SESSION | . 25 Later Dr. Warren left for greener pastures and Dr, Dunham and Dr. Wolfe directed our activities, They also wanted answers—yesterday~—and we have continued to try to provide them as best we can, A few months ago I decided that it would be wise to change direction a bit and give up some administrative responsibilities, Thus, inthe next few years Ll hops to be able to write down some of the observations and conclusions in the way of answers to the questions which have been asked over the years. . ROOT: I'm Lin Root and I come to the Interdisciplinary Conference by an undisciplined and circuitous route, [ started a» « biochemist, did moat of my work at the College of Vhysicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, took a New York State cxamination and found myself in charge of research for the Paychistric Institute of the Manhattan State Hospitals. Biochemistry at the time was both primitive and cleistered—no far-flung conferences in exotic places, Alter several years of quantitative studies of the arterial blood of dementia praecox patients and schizophrenics, to the amused baffle. ment of my paychiatric colleagues, [ felt the need to get away from my ivory tower and to go where the action was, So I jeined Will Beebe's expedition to the Galapagos Islands and the Sargasso Sez, with the aim of making comparative studies on the blood of birds and fieh. After this I became Science and Medical editor of Time maxarine and then moved into feature writirg for national magazines, In the early fifties when atcmic reactors were still very hush-hush in the U.S.,a series of lucky breaks gave me several scoops on foreign atomic energy stories—a sort of chain reaction that culminated in the inside story of the Soviet nuclear situation just before the first Geneva Atoms-for- Peace Conference in 1955, This was after the 1953 Soviet thermonuclear detonation, and our big 1954 one at Bikini, [n the last few years | have been systematically studying the long, or I should say intermediate, range effects of the 1954 test in every country I've been in. You can trace them in international relations, in political alignments, in the attitudes of youth, in the credibility gap, in practically every aspect of life. People are not aware of how much our whole culture has been affected by this event. I think a carcful study of this precusor should provide iinportant clues to the long-range biomedical and psychological effects of nuclear war.