EARLY STUDIES J. N. Stannard University of Rochester, Rochester INTRODUCTIO! The organizers of this symposium anticipated that it would attract a number of younger radiation ecologists who might benefit from, perhaps even enjoy, a short discussion of the early beginnings of biomedical work on plutonium. It was originally planned that this paper would review the early laboratory studies and would be followed by a similar review of field tests and field studies. The speaker who was to present this aspect could not be present but this fact was not known in time to modify the substance cf the present paper. Therefore, the title should be read as “Early Laboratory Studies." It does happen that the older field studies were reviewed in part, but not in any sense completely, in a chapter on "Plutonium in the Environment" which I prepared for the review volume, Uranium, Plutonium, and Transplutonic Elements (Hodges et al., 1973). I would be glad to try to provide copies of the pertinent sections to those interested. There are, of course, other and more exhaustive reviews of the field work but not many are in the open Literature (i.e., nongovernmental literature with broad distribution). The term "early" in the title above may be regarded as “early early" by many of you since it reaches back to the work done under the auspices of the Manhattan District during World War II beginning in 1943. It emphasizes the biomedi-~ cal work done during those years on through the 1950s and just into the 1960s under the aegis of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and counterpart agencies abroad. Much of it has been reviewed before (see, for example, Langham and Healy, 1973) but not in references generally available to members of this audience. Hence, I will proceed as if you were meeting the information for the first time, but with apologies to some of the old-timers also present here who know the story as well as I do or better. Some of you may be surprised at the amount and quality of the work done under great pressures of time and what would be regarded now as slow and cumbersome methodologies.