NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSE CHICAGO 31, Y¥ ILLINOIS a AS JHE MEDICAL SCHOOL Wann Memonmtat Buricing 303 &. Cricaco Avs. October 27, 1953 Mr. Ernest Allen Division of Research Grants National Institutes of Public Health Bethesda, Maryland Dear Mr. Allen: Since the proposal for the Chronic Primate Program (which, as you know, wae passed unanimously through our committee) contained little background on the thinking raticnale behind the various aspects of it, I thought you might weleoms some additional information on this matter. With the atomic suomarine a reality, the atomic powered airplane probably near at hand and with the realization that we have very limited information on chronic radiation effects on man, then one is hard pressed to extrapolate from the amount available on the mouse and rat and apply it to man. Although the Commission who worked up the hwnan data on the two bombed Japanese cities has done a noble job, the rapid dispersion of the Japanese population and the tremendous difficulty of maintaining controlled observations makes even more precarious our predictability of radiation data to inane It thus becomes obvious in a society which does not readily accept experimentation on man that one must have a large number of well-controlled experiments on the higher primates. Such chronic radiation studies on primates are thoroughly practical and there are competent, interested groups in this country who are willing to undertake such long-term experiments (we now have a list of 12 university centers who have expressed such an interest). It occurred to our committee that since such long-term experiments on the monkey should extend over a 20-year period, then in order to extract a maximof data from an expensive project we could enlarge the control series by perhaps 50° at a small percentile increase in total costs and use these control animals for gerontolorical studies and for observations in the realm of social psychology. By thus setting up a project which incorporates radioblology, peron%, tolory and social psycholery, it is obvious that a wider rance of scientific @ observers could be induced into the project and thus forestall any likeliSJ hood that should one particular group be unproductive that all proups would be unproductive. It foes without saying that any project is just