Attachment 1
          
                            COPY                 October 20, 1948

Dear Doctor Stone:

     The secrecy with which some of the work of the Atomic Energy
Commission has to be conducted creates special conditions for the
clinical aspects of its work in that the public is aware of this
necessity for secrecy and of the consequent difficulty of probing
into it.  This situation makes the Advisory Committee on Medical
and Biology concerned to a unique degree with the measure of
confidence it can place in the judgment of the clinicians and
medical scientists who carry on treatment of patients by means of
any substances or facilities provided by the A.E.C.  I think that
I do not misinterpret the opinion of the Advisory Committee in
saying that we agree with those who believe the x-ray treatment
of arthritic patients you have been giving patients is not
justified, and that they do not wish to collaborate in clinical
investigations with physicians in whose considered judgment they
do not have confidence.

     When you explain as in your letter to Dr. Warren of July 26
that the selection of patients, the administration of the
treatment, and the responsibility for it are not a part of the
Atomic Energy Commission's activities, but are activities of the
staff members of the University of California Hospital, acting in
their capacity as individual doctors, you apparently miss a point
to which I would like to draw your attention.  They point is that
you misunderstood the reasons for our concern.  Our view is that
we have no right to compromise with fears you have not allayed.

     This is a matter serious enough in my opinion to justify
some further comment.  In the first place past experience shows
that unfavorable views of new forms of treatment have not always
been right merely because they have been conservative.  Granted. 
But on the other hand, there is plenty of experience that shows
that some forms of therapy attract enthusiastic supports only to
be discarded later as unsafe or unjustified.  Neither of these
facts relieve the Advisory Committee from the duty of forming an
opinion of a procedure that you consider to be the responsibility
of the staff members of the University of California Hospital.

     Very obviously the Advisory Committee on Medicine and
Biology has no obligation to do more than decide what the persons
it considers to have good clinical judgment as a basis for its
recommendations to the A.E.C.  If this letter seems to you to go
beyond that obligation, please charge is against me personally as
unnecessary candor for I would prefer that charge to many other
causes for resentment.  If you are not quite aware of the fact
that your letter of July 26 B&M put you a long way toward losing
the Committee confidence I would not feel that I had treated you
as I would want to be

				1

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Archives and Records Office
Human Radiation Experiments:  Records Project 034412


Dr. Robert St. Stone          -2-            October 20, 1948 

treated, if I did not tell you so.  If that lone seems to you of
minor importance relative to you own freedom to treat patients as
you and your colleagues think best, then there is an honest
difference of opinion.  The Committee would feel, I think, that
it is a difference that will prevent such further developments
under your direction as depend upon our confidence in your
clinical judgment.  Under such circumstances you and I could
report the situation to Dean Smyth since the University of
California Hospital deserves an equally free and informed choice
of its course of action.

     I hope that conclusion on our side as well as yours will be
arrived at patiently and carefully with full comprehension of the
other's sense of responsibility and of the special circumstances
in which this responsibility takes on unusual importance.

                    Yours sincerely,


                    Alan Gregg, M.D., Chairman
                    Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine
                    U.S. Atomic Energy Commission



Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Archives and Records Office
Human Radiation Experiments:  Records Project 034413