Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited: The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation

HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI REVISITED: THE ATOMIC BOMB CASUALTY COMMISSION AND THE RADIATION EFFECTS RESEARCH FOUNDATION FRANK W. PUTNAM* That the Presidential Directive instruct the National Academy of Sciences —National Research Council—to undertake a long range, continuing study of the biological and medical effects of the atomic bomb in man.—Approved, Harry S. Truman, November 26, 1946. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: August 1945 Introduction.—The longest, most comprehensive epidemiological and genetic study ever undertaken is the still ongoing investigation of the late effects on health of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following a letter from James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, that was approved as a directive by President Harry S. Truman on November 26, 1946 [1-3], this binational study was initiated in 1947 by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with the establishment of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC); it still continues under the successor to ABCC, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), which was established in 1975. From the beginning it has been a cooperative study by the Americans and Japanese, but this was only formalized by the founding of RERF, which is funded equally by Japan and the United States. For more than 45 years, ABCC and RERF have monitored the health of the survivors and their children in an evolving program emphasizing parallel studies of somatic cell and genetic effects. More than The author thanks Seymour Jablon, Gilbert W. Beebe, Charles W. Edington, Howard B. Hamilton, James V. Neel, and William J. Schull for careful review of the manuscript and for many helpful suggestions, and Seymour Abrahamson for supplying reports and data. *Professor emeritus of molecular biology and biochemistry, Department of Biology, Indiana University, Jordan Hall 142, Bloomington, Indiana 47405.© 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/94/3704-0883$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 37, 4 ¦ Summer 1994 515 1,500 scientific, medical, and technical articles have been published on the findings; these provide the most extensive database available for estimating the overall risks of late radiation effects in man and are the primary basis for world standards for radiation protection [3]. Yet the existence and significance of this study is little known to the biomedical world and hardly at all to the public. This article is not the tale of the two cities at the time of the bombing; that is well told in many books, such as the famous first one by John Hersey [4] and the psychoanalytic study by Lifton [5], and also in thousands of scientific, medical, and popular reports in many languages. Rather, this is a brief perspective on perhaps the most important genetic and epidemiological study ever undertaken, one whose end is not yet in sight. My account is not based on actual participation in the study; rather, it reflects observations made during my tenure as Chairman of the Assembly of Life Sciences of the National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences (NRC-NAS), from 1977-1981 (through which U.S. participation in RERF is administered), and my membership on the Board of Directors of RERF from 1982-1987. The Bombings and the Resultant Death, Destruction, and Chaos.—In the summer of 1945, a tragic drama was evolving that would forever change the world. On August 6 a B29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off from the island of Tinian with its fateful cargo, an untested uranium-235 bomb code-named Little Boy. At 8: 15 a.m. the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima City and exploded at an altitude of 580 meters (the burst point or epicenter), with a yield equivalent to about 15 kilotons of TNT. Some 40,000 buildings or 80 percent of the total were destroyed. About one-third of the civilians in the city died, many immediately from blast and burn, others in the next few months from the radiation they had received. One Japanese estimate of civilian deaths in Hiroshima is about 78,000; the estimate is about 24,000 in Nagasaki, where on August 9 a plutonium-239 bomb (code-named Fat Man), with a yield of 21 kilotons was dropped [6]. However, these figures exclude deaths among the military personnel and also...