year. As I say they were distributed among hospitals treating fifty to a
hundred patients a year. So that was myfirst objective in going. I didn't want
to be the head of this, but I wanted to see it created. To make a long story
short, and to pass overa lot of political shenanigans, that has come to pass
and there now is something called the Joint Center for Radiation Therapy in
the Longwood Avenuearea. It may be the largest department of radiation
therapy in the United States. They treat something like four thousand
patients a year. Certainly far more than three thousand. I regard that as my
chief contribution in this field. Then the other thing was to create a
laboratory of radiological sciences, and I think I did the right thing there by
establishing groups for diagnosis, for therapy, for nuclear medicine, and for
my own workin biology. Each group wasresponsible foritself; they were not
under me as a laboratory director. My own experimental work, in
collaboration with Dr. Roger Melvold, confirmed that previously done with
Dr. Bailey, that there were not any transmissible x-ray induced mutationsin
the mouse histocompatibilty system. I should also add that this work led me

to have a general interest in genetics work at the Medical School. Harvard at
that time did not have a department devoted to medical genetics. Instead

there was established at that time a loose confederation of workers from
several departments in several hospitals called the Center for Human

Genetics, of which I served as the initial Director for some years.
[4. Biology and Physics]
Kohn's Edited Insert: A project that took a great deal of my time end energy

wa

NN,

during the period of 1975-1979, was the work of the National Academyof
Science Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems. There were

about a half-dozen people on the Committee and this book is the
Committee's report, issued in 1980.

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