| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 |
Q: Were these studies all classified?
Ross: Not all of them, but many of them were. Those that were related to fallout, and to some extent those that were related to the effects of ionizing radiation, were classified initially. They're not classified now.
Q: Why were they classified initially?
Ross: This was the effect of the government that felt that such information might be disadvantageous to the interests of the military, to the Atomic Energy Commission, and possibly to the interests of the American citizen. That's the best explanation I can give.
Q: Was there discussion during this period of nuclear hazards and the question of nuclear safety?
Ross: Yes, there was, and our group was concerned about the implications of fallout in terms of hazards to the population. We were very concerned about the fact that following some of the detonations the cattle and sheep up in Utah developed certain illnesses which undoubtedly were attributable to fallout. Subsequently, there have been claims that humans living in that area were very disadvantaged by this and I think it was a legal determination that one of these women--her leukemia was caused by fallout. I'm not sure anybody could prove that, but I would also say that fallout in significant amounts is not really advantageous to the human being. I'm not sure it's all that disadvantageous in small amounts but it's enough to give people pause for thought.
Q: Were there also studies done on the areas surrounding developing nuclear plants?
Ross: No, we did not get into that. I tried to encourage this being done at the San Onofre nuclear power generator south of here, but the Southern California Edison Company and the engineers running it were profoundly disinterested. I'm sure that they believed that what people don't know won't worry them, but it would have been an ideal place to have done environmental studies on the hill where the effluent from the plant blows, and in the waters and the costal area around the plant. This could have been funded through various agencies but they didn't want any of that done, so it was never done, which was a lost opportunity. I really believe it would have been supportive of what they were doing, since the amounts of radiation released are small. Probably the most important influence that existed was consequent to the release of large volumes of water into the sea, which increased the ambient temperature in that area by two or three degrees, and allowed lobsters, and fish and other things to grow much bigger and much quicker than otherwise might have happened. I don't think there's been any information, as far as I know, showing abnormality of these animals, consequent to exposure to radiation.
[end of side one of tape five; beginning of side two]
Q: Dr. Ross, in 1969, you became chief of the Division of Hematology at UCLA. I was wondering if you could recount some of the events that occurred.
Ross: Actually, when I came to UCLA from Boston, I initiated some investigative endeavors which were done in collaboration with a research fellow I brought to UCLA, Dr. Michael Quastel, a Canadian born physician. Mike was a very bright fellow whose father was a distinguished biochemist. In the studies that I had done in Boston, it was apparent that acute inflammatory diseases and neoplastic diseases led to to an arrest in the maturation and the formation of red blood cells, and to some extent white blood cells. I thought it would be appropriate to try to continue this investigation using experimental animals, namely rats. We attempted to study erythropoiesis and what went wrong by inducing turpentine abscesses in rats, then giving them radioactive iron and finding out what happened in terms of their capacity to use iron to form hemoglobin. It turned out that the same thing was observed in rats. If we produced an acute inflammation process, it turns off the formation of erythrocytes and certain other formed blood elements. We were able to trace this and concluded that the blockage occurred in the phagocytic cells, which are known as macrophages. The macrophages ingested and destroyed old red cells but they were unable to transmit the broken down iron products to the erythropoietic cells which resulted in a decrease in the formation of new cells. In essence, we thought that this had accounted for the failure of people with these illnesses to make blood in an adequate fashion. That's about as far as we got in this research. Doctor Quastel subsequently went to Israel where he heads the nuclear medicine activity. I think probably the most distinguished one in Israel, but we didn't follow up with any more of those studies.
When I became chief of the Division of Hematology, my activities were primarily administrative and clinical and I did not do any more laboratory investigation. However, we had a training program which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, which was a very successful! During the duration of this grant, which existed prior to my involvement with it, in its total time up to the time I completed my relationship to it, we had trained around sixty people in the field of hematology and something like three-quarters of them held high academic level jobs in hematologic investigation and clinical hematology! It was really a very distinguished program!! It was a privilege for me to come into the program and to be able to continue and expand it! At one point, at UCLA, the hematology division had responsibility for something like fifty percent of all the patients in the hospital. These patients had hematological related diseases. Our outpatient clinics were very large and had large numbers of patients. We had a very active teaching program and the clinical investigation that was done was fairly effective. This was done by research fellows and assistant professors. I wouldn't say that it was world shaking but it was good investigative endeavor in relationship to platelet function and to abnormalities of the leukocytes.
Then I reached the age at which the university mandated retirement from administrative responsibilities, which is at age sixty-five years. So I ceased being head of the division and this was turned over to Dr. Martin Cline who changed completely the emphasis of the educational and research activities. He was primarily interested in oncology and the treatment of solid tumors and he didn't have much sympathy or time for morphological or cytological education. This was pretty much all abandoned in the department and the main emphasis became the management of patients who had neoplastic disease and in bone marrow transplantation.
I was not at all enthusiastic about bone marrow transplantation. I've never participated in this endeavor. I'm not at all sure that this is a tremendously effective way to treat most hematologic diseases, but, again, that's just my opinion. Others have different ones, so that's fine.
The man that he put in charge of the transplant program, Dr. Robert Peter Gale, at the time of the Chernobyl accident, went to Armand Hammer, who's a consultant to the Soviet Union as well as the United States, and got Dr. Hammer to offer Dr. Gale's services to the Soviet Union. So he went over there and transplanted bone marrow and fetal liver into some twenty-nine of the patients who were victims of Chernobyl. The last I had heard, something like twenty-three or twenty-four of these subjects had died. I don't think the bone marrow transplants helped them very much.
That was my activity as chief of hematology. We were primarily engaged in clinical care of large numbers of private and clinic patients, both inpatient and outpatient, and the education of fellows and medical students. We ran the course in what was called the pathophysiology of disease. It's a new name for the department of clinical pathology. This course was very effective in orienting students to the field of hematology, and I'm very gratified that many of the students that I had in this course now express appreciation of their hematologic education! At the time they took the course they were cursing me for giving them the hardest course and the worst examinations they ever had had. I gave open book. I told them they could bring anything they wanted to the examination and one day a guy walked in with a footlocker full of books and notes and every other thing he could think of related to the [?]. If they'd been smart, they'd have realized that if they didn't know it they weren't going to find out then from books during the exam, but many of them would come in with indexes to all the pages of their hooks and they learned a hell of a lot just making the indexes as well as otherwise. Subsequently, quite a few of these students have gone into the field of hematology. I've seen them around the country and they come up to me and say, "We cursed you but we thank you now," which is very gratifying!
Q: The change that came to the department with Martin Cline's chairmanship, did this in any way mark a change from a morphological approach to hematology towards ones that face more on perhaps molecular, biological emphasis?
Ross: Yes, it certainly did, and this is a trend which I think is occurring all over the world. Cytology, and morphology, serve as a very useful basis and on this basis subsequently has been built the concept of genetics, molecular biology, molecular physics, and approaches to understand more fully the mechanisms of disease, particularly hematologic disease. It's very gratifying to see that now characterizations of oncogenes and other influences on the etiology of neoplastic disease have occurred. This is tremendously important! But I still feel it is unfortunate that the young hematologist today really doesn't know much about the morphology of cells. He couldn't recognize the difference between an acute leukemia and maybe an infectious mononucleosis, which from a clinical standpoint is tremendously important.
Q: Did this change also bring about changes in research styles, sources of funding, sources of students, and the development of different lab practices?
Ross: It certainly eventuated in a difference in teaching approaches. The emphasis that I had on clinical, morphological, and cytological aspects of hematological disease has now been quite completely abandoned. The performance of bone marrow studies is now completely left to the pathology department. The laboratories which in the past were usually used for these studies have been converted to laboratories for cell culture and for molecular biology, which certainly is very important. I'm afraid I must say that in my opinion, the overwhelming dedication to these more fundamental aspects of the etiology of disease has led to depreciation in the value and the virtue of intimate, personal care of sick people. I don't believe that the current physicians dedicate as much concern to trying to manage the emotional and the psychological and the physical distress of people who are sick. Yet, that is, in my opinion, the fundamental role of the physician. And when he begins to forget this, he no longer is filling the role of physician. He becomes like a Ph.D. who's involved in things other than patient care. I see this happening not only in relationship to hematology but in other specialties too. When the young physician is being oriented in the fundamental direction, I'm afraid it carries over into his subsequent practice when he becomes a practitioner. Both fundamental research and good practical clinical hematology is important!!!
The instrumentation has been vastly changed. Instead of using just microscopes, now chemical probes and other approaches are used which were not around and not used when I was working in hematological research. There's nothing wrong with that. I think it has to be done. But clinical expertise must not be abandoned.
Q: Have the sources of funding changed?
Ross: The sources of funding have continued to be largely from governmental sources and the National Institutes of Health, particularly the National Cancer Institute and also the National Institute for Pulmonary and Blood Diseases, are the primary sources of funding.
On the other hand, the introduction of oncology has introduced research money from the tobacco industry which is trying to prove that tobacco smoking doesn't have anything to do with cancer. One of the members of our department now receives his primary funding in an attempt to prove this. I don't think he's going to succeed, but he gets a big chunk of money. The money from the State of California to support research is minuscule. They don't really expect to provide that. They expect the faculty to obtain that elsewhere.
I don't think there's much private money that goes into the support of hematology at UCLA, or elsewhere in the county any more.
Q: Has there been any push from the private sector in the direction of hematology?
Ross: You mean private industry?
Q: Private industry, pharmaceutical houses--
Ross: Not that I'm aware of. There might be, but I don't know about it.
Q: Has there been cooperation between the academic departments, the clinical departments, and pharmaceutical houses' research departments?
Ross: Some of the independent members of the Division of Hematology cooperate quite closely with some of the commercial aspects to the point where they have been accused of conflict of interest between the stock that they own, their obligations as a professor in the university, and their obligations to do, shall we say, unbiased research. I think that's most unfortunate.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add about the development of hematology at UCLA and your involvement in it?
Ross: I think it's following a normal progression which is being observed elsewhere in the country, with progression from cytology and morphology and anatomical pathology to genetics, molecular bio- chemistry, and other such fundamental approaches. I think that's a normal progression. I think that's very good. I just hope that the old time things don't be completely forgot. The education of medical students and house staff in the technical procedures of hematology I think has pretty much gone by now. There's no point in teaching a student how to do a hemoglobin analysis, or really I suppose to do a differential, if he's got good pathologists and technologists on whom he can rely. It wouldn't be gratifying to me personally, but other people look at it in a different way.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add at this time, Dr. Ross?
Ross: Well, I'd like to thank you very much for your endeavors. It's been a great pleasure to meet and talk with you for the last two days. I'm amazed at your persistence and your perseverance, your patience, and your pertinacity. I admire you very much for all the work that you did before you got here and your patience with all the hot air you've put up with since you got here. I'll be interested to see what the hot air looks like in typescript!!
[End of interview]
| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 |