

organisms. We also started recruiting for somebody to run that program. The person

we spotted was Charles Coutant, who was a young aquatic scientist at Hanford

[National Laboratory, Washington]. We made, we contacted him, and he and his wife

were from East Pennsylvania, and he was interested and he had just the right

credentials for us. He was working on those kind of things in the Columbia [River]. So

we brought him in. He constructed the laboratory with tanks with computer controls,

that could run, cycle water 24 hours a day, cycle the temperature. At the same time,

we were interested in the impact of the pressure of the cooling system on fish, as they

were whipped through the turbines. So Chuck and the engineer designed this big thing

out there which essentially was a simulator of pressure in the cooling system. We’d

introduce the fish at the top, you’d pump it, and they’d come whipping out the back and

measure it. It hasn’t been used now, what, 20 years? 25 years? [Laughter] So we built

that. We put the main building on hold for that period of time, until around 1974, 1975.

By then we not only occupied 2001 [building], but we moved into building 3017 where

Dave took over the terrestrial section. We added wings onto 2001 so we could

accommodate our first computer. We had taken over a couple of information centers,

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which we put in trailers around there [inaudible 7:20] somebody else. Now, the other

thing that happened in the 1970’s was, finally around the country, the woman’s

movement revolt, if you’re old enough to remember that. I had long been a champion

of the utilization of women around here. I had, that had hit me back when I first came

here. I wanted technicians. The technicians I was given were dedicated people. They

would do what they were told, they would do it repetitively, but they were not college-

trained. And in the university system, where you do research, you got the money, you

employed a graduate student, or advanced undergraduate who understood what

needed to be done. They could work independently. So I asked why didn’t’ we have

them here. Well, this is an engineering organization. Well, being at Y-12, I also had

contact with the Biology Division, and there, their technicians, most of them were

female, all college-trained with good records. They came from mostly women’s

colleges. I learned that [Alexander] Holleander would go recruiting down there with

other people, offering them jobs up here, good salaries, intellectually stimulating, lots

of single young men around here who’d be looking for wives. I said, “Well, if he can do

it, I can do it too.” So, I went down to Personnel and told them from here out, get some

applications from women’s college graduates who were looking for a position. I wanted

them forwarded to me. They soon came in. I remember the first one we hired was a

young lady from Iowa, Mary something or other, she went to work for [Dac] Crossley. It

was just the way I had hoped. She understood what the problem was. You tell her

what needed to be done, and she’d run it.

MR. REICHLE: Hoglund?

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MR. AUERBACH: Mary Hoglund. Mary Hoglund. She later married Dick Hoglund who

rode the ranks at K-25.

MR. REICHLE: Cynthia Corley.

MR. AUERBACH: Well, I’ll come to Cynthia Corley, yeah. Then one day, an

application came across my desk for a graduate from the University of Georgia, Phi

Beta Kappa, A minus average, biochemistry, biology, ecology, etcetera. So, oh, we’d

better hire her. So we hired her, and in comes in this very cute young lady. Vivacious.

Georgia peach. Outgoing, and she was happy to come up here. Made everybody

happy just to talk to her. In fact, we took a group picture one time, and we were in

collaboration, contact with a Russian group over in the Soviet Union then who was in

ecology, and we sent them our group picture. He said, “Thank you very much.” He

said, “We would like to send some men over there who would like to work with that

lady in the front row. [Laughter] Or have her come work for us.” Well, I’m digressing a

bit, but you need to have something other than the other side of the story. Well, at that

time, Oak Ridge used to have an annual beauty contest, Miss ORNL [Oak Ridge

National Laboratory]. Divisions would nominate people, women, and they were

elected, sort of by a popular vote, who was the prettiest lady at ORNL. So, Cynthia

hadn’t been here, she’d been here about a year. We had a brand new, odd kind of

truck. We were over at Y-12. She had to go out in the field and collect samples. She’d

take that truck over. Every guard at Y-12, every guard at X-10 soon knew her. “Hi,

Cynthia.” “Hi. You want me to stop?” “No, go on through.” [Laughter] The, she wasn’t

quite as rigorous a scientist as we hoped, but she made up for it in personality. So, the

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Miss ORNL contest was coming around. This was around 19 and 60… Was she here

when Phil [?] and you got here?

MR. REICHLE: She was in my security detail.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] That’s right. ’63 or ’64. And word came, “Why don’t we

nominate Cynthia for Miss ORNL?” The division had nominated somebody else, but

she won by a landslide, it was a popular vote. Then the next year, we’d also taken on

another technician with her Master’s degree or something, and she was a good looking

young red-head. She worked in the mammals section. She was again, smart, knew her

business, and the… So, “Why don’t we put her up next year?” So we did, and she won.

Of course, I had the fun, each of those beauty contests, of being the chairman each

evening of the affair and crowning the queen, kissing them and all that good stuff. So,

life was kind of interesting that way. Well, I said, by 1970, the women’s movement was

getting active, and I had, I mean I had seen through my own wife and stuff, these

highly educated young women in town are spouses and all they could be were house

wives or volunteers. They couldn’t get jobs. Many had better skills than many of the

men. So I started trying to hire them. Fortunately, in 1970, we had to start the impact

statement program, and I had to hire a number of people fast. So, we tried to get

women as fast as possible. Being 1970, the women’s revolt was sort of on. Maybe

you’re too young to remember that.

[Mr. Auerbach shakes head at someone off camera]

MR. AUERBACH: You don’t know? Well, anyway, they decided that they would make

a demonstration once a week at the Laboratory, sort of calling attention that they are

professional women, but they are also women. So every Friday at noon, they’d go

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down to the cafeteria for lunch, braless, which of course created another… [Laughter]

…another problem for the... [Laughter] The cafeteria [inaudible 14:29] Friday at noon

was always packed with people. Well, you know, then I had to cope… I didn’t cope

with that, I just… You know, it was fun. Then one time later on, I think [Herman]

Postma was the director, he came down to look at the division, and make a walk.

Knowing he was coming through, suddenly in one of the offices, a full-length enlarged

centerfold from Playgirl was hanging up there. He looked at me, I said, “Well, you

know, that’s the way it is.” But that was kind of an interesting period in the development

of the organization. In the 1970’s, early then on too, we got the word that a new

building might be welcomed here, because it had been about 10 or 12 years since any

building had been built in the Lab, longer than that. So, I got back with my engineering

friend and he started to seriously work on a design. I finally decided, lets convert the

round building to a rectangular building, same principle, mostly the same principle,

except this was 1975, ‘74 going on. We wanted to be energy efficient. We wanted to

be uniquely environmental, and Dan Nelson and I worked on it. We wanted to be, it

wasn’t going to be a red brick. Have you seen the building? Yeah, yeah, you’ve seen

the building. And so we prepared that design. Dan also decided we’d try to make it as

energy efficient as possible. This was already after the oil embargo, and we did a study

on using solar panels. They weren’t going to be cost effective, but we did make it

heavily insulated, earthquake proof, totally stable, windows weren’t as large as other

places, save energy, zonal heating and cooling, and trying to make arrangements,

effective arrangements like here in 4500. Offices on the outside, laboratories on the

inside. It came in at the estimated cost of about $8 million. I had to do some, I didn’t

93

hesitate to do pastoralizing, visiting our congress people at the time. Howard Baker

was highly in support of it, and some of the others. And just before the groundbreaking

in 1975, Dan Nelson died suddenly of a heart attack, which was a great loss to us, but

[Ed] Struxness was there to help me, and we decided on… Dan Nelson… We started

on another controversial thing we were going to do with that building. Dan had read

somewhere, either the Wall Street Journal or something, that Congress had allocated

in the new, from now on in construction of federal buildings, they were getting so many

complaints about how drab buildings looked, by the federal government. In that period,

they were looking like communist-era buildings, that you could spend a certain

percentage of the building [money] on some kind of artwork to enhance the

appearance of the building. So, Ed Struxness knew this well-known ceramicist Charles

Counts, who was well-known through the southeast and parts of Europe for his

ceramic work. We approached him about a design to put something on the side of the

building. He had done one years before, I think, for ORAU [Oak Ridge Associated

Universities] on their Medical Arts Building, a small one. So he came in with this…

What do you want to say? Futuristic, or not futuristic…

MR. REICHLE: Circle of Life.

MR. AUERBACH: Well, yes, circle of life, but it’s not, not… It’s representative of… an

artist’s conception, conceptual version that went up on the building. And it wasn’t going

to be that expensive, and they would put it up. It created an underground firestorm

among the staff in the building. And there was, it apparently sponsored a limerick

contest. [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: I entered it, but I didn’t [inaudible 19:27].

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MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter] Oh, you didn’t sponsor it. Maybe O’Neill sponsored it.

MR. REICHLE: I think so. Ed never quite forgave me when he found out that I

participated, that I did this.

MR. AUERBACH: I have a complete set at home in a file. [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: You do?

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: I’d love to hang out.

MR. AUERBACH: You’d love to hang out?

MR. REICHLE: [Inaudible 19:45].

MR. AUERBACH: All right, I’ll make copies of it. So, but that wasn’t to deter us…

MR. REICHLE: Oh boy.

MR. AUERBACH: …neither did an underground newsletter by one of our female

scientists who’s initials are B.A., who had underground newsletters, which I was

generally, you know, the person with the horns. The plant was interesting then in those

days. So, that’s how the building was finished. It took four years to build it. Drove me

nuts for that period of time. Partially, it was the contractor, and all the other things, but

we got essentially what we wanted. It was the only place in the Laboratory then, new

building with underground wiring. No telephone poles near there. It had an earth-type

tone to it, and we built two other buildings around with it, and it’s become the

Environmental Center. That was in the mid-‘70’s. David, you want to take up the

research side of the ‘70’s? Now that was when the coal technology programs, nuclear

was a bad word, coal gasification programs. We had some role in that. So we hired in

things like Barbara…

95

MR. REICHLE: I had to step out a moment while you were talking. You went through

the NEPA?

MR. AUERBACH: No, I didn’t do much of the NEPA?

MR. REICHLE: Okay, so maybe I’ll start there…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: …if you help me out along the way. When I last left the discussion

here, we had talked about the early programs in radio ecology…

MR. AUERBACH: He’s got to change. You got to… Oh, no.

MR. REICHLE: …the transport, movement of radionuclides in the environment, an

area which was really unique in our research program, set the stage for the IBP, which

was another [inaudible 22:01] change at this time, occurred in the very early ‘70’s, with

the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] in…

MR. AUERBACH and MR. REICHLE [in unison]: 1969.

MR. REICHLE: …which really stemmed out of the Calvert Cliffs [nuclear power station]

court decision.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: A nuclear reactor proposed for the Chesapeake and the

environmentalists opposing us raised questions about the thermal outfall, and the

impacts on fish. It was a court hearing controversy that developed. There really was no

process for dealing with this, and out of this court case evolved a national police act,

that we now refer to as NEPA, which outlined formal requirements for federal

agencies, federal funding, to evaluate the impacts of the federal actions on the

environment. It was the beginning of a whole series of environmental legislation

96

through the ‘70’s. [Inaudible 23:05]. It really effected a new perspective of how the

country and the people looked at the environment and the desire to protect it. Well,

NEPA had a profound effect, and one long lasting effect was it required considerable

input from staff in the division. As I recall, all the aquatic scientists in the division who

were working on basic research programs were told to cease and desist…

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: …by headquarters, AEC at the time. Stan was just a wreck with them,

and immediately began working on impact statements.

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: These were young scientists at the beginnings of their careers who

came here for the fabulous research opportunities and were now told to stop, and start

working on environmental impact statements. The load became so huge that you went

into a rapid hiring mode, and at the end I don’t know how many aquatic colleges

[inaudible 24:14] working on NEPA statements. At least 30.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: It was a terrible grind, terrible deadlines, terrible work schedules. A lot

of overtime. Stan [inaudible 24:27] lab management, compensation for these people

because of overtime. The best employees were working 80 hours a week, week after

week, after week. So these were opportunities and challenges that they never had

[inaudible 24:41] [Laughter]. It was a test of fire and some made it and some didn’t. But

those who survived, I’ll talk about those later, became very excellent, excellent people,

and added a lot to the Laboratory through the years. It was really the beginning of the

technology assessment activities at the Laboratory, which in future years, spread over

97

a lot of divisions. It formed about half of the basis of the Energy Division that had

formed, which became at a later time, a focal point for NEPA statements, because it

was part social sciences [inaudible 25:22] ecologists, and environmentalists. The

impact on the division had been, I don’t believe that we ever had been the same kind

of [inaudible 25:36] proposal after NEPA as you wrote before NEPA because we were

being forced, and paid too, to learn energy technology. And ever thereafter, other

national labs that were writing [inaudible 25:52] science proposals. The ones coming

out of Stan’s organization were very applied, very specific with the technology impact

on the environment. There were very specific research plans that came up with the

kinds of information that were lacking, that we needed to evaluate with technology.

This rapid growth, the NEPA program, the IBP program, the continued support from

DOE, caused the Laboratory to recognize that it really had a whole new kind of

existence at the Laboratory, and decided to form the Ecological Sciences Division,

which was 19…

MR. AUERBACH and MR. REICHLE [in unison]: ’70.

MR. REICHLE: And almost immediately, Stan, maybe even before, his division

realized that an ecological division was too narrow, not farsighted enough. The

Laboratory really needed a home for the environmental sciences, in general. Not just

the aquatic ecology, but geosciences, [inaudible 27:08]

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: And it was early 1972?

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: That the Laboratory then formed the environmental.

98

MR. AUERBACH: They rechanged the name.

MR. REICHLE: Rechanged the name.

MR. AUERBACH: I wrote them a letter to deploy…

MR. REICHLE: From the Environmental Sciences Division and added to it the old

Waste Management section out of the old Health Physics Division, which had been the

sister section of the radiation ecology section. So essentially that half was the old

Health Physics Division, following the lead that you had established in the ecology

program, became the new Environmental Sciences.

MR. AUERBACH: A number of them did, not all of them did though.

MR. REICHLE: Not all of them.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: The dates escape me. Somewhere during this period, another impact,

lots of things were happening in the environment…

MR. AUERBACH: Well, we got in…

MR. REICHLE: I talked about research opportunities, the whole sweep of federal

legislation giving the opportunities for science. We…

MR. AUERBACH: Coal gasification.

MR. REICHLE: Well, AEC went to ERDA [Energy Research and Development

Administration]…

MR. AUERBACH: Right.

MR. REICHLE: The dates escape me.

MR. AUERBACH: That happened about ’74.

99

MR. REICHLE: ’74, and that expanded the mission of the Laboratory from just nuclear

energy, to all forms of energy. Solar, geothermal, fossil fuels, coal gasification and

centrifuge programs were very big programs, continuing to work on nuclear, and wind

programs. It further expanded the technology assessment activities.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: Again, what are the environmental impacts, which then lead into a

whole series of opportunities for research on the environmental impacts on these new

technologies. Just as the National Science Foundation funding at IBP had a major

impact on the Laboratory, the National Science Foundation had another new program

that emerged, and it was…

MR. AUERBACH: Research applied to national needs.

MR. AUERBACH and MR. REICHLE [in unison]: Grant.

MR. REICHLE: A grant program, which was preceded by a year or two by the ERPA

[?]…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: …interdisciplinary research on something or other.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: And what the Laboratory came in with, the proposals for this were

really to look at technology assessment. We had social scientists, economists, and

environmental scientists working together. But our division capitalized on another

opportunity under them, and that was to look at trace element contaminants in the

environment, which was immediately expanded, built upon our capabilities in

radionuclides, but opened up the whole area of hazardous chemicals. In later years,

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that brought us full circle back to the waste management problems that we started out

with in our origin.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: But it had us working on mercury, cadmium, zinc, other toxic and

hazardous chemicals in the environment, and a new coal liquefaction and gasification

program brought in another series of environmental contaminants. These were the

organics.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: And all its compounds that wound up in other areas, working on PCBs

[polychlorinated biphenyls] and trichloroethylene. So suddenly we were into an

expanded effects program, as well as its transport. We built on our isotope transport to

get into trace elements, conversion and movement in the environment. Our work on

radiation effects expanded rapidly now to look at chemicals, toxicity and chemical

effects. The Biology Division was looking at the mutagenesis and carcinogenesis, and

your division was looking at the effects on population, survivorship, [inaudible 31:28]

and fertility.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: And those also attracted in some bright new scientists and added to

the growth of the division, and increased our national visibility...

MR. AUERBACH: That’s right. Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: …and even more strongly coupled us into the National Science

Foundation...

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

101

MR. REICHLE: …which was a unique…

MR. AUERBACH: Relationship

MR. REICHLE: …role for the Laboratory.

[Break in video]

MR. AUERBACH: …brought some other major changes in the laboratory. Prior to that,

late ‘60’s, Alvin Weinberg had by now been convinced that the environmental issues

are going to be one of the major issues facing this country. He felt strongly that we

weren’t scientifically equipped to handle it on a big basis. He felt that we should have a

system of national laboratories similar to Oak Ridge, or the other, that were devoted

strictly to major environmental issues. He called it… He then proposed a draft bill to

Howard Baker, that we ought to create a national environmental laboratory system. We

used to have monthly sort of think centers. Weinberg and the senior staff would meet

in Oak Ridge somewhere. We talked about these things. He was always interested in

milking the staff for ideas. But then he sat down and got Howard Baker interested, and

they started to put a draft in to create a national environmental laboratory system. Well,

we still had the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] still, and the Joint Committee on

Atomic Energy was one of the most powerful committees in Congress because it dealt

with atomic energy that nobody knew anything about. It was all secret. So, that’s the

sort of sociological situation these guys are on the in. They know it. You don’t ask

questions. Well, this infuriated the senior members of the congressional delegation.

How we could presume, being the director of the Laboratory, to propose a totally new

system like that? Of course, they didn’t let it get anywhere. I can’t say for sure because

I don’t know, but that was part of a set of circumstances that forced Weinberg to resign

102

from the Laboratory as director of the Laboratory in 1972, or there about. I mean, Alvin

was a, I think, an administrative genius, and he called the shots as he saw them. He

was an intellectual innovator, great perception, but he was forced to step down. For the

next year Floyd Culler, who was really almost a student of Alvin’s in many ways, was

appointed acting director of the Laboratory, until they could come up with a new one.

After a year, Union Carbide, who had the power of appointment, appointed Herman

Postma as the director of the Laboratory. Herman had been director of the Fusion

Energy Division. Now about the same time, public pressure finally forced the Congress

to abolish the Atomic Energy Commission and create something called the Energy

Research and Development Administration, ERDA, which really was much of the same

thing with a different kind of name. The part about relating to nuclear power however,

had been split off from the AEC, and in a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission,

created by Congress, which was strictly charged to tracking the health and safety of

reactors and buildings. So they became a separate entity. Well, the Energy Research

and Development Administration, I said was in a year. They were here for the

groundbreaking for the new building took place, and Robert Seamans, who was a

distinguished scientists, was then the director of it. But I think it was far doomed to

failure because I think the congress didn’t want another kind of administration. This

was kind of an in between-between entity that was hard to factor in budgets and

anything else. So they decided to make it into a cabinet level organization, named the

Department of Energy. That was done about a year or two later. That served to where

we are now. It has its good points. It has many bad points. Well, it’s much more

susceptible to political involvement than the other one was. This all happened between

103

1973 and about 1978, or there abouts. So, I was busy building the building. I didn’t get

[inaudible 37:01] l out of it, but it did tend to impact us operation-wise and budget-wise.

At the same time, environmental programs, environmental research was very much a

concern of the new Energy Department because they still had the responsibility of

getting reactors licensed and [inaudible 37:28]. They had to do that. They had to

prepare the environmental impact statements, and make past scientific quotas. They

also were told to broaden their research to all forms of energy, not merely nuclear

reactors, coal, biomass, solar. So that we here have the opportunity of expanding our

programs, which we did, based on our ecological work, looking at biomass programs.

What can grow the most biomass? How can that take place? At the same time, the

lines of communication were more difficult because there was a whole new staff in

Washington. That gave us difficulty. One of the areas that was a growing concern was

global carbon, global warming. Some of the reports coming out were saying that there

was going to be global warming. At first Washington was indifferent to it, but we had

done some pioneering analysis here, generally under Jerry Olson and some others,

looking at that future problem, in our case, based on the role of carbon. Other

ecologists were looking at the oceans and what was happening there. Alvin, after he

had to step down here, was given a position in Washington, I think it was Director of

Energy Planning or something like that, on the White House staff, which he stayed

there a year or two, then came back to ORAU [Oak Ridge Associated Universities] and

they had created a sub-institute for energy studies, which he was the director there of.

They began to look at the problem of global change. Jerry Olson from my staff, who

had been a leading thinker in some aspects of the global problem, was a consultant to

104

them. A number of other people were involved with it. This all took place, again,

around 1978 to 1980. That was another busy time. At the same time, we were getting

ready to occupy the new building. I had a difficult time because, as I said, Dan Nelson

had died suddenly. Ed Struxness, after the Health Physics Division was separated

from us and reorganized in 1972, he accepted my invitation to come over as associate

director of the ESD. He was too valuable of a person to let, get let go adrift. Stop your

microphone a minute. I just want to pick up a thought here. Oh…

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. AUERBACH: …you can turn it back up. The interest in the environment was

strong throughout that agency, and in 1972, I hope it isn’t a problem flicking back and

forth. One of the gentleman in what was then the Department of Energy, or AEC

headquarters, an ecologist up there by the name of William Osborne conceived the

idea that these AEC instillations, with their large acreage around them should serve as

an environmental research partner, where they work, and they do, on the impact of

technology, energy technology on the local environment. Now, they had several

obvious advantages, most of them were closely controlled, limited access by the

public. Most of them had not been dramatically disturbed since they were created as a

facility in World War II. They had tremendous potential for academic, laboratory

support facilities and the facilities that were there. He proposed therefore that these

ought to be created, called National Environmental Research Parks. Now, he put the

paperwork through headquarters, and I guess it was either DOE or AEC in 1970, well

1970, it was still AEC. They approved it as a concept within the agency. That the AEC

would have I think seven, well, a number of environmental research parks. The

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directors went out to the different operations offices. Every one of them thought it was

a great idea except one. Want to guess who it is?

VOICE OFF CAMERA: [inaudible 42:26].

MR. AUERBACH: Right. Oak Ridge Operations office did not like the idea of this being

made into a National Environmental Research Park. Their reasoning was that it could

allow foreign visitors to go freely onto the Lab, creating then perhaps future safety

problems.

MR. REICHLE: That was [inaudible 42:50] office?

MR. AUERBACH: Oh yeah. It was our office.

MR. REICHLE: I think the real argument was…

MR. AUERBACH: Control.

MR. REICHLE: …wanting to control.

MR. AUERBACH: Control, sure. Oh, sure.

MR. REICHLE: One of the few things the OPs Office [operations office] is independent

for is land use.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah. Oh yeah.

MR. REICHLE: They didn’t want to give up land use.

MR. AUERBACH: So, they were all…

MR. REICHLE: We had the opportunity through the years to work for the most

controlling OPs Office…

MR. AUERBACH: Oh yeah. I know.

MR. REICHLE: …in the DOE system.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, yeah.

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MR. REICHLE: I think more interested in controlling the Laboratory than building

programs.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh yeah. Yeah. We’re in charge.

MR. REICHLE: Better to be in charge of nothing… [Laughter]

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: …than encourage your Laboratory to develop something.

MR. AUERBACH: So, we had to go along with that. That didn’t stop me from doing my

work, my group doing work. They made it a little more difficult because the security

system patrols had been withdrawn. We had poaching to deal with and problems. We

had a growing deer population. We had vandalism. We had some of our [inaudible

44:00] damaged. All we could do was complain because we had no patrol or any of

that. Well, this situation went along for about six years, 1978. President Carter was

elected. President Carter came in on a whole new wave of philosophy. This is the era

of women’s role in government. This is the era where we looked at things totally

differently. We’re no longer atomic energy. Carter hated atomic energy. He didn’t think

it was a good idea. So about… Well, I don’t know how many years it was after he was

elected, but finally in 1980, the Assistant Secretary of the Environment was a lady

named Ruth Clusen, who had been an activist and environmentalist in the state of

Wisconsin. So she was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Environment. And Dr.

James Liverman, who had been down here, was a deputy to her as well as the

manager, was in a position to brief her. He wasn’t in a position to override the OPs

Office, but she could. So she sent word down in ’79, or there abouts, said Oak Ridge is

going to become a National Environmental Research Park. She dedicated in 1980,

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with some of the Operations Office standing around with these forced smiles on their

faces [Laughter]. No names. We came, and now of course, Dave and I are both parties

to, the reservation again is under threat from local real estate interests, the City of Oak

Ridge, the economic Royalists who all see it as a source of, I think, maybe private

gain. That was just, that was another occupancy through the ‘80’s. We dedicated the

new building in 1979. We had the hearing. President Carter came to visit the

Laboratory in 1978, and he got a chance to see the new building. Then one of the

challenges that faced us in the late ‘70’s, David maybe close to that, was the national

problem of acid rain, and air pollution. So we built that new building, and remember

those fancy gaseous test facilities for Sandy McCloughlin? That was in our… We had,

actually had three buildings there. We had the aquatic building, the main building, and

we had an experimental facility…

MR. REICHLE: Greenhouse laboratory…

MR. AUERBACH: …greenhouse laboratory.

MR. REICHLE: …[Inaudible 47:09] physiology.

MR. AUERBACH: And one of the things, recognition that we would get, once a year,

Howard Baker would come down, want to get briefed on the environmental issues,

wanted to, he saw the things, wanted to learn about acid rain, whatever we were

doing, and he took it back to them to deal with.

MR. REICHLE: Essentially… Before I pick up on acid rain, your story, you were

generous not mentioning names. Your story on the NERPs [National Environmental

Research Parks]…

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

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MR. REICHLE: …and their formation. You remember the stories I don’t. Sometime

when Ruth Clusen was in, when the National Environmental Research Park program

was starting, the boom across the plant sites, I got a call from the research arm of

DOE headquarters. Lar Brisman [sp? 48:08] was there, and he called me up and said,

“Dave, do you know a fellow by the name of Lenherd or…?”

MR. AUERBACH: [Joe] Lenhart.

MR. REICHLE: “…Lenhart, or something?” I’m assuming by the time anyone seriously

reviews these tapes we’re all going to be dead, so it doesn’t matter. And I said, “Yeah,

he’s over at the OPs Office.” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “They’re having a big NERP

meeting in Idaho Falls. The OPs Office there is hosting it.” Difference in attitudes.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: “And we’d like you to come up from Oak Ridge to represent Oak

Ridge.” So extended the invitation, the formality, DOE speaking to DOE. He said, “This

guy said that we’re not interested.” I said that I told him it was a very important

program. It’s going to be a new way of doing business essentially, funding, be

important to Oak Ridge. He says, “We’re still not interested.” He said, “But you don’t

understand, this is the way of the future, and the train is leaving the station unless you

get on, you’ll be forgotten about.” Joe said to him, “If Dave Reichle goes to this

meeting in Idaho Falls, he will come back to find out that he has no job here in Oak

Ridge.” I said to Lar [sp? 49:35], this is late in the afternoon, pushing 5:00 or

something. I said, “Do you know Jim Liverman at all, Lar?” He said, “Yeah, he’s down

the street. We jog together sometimes.” I said, “Well, I think you ought to go down and

tell him what you just told me.” I said, “I’m going to tell my boss, Stan Auerbach. I

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suspect he’ll be talking to Jim pretty soon. He might like to be briefed beforehand.” I

told you what happened. And 7:00 that night, you called me and said, five minutes ago,

Jim Liverman called me, Assistant Secretary Liverman. He said that he just talked to

Mr. Joe he hired in Oak Ridge, and told him the day that Reichle lost his job at ORNL

would be the day he was gone from the OPs Office. [Laughter] I didn’t even know this

fellow was speaking to him, but I knew who he was in public meetings. I tried to stay

on the other side of the room and avoid him. But that was some of the interesting

interactions. The acid rain was an interesting one. I remember very early, Stan. I’ve got

something in my file, a letter in 1969, to DOE headquarters. It was one of the first lake

[inaudible 50:56] were coming out.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: …[inaudible 51:04], and we had been told by a young red-headed soil

scientists up in, I forget his name, in DOE. A brilliant boy from the university who

rotated in and knew all the answers to our 189 that there were no acid rain effects

demonstrated, or theoretically possible [inaudible 51:25]. So, it was not a topic that

DOE was interested in. I’d written a long letter back and said it was hard to be a

scientist working for DOE, when the academic community accuses the feds of all being

dimwitted scientists who can’t get jobs in academia and go to work for federal

laboratories. They never had an original thought. Here’s yet another example of where

we’re out of funk with the country and we have to deal with dimwits at headquarters

who sit on top of ideas until they’re too late, and other agencies are funding university

programs. As things evolved, we got our first break in the acid rain, working for the

Electric Power Research Institute [ERPI].

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MR. AUERBACH: No, there was another egregious thing that took place earlier.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: Congress passed the National Acid Precipitation Act, NAPA rather.

MR. REICHLE: Okay.

MR. AUERBACH: A congressman from Long Island [New York] put into the bill that

this program being national, involving a variety of systems should be managed by the

four national laboratories who already have a program on it: Brookhaven, Oak Ridge,

Argonne, and Battelle. They should form a consortium that will lead that program. This

was kind of unprecedented to pass Congress like that. Of course, I remember Dave

Shriner and I looked at that and Dave had written some big documents, an

assessment of [inaudible 53:18].

MR. REICHLE: [Inaudible 53:19].

MR. AUERBACH: [Makes audible noise]

MR. REICHLE: Do you think this predated any funded work we had on acid rain? It

came after it.

MR. AUERBACH: It came a little after it. We were already known for doing that.

MR. REICHLE: Yeah. Yeah.

MR. AUERBACH: And we’re upon, I, and I guess Bernie Maskewitz at Brookhaven…

MR. REICHLE: Bernie Manowitz.

MR. AUERBACH: Manowitz…

MR. REICHLE: Yeah.

MR. AUERBACH: …who was up there. I said, “Let’s go up to DOE headquarters and

see what we can do.” So we went up to see the then director of energy, a gentleman

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you know well, and he said, “No, the department can’t do that type of thing. We’re not

going to get involved. [Inaudible 53:58].”

MR. REICHLE: [Inaudible 54:02].

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was then the director of energy.

MR. REICHLE: [Inaudible 54:10], late ‘70’s.

MR. AUERBACH: Late ‘70’s, I think it was. Yeah, late ‘70’s, early ‘80’s. But we had a

program, but we didn’t become a national leader in it yet.

MR. REICHLE: No, what I was referring to, I think our first research funding came from

EPRI.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: It didn’t hurt that some of… One of the things that helped our programs

through the years has been the graduates of students or staff that left for opportunities

beyond what we could offer here.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: Went to work at NSF, went to work at EPA, went to work at ERPI.

ERPI funded us to look at some acid rain because I think they had a far reaching

research program at the time, and they anticipated the regulatory issues that were

coming down. I remember asking Bob Brocksen one time, why they were doing this,

and he said, “We don’t think it’s a public utility consortium. We’ll never be able to

officially buck standards or alter the process. The best we can hope for is that when a

formed committee develops federal legislation, standards, that they will use the best

scientists around in science that has been produced and the best thing we can hope

for is that that good science was particularly supported by us and there were some

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good people who were supported by us and they understand the issues.” It wasn’t long

after that that EPA came to us learning a little bit on some of the publications what we

were doing with EPRI, and I remember we called EPRI and said would they find us in a

conflict of interest if we accepted funding from a regulatory agency while we were

working for them on the same topic.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: They said, “No, more power to you, assuming you can share the data

that you produce with EPRI, with EPA with us…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: …and we’ll share our data with them. All during this time, DOE was

withdrawn, just like they did on Calvert Cliffs. You remember they got in trouble at

NEPA by saying that we’re not the only people that produce hot water. The nuclear

plants…

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: …and coal plants do too. So it’s not our problem.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: And boom [hits fist on arm rest], they got the… The got NAPA…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah, right.

MR. REICHLE: …and the put down on them. In the end, the irony was DOE was

coming back to its national laboratories, using this one heavily, to give them a seat with

the other federal agencies, who were funding programs in this because they almost

lost any meaningful role in NAPA. And I think what they got were resource terms. They

didn’t have controlled technology in the beginning, and they didn’t have the effects.

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MR. AUERBACH: No.

MR. REICHLE: Although their laboratories were the main research units in the

country…

MR. AUERBACH: That’s right.

MR. REICHLE: …working on it…

MR. AUERBACH: That’s right.

MR. REICHLE: …with these other federal…

MR. AUERBACH: Agencies.

MR. REICHLE: …federal agencies. So it’s somewhat ironic that ERDA then, which

was [inaudible 57:31] to DOE. I think it was ERDA still, whose job was to research the

issues associated with energy development, really taking a back seat in terms of the

biggest environmental problem at the time associated with fossil energy. That was acid

rain. I guess NAPA then produced the famous NAPA assessment, 26…

MR. AUERBACH: Volumes.

MR. REICHLE: …volumes, of which I think we did eight alone…

MR. AUERBACH: Right, right.

MR. REICHLE: …out of this laboratory. And again that attributed to the national

reputation. It again reinforced the partnership with multiple funded agencies doing

environmental research here. It strengthened the collaboration with a lot of university

research centers.

MR. AUERBACH: Your philosophical point about the organization in town that wants

to be in control all the time, occurred to me that we ran into the same problem when

we were proposing to build the outside mural on the Environmental Science building,

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the art work on there. As I said, we had done our homework. It was legal. Congress

had said to use a certain percentage of it, and I think it was the cost of $10,000, or

something like that. So I put the paperwork into the OPs Office. I was citing the fact

that I had recently been to Israel and saw there, [inaudible 59:11] our Holifield vertical

reactor over there, a beautifully designed vertical, modernistic structure. Holifield

offices had been improved and is what it was. I then spoke to, said to Jim Liverman,

“They’re going to block me down here again.” So, again, he got on the phone with the

same gentleman, and that finally came through other channels, maybe not from Joe,

“Okay, you go ahead and make it pretty if you want to.” Very, very difficult dealing with

this local organization. But… Well, does that bring us, Brother David?

MR. REICHLE: Well…

MR. AUERBACH: 1986, I decided to get rid of my headaches, [Laughter] and step

down. I received the retirement age of 65.

MR. REICHLE: That might be a good place to stop. It may be an interesting sequel on

this to sometime in the future to maybe start with me who picked up from Stan in ’86,

and then Bob Van Hook who picked up in ’90. Then Steve Hildebrand who, I think,

picked up around ’92 or ’93, and maybe bring this forward to its currency. I’d be remiss

if I didn’t say a few things. I’ve known Stan now since 1963 actually, ’64 when I first

came here. And I’ve known him as a boss. I’ve known him as a mentor, and finally,

and most importantly, I’ve known him as a very good friend. I, and especially everyone

who worked for him, or knew him through the years, has appreciated his foresight and

strategic thinking in the environmental sciences. It resulted in him creating here the

groundwork for an environmental research program that was unequal to anywhere else

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in the country or the world. The irony is, it occurred at a laboratory that is a DOE

laboratory when DOE is not the primary environmental agency in Washington. So, it

required in its success, not only the support of DOE, because DOE has some very

important and serious environmental issues, but it required the support of a number of

different federal agencies.

MR. AUERBACH: It did.

MR. REICHLE: We mentioned NSF, EPA, Forest Service, Interior, NASA, through the

years, all of this stuff. It was important to a lot of these agencies through a lot of the

people that had work here in later years. One of the more important contributions I

think is the new generation of ecologists which populated the universities and federal

agencies, many of which came from our program.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

MR. REICHLE: A very important legacy. Stan was instrumental in developing the field

of radioecology that we talked about, understanding the use of radiotracers to measure

ecological processes. He developed the first mathematical systems ecology program

in the country dealing with modeling of ecological systems, and really made his mark in

the division by creating this field experimental research unit which looked at

ecosystems. No one in the country was dealing with complex challenges of how do

you look at entire ecosystems in the natural environment. Through the years, I think it

enabled an important bit of science to occur which was taking site specific

measurements and being able to aggregate and interpret them on an increasingly

larger scale in space and time.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

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MR. REICHLE: Where the questions were being asked.

MR. AUERBACH: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: How do you do soil samples and interpret that to 20, 50 year changes

in soil chemistry, as a result of the acid rain? Which led us in the regional landscape,

and eventually global ecological issues. In each case, this division is out on the front

with the best institutions in the country. Stan was a hard boss. He was demanding,

challenging of people. I worked for him and he chose very active people. I think folks

respected him for the fact that he never asked them to do any more than he would be

willing to do himself. It’s easy to work hard for someone who’s working just as hard as

you are. I found he had another interesting characteristic. He may have felt like he was

under scrutiny if Al Weinberg was asking hard questions, but we felt we had hard

questions from you. But I did find out if you came to Stan with an idea, and he said,

“No,” that wasn’t the last discussion of the topic. If he felt very strongly that you were

right, or had a good argument, you learned that you better go back and get your facts

in order and make a better argument, and come back in again, and he’d give you a

second hearing. If he said, “Maybe,” you were on your way.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: But he never said, “Yes,” unless he was sure that he could give you

the support that the yes would then guarantee. If he said, “Yes,” he was right there

behind you all the way. Developed some fierce loyalty of people, to him. He drove

some people out of here.

MR. AUERBACH: Oh yeah.

MR. REICHLE: Which is good, probably.

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MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: But there are some people who weathered the challenges with

environments through the years, and we always used to joke that if you worked for 10

or 20 years for Stan, you were ready for the politics of ORNL.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: And if you looked back, I was one of the products.

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: Bob Van Hook…

MR. AUERBACH: Yeah.

MR. REICHLE: …who became executive, deputy director of the Laboratory and head

of the Y-12 plant. Frank Harris who is deputy director of the Laboratory…

[Break in audio, video continues]

MR. REICHLE: …director of Health Sciences Research Division.

MR. AUERBACH: Steve Stow is the chief of ethics.

MR. REICHLE: I have to apologize as I was jumping up. It’s probably picking that up

on the screen. It’s hard to give an audio history here with all your friends that you

haven’t seen in years, walking by making faces.

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: But I’ve been acquiring manuscripts and papers [inaudible 1:07:01].

MR. AUERBACH: [Laughter]

MR. REICHLE: So it’s been a wonderful work experience, and Stan, I think is certainly

a legacy both in science programs here, facilities here, a generation or two of scientists

who’ve changed the face of American ecology, and a solid core of people in leadership

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for the next generation here at the Laboratory. I’d probably look at the legacy we’ll

leave, I think, the most important legacy is people who were mentored and supported

because they have the values that you appreciate or share with them, and they’re the

ones that will maintain the good battle, the good fight, and keep the values, and build

the program to the future [inaudible 1:07:59] I think. That maybe your enduring legacy,

I hope I shared a little bit of that to the generations of scientists that are following in

your footsteps.

MR. AUERBACH: Well, thank you David. I think you do yourself somewhat of an

injustice. A lot of times you were in there and pushing at me, and making me rethink

what I was thinking, and finally taking your advice, which turned out to be excellent,

and brought to the advantage of both of us. I don’t think I, I can’t accept all of that as

my own.

[End of Interview]

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