Attachment 6

                    THE UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
                  School of Medicine and Denistry
                           P.O. Box 287
                        Crittenden Station
                         ROCHESTER 7, N.Y.

                                                February 12, 1948
Mr. Brewer F. Boardman, Chief
Technical Information Division
Field Operations
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Dear Mr. Boardman:

     Thank you for your letter of February 4, on the subject of
declassifying Chapter XVI.

     I would like to advance the argument that Chapter XVI does not
report experiments with humans, and should never have been
classified on this basis in the first place.

     Examining Chapter XVI shows that there are 5 major parts to
the chapter.

     1)   A review of the literature is presented in which the
     clinical use of uranium as a drug in the treatment of disease
     in the years 1874 to 1930 is described.  All of these reports
     are in the medical literature and all antedate the Manhattan
     Project.

     2)   An historical description is included next of the
     selection of 150/u g U/m3 as a temporary maximum allowable
     concentration.

     3)   Some of the factors known to be important is exposures to
     dusts are presented and their influence indicated.

     4)   Reports are made in considerable detail of two accidents
     in which workers were exposed to flood concentrations of
     uranium hexafluoride.  Case reports are included, both of
     fatal and of non-fatal cases.

     5)   A careful outline is presented of the progress of medical
     observations conducted by the medical branch on workers in
     laboratories and plants in which chronic exposures to uranium
     compounds were possible.  The description included pre-
     employment examinations, periodic health check-ups with
     laboratory procedures.  A special program of industrial
     hygiene was set up at 4 selected sites: a) a large laboratory,
     b) a small uranium processing plant, c) a large ore and
     uranium processing plant, and d) a large uranium processing
     plant.  In addition, 2 programs of special examinations were
     carried out; one on 10 men working in a UF6 plant, and the
     other on 31 men with possible exposures to UO3, UO4, and
     UC14.

Mr. Brewer F. Boardman          -2-             February 12, 1948

     I wish to submit the argument that none of this material is
human experimentation unless you would class measuring a man's
height or recording his weight as human experimentation.  I
recommend that Chapter XVI be declassified for inclusion in our
first Pharmacology Volume, because it illustrates the care with
which the medical supervisory programs were instituted and carried
out.  In this way, one of the uses is indicated of the data grained
from animal experimentation.

                         Yours truly,


                         /s/ Harold C. Hodge

                         Harold C. Hodge
                         Chief Pharmacologist

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