The Wonderful Pile

General Leslie Groves, Grand Panjandrum of military atomics, made a minor concession to the cause of science. The Oak Ridge Laboratory, he said last week, was working on an experimental plant for producing atomic power. It should be finished in a year.

But many scientists, though interested in atomic power, are more interested in the radioactive materials from the Oak Ridge chain-reacting pile. These promise a scientific revolution.

The pile, a rather simple device, consists of uranium rods stuck through a large mass of graphite. Some uranium atoms--those with an atomic weight of 235--split in two, producing energy and shooting out neutrons, which are subatomic particles with zero electric charge. These are the lifeblood of the pile.

Swarming through the pile in billions of billions, these neutrons stir up a storm of unrest among the atoms of every element in it. Some are turned into atoms of different chemical elements, some into different isotopes of the same element. Nearly all are "hot," shooting out rays and energy. Every element is made radioactive.

Atomic Doodling. So far, only a few scientists connected with the Manhattan Project have been allowed to experiment freely with the pile's products. But outsiders, letting their imaginations soar, have dreamed up many uses: one possibility, a radioactive lamp that might glow for months or years.

Some substances in the pile" give off gamma rays (X rays). Scientists see no reason why they should not be used to take pictures of infected teeth or flaws in steel castings.

Seaborg Tells. Until recently, atomic doodlers had little real information. But last week, Glenn T. Seaborg, codiscoverer of plutonium, and leading chemist of the Manhattan Project, released a gob of it. Said Seaborg: "It is not at all out of the question that the greatest gains to humanity from the atomic energy development will result from the widespread use of tracers. . . ."

By "tracers" Seaborg meant radioactive tags attached to chemical elements. Radioactive carbon, for instance, follows ordinary carbon through the most complicated chemical reactions, and its progress can be traced by its radioactive effects. Thus if an infinitesimal part of the carbon in sugar is made radioactive and fed to a human being, physiologists can follow it through the digestive tract, into the blood, the muscles, and out through the lungs as carbon dioxide.

Every element and compound can be tagged in this way. Within a few years, tracers should be: 1) marking the progress of raw materials through industrial processes, 2) "banding" bacteria as if they were robins, 3) even following the motion of water deep underground.

Medicine, too, said Seaborg, can use the magic pile, both for studying diseases and for curing them. Radioactive iodine, for instance, follows ordinary iodine through the human body. Its rate of accumulation in the thyroid gland (shown by holding a radiation counter near the throat) diagnoses accurately the condition of the gland in goiter and related diseases (see MEDICINE).

All this and more could be forecast, but so far, the Manhattan Project is grimly guarding its piles, and burying their products underground.

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