The story
The unit
Strontium-90 is a fission product with a half-life of about twenty-eight years that behaves chemically like calcium: when it falls on grass and the grass is eaten and the milk is drunk, it goes where calcium goes and stays there, emitting inside the bone for the rest of the life it is in. The Commission's report of July 1954 defines the unit for it, adds that one unit is about a thousandth of the permissible body burden for an adult, and calculates the dose for an infant, because a growing skeleton is built from whatever is in the food supply now. Finding out how much of it was already in people required bone. That is the subject of this book.
Where the name came from
Project Gabriel began in 1949 with a question about war: how many atomic weapons could be detonated before the fallout became a long-range hazard to a continent. In the summer of 1953 the Rand Corporation, under contract, convened a conference to review Gabriel, and the worldwide programme to measure strontium in the living and the dead came out of it under a new name. The Commission's General Advisory Committee took Sunshine up at its thirty-sixth meeting in August 1953. Its minutes are the deleted version, the first eleven pages gone. On the last surviving page, in a parenthesis, is the suggestion about where bone could practically be found.
Who wrote what, and to whom
The middle of the book is the Commission writing to Congress and to itself. In October 1953 the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy asked for the status of Gabriel; the Division answered in five pages that name the three laboratories doing the assays, at Chicago, at Columbia and in the Commission's own New York office. The July 1954 report is the spine of the volume: it states on its second page that keeping the worldwide assay secret had limited what could be obtained from abroad, and its appendix tables the samples, milk from the Chicago milkshed, cheese from six countries, and the human material by place and age. After it come three memoranda a Commissioner wrote in 1956 and 1957, one directing that the human work be encouraged, and five papers of 1958 in which the staff try to say who runs Sunshine and conclude that three offices do and none is in charge.
The conference
On 18 January 1955 the Division convened a classified Biophysics Conference in Room 1201 of a Washington office building. The stenographic transcript runs to 196 pages; fourteen leaves are printed here, in which the men running the programme describe, to each other, the arrangements for obtaining samples and the reasons they could not be described to anyone else.
