[ RadSafe ] News article about Ron Kathren

[Conklin, Al]

Below is a news article about Ron Kathren from Sunday's Tri-City Herald. I
like giving him a bad time about being old enough to have actually seen
Radithor on a pharmacist's shelf. Anyway, a great story about a great guy
and a great Health Physicist.

High-powered collection 
This story was published Sunday, March 27th, 2005
By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer 
As a Los Angeles high school student, Ron Kathren would get up at 4 or 5
a.m. and go outside to see the flash in the eastern sky from nuclear weapons
tests in Nevada. 
It was perhaps a sign that Kathren's career would be devoted to the art and
science of radiation protection. And his hobby would be collecting the books
and equipment that trace the history of the new science of radiology,
starting in the days when radiation seemed magical. 
Go to the Smithsonian's Museum of American History and you'll see five items
loaned by Kathren on display, including a radiation sign from the Hanford
nuclear reservation and a dosimeter from the 1940s. 
Now he's in the process of breaking up the rest of his collection, donating
books valued at $250,000 to Washington State University and other items to a
nuclear-themed museum in Nevada and a nonprofit organization in Tennessee.
 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 		
The collection, which ranges from early X-ray equipment to patent medicines
laced with radium, reflects an era when the world was in love with the
possibilities of radiation. 
Before the collection is dispersed, some of the items are on display in the
glass cases along the main hallway of the Consolidated Information Center at
Washington State University Tri-Cities in Richland. 
They range from a Revigator, a radium-lined jug good for making a
radioactive tonic, to the self-published laboratory notes of the Boston
dentist whose experiments on guinea pigs were the first to show that X-rays
could kill animals in 1902. 
"People like that did extraordinary things, and very quietly, that really
intrigued me," Kathren said. 
Kathren, who started working at Hanford in 1967 managing the external dose
evaluation program, is now a professor emeritus at the College of Pharmacy
at WSU Tri-Cities. 
His career is marked by firsts. He's the first, and only, health physicist
to receive all three major awards from the Health Physics Society. He's also
the first professor emeritus for WSU Tri-Cities. 
In 1959, only a few years before he started his radiological history
collecting, he helped draft Los Angeles' first regulations for X-rays. 
X-rays, an unknown form of radiation, were discovered in 1895 and almost
immediately captured the public's fancy. 
Within a year of the discovery of X-rays, five books had been published on
the subject in English, all of which are in Kathren's collection. It wasn't
just doctors and scientists who were interested in the subject -- members of
the general public bought copies of Something About X-Rays for Everybody. 
It seemed magical to see inside the body, and people believed if you
couldn't see, taste or smell it, it obviously must not be harmful, Kathren
said. X-ray baths were advocated as a cure for criminal tendencies, among
other benefits. 
At one time, the New Jersey Legislature came within one vote of banning
X-rays from opera glasses, Kathren said. 
But after Marie Curie separated enough radium to verify it as a new element,
public interest shifted to radium. 
"It was a panacea," Kathren said. Radium just sat there and gave off energy,
so surely it would be energizing for health. 
It was used to treat more than 100 conditions, including baldness. 
People could get their dose of radium, advertised as "water's lost element,"
from letting water stand overnight in their Revigator, or by buying a cone
laced with yellow uranium ore to treat their water. 
In the 1920s and '30s, radium was included in the patent medicine Radithor,
which killed a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist who took several bottles a
day. More people might have been harmed, but few could afford it. 
"Radiation was a very expensive commodity in the early days," Kathren said. 
Working for the Los Angeles City Health Department early in his career,
Kathren came upon a drug store that still had a few dozen bottles of
Radithor. He still regrets not confiscating the bottles for the collection
he would build. Instead, he told the pharmacist to dump them down the drain,
an accepted disposal method at the time. 
Radium's glow when mixed with a phosphorescent also made it popular.
Kathren's collection includes buttons for women's blouses and light pulls
that were easy to find in the dark. 
As a boy of about 6, Kathren was fascinated with clocks and watches painted
with radium. He'd take them into a walk-in closet and conduct experiments,
observing how the light output would diminish. 
It was the fate of the young women, many recent immigrants, who painted
those clock and watch dials that began to change public opinion about the
safety of radiation. 
Kathren has photos from the 1920s showing women sitting in rows of school
desks in unventilated classrooms, painting radiological material onto the
faces of clocks and watches. 
They would twirl the tips of their paint brushes in their mouths to get a
fine point for the delicate work. Some would spread the radium on their skin
and hair to sparkle when they went out at night. 
About 30 percent developed bone cancer. 
As a health physicist, Kathren was fascinated by the fact that no women who
received less than a certain dose developed bone cancer. That shows there is
a threshold for the amount that causes harm, he said. 
Why only some of the women who received a high dose developed cancer
remained a mystery for much of Kathren's career. Now scientists know that
people have to be genetically programmed to be harmed, he said. 
Kathren is donating some of his collection to the new Atomic Testing Museum
in Las Vegas. 
Many of his X-ray items, including early X-ray tubes and devices for
measuring radiation treatment doses, will become part of the collection at
the nonprofit Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Tennessee. Some of the
items already donated can be seen at www.orau.org/ptp/museumdirectory.htm
<www.orau.org/ptp/museumdirectory.htm> . 
His 3,400 books are going to WSU. His interest and donations were
instrumental in starting the university's Special Library Collection
Development Project with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And his
generosity is leading to more donations throughout the university system,
said LoAnn Ayers of the WSU Tri-Cities. 
Kathren's collection is so large that the university is accepting books in
batches as it has time to catalog them. The collection covers radiation
protection and biology and the development of the atomic bomb. 
Rare or fragile books, such as first editions by Curie, will be housed in a
climate-controlled archival wing in Pullman, but much of the collection is
available already for public use at WSU Tri-Cities. 
It was a sacrifice to donate his book collection on radiological science and
the development of the atomic bomb. Kathren remains active in retirement,
including serving on a National Academies Committee on the health effects of
depleted uranium. 
"I still come over to use these books," he said. While he may not have read
them all, "I've leafed through every one," he said. 
He's hoping his donation to the WSU library will inspire others to donate
books and other historical information. For more information on the Special
Library Collection Development Project, call Joseph Judy at 372-7000. 
n Reporter Annette Cary can be reached at 582-1533 or via e-mail at
acary at tri-cityherald.com. 


Allen W. Conklin
Supervising Health Physicist
Air Emissions & Defense Waste Section
Office of Radiation Protection
Department of Health
Building 5, 7171 Cleanwater Lane
New Market Center
Olympia WA  98504-7827
office (360) 236-3261
cell    (360) 239-1237
page  (360) 786-2975
> Public Health -- Always working for a healthier and safer Washington.
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