McDuffie, Fritz

              ORAL HISTORY OF HAROLD FRITZ MCDUFFIE, JR., PH.D.
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 11, 2009
 
Dr. McDuffie: My name is Fritz McDuffie. My full name is Harold Fritz McDuffie, and I was a Jr. My father was a doctor. But the administrative people and the medical people all know me as Harold.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right.
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah. I can’t – I can’t get away from it.
Mr. McDaniel: But everybody else knows you as Fritz – 
Dr. McDuffie: Fritz. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, Mr. McDuffie, how old are you?
Dr. McDuffie: Well, I’m almost ninety-three. I’ll be ninety-three in April.
Mr. McDaniel: And today’s date is December the 11th, 2009.
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah. So it won’t – won’t be very long before I’m ninety-three, and I’m not planning on stopping on the way.
Mr. McDaniel: Very good. Why don’t you tell me about – how did you come to Oak Ridge?
Dr. McDuffie: Well, it’s interesting. Oak Ridge was the first opportunity I had to come back south. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia. My father was a doctor, and my mother had been a schoolteacher. They both were born in New Jersey, but we ended up in Atlanta. My Uncle Phil was already there, as a lawyer, and doing very well, and liked it in Atlanta. 
Mr. McDaniel: So your father was a physician – 
Dr. McDuffie: A doctor – 
Mr. McDaniel: Was a doctor. Did he have a private practice or – 
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah, private practice. At one time, he was on the Board of Examiners for the Medical Licensing Board that the doctors have to take before they can operate. I was – I went to Tenth Street School in Atlanta for my first six years. Then for junior high school, I went to O’Keefe Junior High School, which was located over near Georgia Tech. Then for high school, I went to the famous Boys High School of Atlanta, and it was a high – it was a school of high quality, high achievement, and good football teams. My brother Bob was one of their football players, captains. 
Mr. McDaniel: Did you – how many siblings did you have?
Dr. McDuffie: I had three siblings, and three of us are still alive. Bob died, interestingly enough, at the end of a downhill race, because he likes snow and skiing, and golf, after he retired. So he went downhill one day in a strenuous race, and stopped at the bottom, dropped his poles and collapsed, and that was all there was. I mean, he just went out as he wanted to go out, with a bang. I went to Boys High School, as I said, and I was not their best student. I was not the greasy-grind or the one who always had things on time, but I apparently learned something on the way. The Emory University Alumni had put up a scholarship as a prize, or several of them, for a competitive exam that any high school student in the state could take. I turned out to be number two of the state. I was a fraction of a point behind number one, who became one of my best friends.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right. 
Dr. McDuffie: So I was able to get from high school to college with some tuition pay, and I could live at home.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that, when you started college?
Dr. McDuffie: It was 1934 or ’33, ’34, and I graduated in 1938, and conditions were bad. I stayed on and got my Master’s in 1939. At that point, I was able to – I was happy to receive an offer from Princeton, New Jersey to come there and do my graduate work, which I did and got my degree in 1942. 
Mr. McDaniel: So you were in college during the Depression.
Dr. McDuffie: Yes. Then when I went to work, I was working in New York State, and up in the – I had rooms in a little village called Camillus, which is famous for their cutlery, their knives. That’s where I met Betty in the Methodist Church. We sang duets together, and we decided to make it a good idea, and got married up there. 
Mr. McDaniel: What year did you get married?
Dr. McDuffie: Oh, don’t tell me. I think we could – about to come on our 65th anniversary right now.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right.
Dr. McDuffie: Pretty soon.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you – so you graduated from Princeton – 
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah –
Mr. McDaniel: Then you went to – 
Dr. McDuffie: ’42 – 
Mr. McDaniel: And then you went to work. 
Dr. McDuffie: Then I went – actually, I took a – I was going to take a post-doctorate course, and I got admitted to Professor du Vigneaud’s Lab for Cornell University, Biochemistry Department. But it is located in New York Hospital in New York City. So I went there to work actually on insulin, but about a week after I came, an event occurred which changed my life: Pearl Harbor. So the next day, I was working on a project of determining the biochemical action of vesicants, like mustard gas. So we worked with mustard gas and its derivatives for a year and made a bunch of derivatives and purified them and sent them next door to the Rockefeller Institute where they were going to examine them for effects on various parts of the human life cycle. 
Mr. McDaniel: Well, let me ask you a question. What did you get your degree in?
Dr. McDuffie: In Physical Organic Chemistry, studying mechanisms of reaction and rates of reaction.
Mr. McDaniel: So a week after you started your new job – Pearl Harbor happened –
Dr. McDuffie: Work – working with Professor du Vigneaud.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah, Pearl Harbor occurred, Pearl Harbor. We went into an OSR&D, Office of Scientific Research & Development. We went into that for a year. After that, I was invited to go to Allied Chemical & Dye Corporation in their Patent Department and be a patent chemist. My roommate in Princeton had gone that route, and he’d had one year with them, and liked it. So I went there to see what I would get out of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Where was that located?
Dr. McDuffie: That was located in New York City, way down near Wall Street, where their offices were. The Patent Office was down there too. That was a nice job, and nice people to work with, but after I met Betty in Camillus, it seemed better for me to stay up there and not go back. So I did, but I stayed – worked in that research laboratory as a patent liaison chemist and as a research chemist. So I had two opportunities and two jobs during that time. We worked on some of the materials that go into the major polymers that are used. When I joined Allied, we had our work during the day, but we had the evenings off. I enrolled in New York University School of Law and then at night I did my lessons with NYU, which was located in Washington Square at the bottom of 5th Avenue. Where we lived on No. 12 5th Avenue, but it wasn’t a great – wasn’t a very high-class dump, but we had a room, Bob and I. Now – 
Mr. McDaniel: So you went to law school.
Dr. McDuffie: I went to law school for one year, so I got half of the total thing. Got all the basic courses and didn’t have to work on the particular courses that you get in the next year. All right, I worked with Allied till the end of the war, at which time they wanted to move the a laboratory down to Saltwater, Virginia, and we declined. But I got a position with Bristol Laboratories in Syracuse, and they were a big penicillin producer. I got a job as an assistant to the research director, Dr. Minardi, who was a very fine man to work with. The whole organization was a fine man. They had – they imported a consultant who was a statistician and that was one of the most influential things that ever happened to me, was to meet Professor Brumbaugh, and to learn about how you use statistics to accomplish industrial experimentation goals. I learned a whole lot with him, and worked with another fellow, an organic chemist from Illinois, Doug Cooper. We made a penicillin derivative that retained a critical box-shaped structure which is called – not a – an internal circle. Ordinarily you can’t do – make anything out of penicillin without disrupting that circle and ruining its potency. So we made one that didn’t do that, but it also didn’t do any good when we put it in the sheep to see if it would act like a depot product. So that was that. About 1949, the penicillin production people were getting squeezed more and more by the rapid downward price of penicillin, and the competition. I went down to American Chemical Society Convention which was being held on the Jersey coast, in New Jersey. There, I met an old friend from Allied Chemical, Dr. D. C. Bardwell, who had designed some basic research laboratories for Allied Chemical Corporation in Morristown. So he knew me and knew about me. He was there with John Swartout and they were interviewing. So I talked with them about coming south to Oak Ridge and that sounded like a pretty good deal. Dr. Bardwell was head of the Chemistry Division. He had worked on radium and worked on the synthesis of ammonia with Allied. John Swartout had been working on plutonium chemistry in Chicago with a group there and was the one who developed the plutonium production process that was later used at Hanford. So he was riding high. So they interviewed me, and everything stopped and disappeared for a while, until one day I got a call to say, “Your clearance has finally come through.” So I had my security clearance, and I got my things arranged so that I could start there on April 1, 1950.
Mr. McDaniel: In Oak Ridge – 
Dr. McDuffie: In Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, let me ask you a question. When they were doing your security clearance, did you have relatives or friends call and – 
Dr. McDuffie: No, I didn’t. I didn’t hear a word out of them. I don’t know. They must have been anxious to get people. I think at that time, Carbide ��� that’s Carbide who ran the lab – Carbide was ramping up with people because the whole country was ramping up in anticipation of what the Russians were doing. That was a time when we started some big programs on the thermonuclear materials, because of the fear of the Russians and the knowledge of what they had already done.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you came here April 1, 1950.
Dr. McDuffie: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Now was your – did you have a family then or – I mean, you’re married. But did you – 
Dr. McDuffie: I was married and I had Kurt. He was, I don’t know, four or five years old. I had David on the way, almost here. David finally arrived in September of that year. He is with us now, a few miles away. Then later on, we had Mark. We unfortunately lost Mark along the way, but then we had another one, Greg, who is with us today and works in Y-12 and lives in Clinton.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay.
Dr. McDuffie: And I have two sons of Greg, Justin and Jeremy, who are in school at middle school and high school at Webb School on the edge of Knoxville. They live with their mother, Tammy, who is one of the important people with DOE. She has a nice house near Webb, and they spend time with her and they spend time with Greg and his new family in Clinton. If you would like me to talk more about my personal things and my introduction to Oak Ridge, I’ll do that now.
Mr. McDaniel: That sounds good. Tell you what. Let’s take a quick break – 
Dr. McDuffie: All right.
Mr. McDaniel: Real quick, so we can get rolling.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: We’re rolling again. Now, we’ll – yeah, let’s talk a little bit about your introduction to Oak Ridge, and your personal life in Oak Ridge.
Dr. McDuffie: Now, we have to talk about the company a little bit, because I was working for them. They put me into a – as soon as I arrived, they put me into an office with a desk, and another desk right back to it. On that desk was Alexander MacIntosh, who was an architect and well known in the city at that time. I was told to bide my time until we had housing, so that’s what I was doing, and living in one of the dormitory rooms in what was one of the halls that was down near the laboratory. 
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now, was Betty with – so Betty wasn’t with you then.
Dr. McDuffie: Betty was still at home in Atlanta with my mother and my sister, waiting to come up – until we should get the signal.
Mr. McDaniel: Once you get everything settled.
Dr. McDuffie: So it wasn’t long before we had the signal, and Betty and Kurt came up on the train from Atlanta to Knoxville. I went in to meet them and bring them home. They were surprised and we were – I mean, we were all surprised at how things were. But they had called me on the phone and said, “We have a house that you might want to look at.” It’s – and MacIntosh back, says, “Find out where it is. Find out where it is.” So I said, “Just where is it? I don’t know Oak Ridge.” They said, “Well, it’s up on a place called Ogden Circle.” I said, “Mac, should I look at it or not?” He said, “At that location, don’t look at it, just take it and run.” 
Mr. McDaniel: And why would that be? Why would Ogden Circle be – 
Dr. McDuffie: Well, I was on the inside of the circle, and opposite me was the home of Sam Sapirie, the manager of things in Oak Ridge. Next to him was Paul Huber, who was running things at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Next to him was Paul Aebersold from the AEC, who was in charge of the isotope program. On the other side of Sam Sapirie was Bernie Menke, who was in charge of security. So I was pretty well hemmed in by high brass at that point. But on the inside, there were Jennie and Gus Smith, who were good friends of mine, and Harold and Docia Shnider, who I went fishing with a lot and knew all the time. Then on the downside of my house was Marvin Mills, who was in the business end of Carbide’s work. He had a young son, who – Jackie, I think it was – who was about the same age as Kurt. So that worked out real well.
Mr. McDaniel: And Ogden was one of those, what they call a lollipop street. Had a – 
Dr. McDuffie: No, that was called Snobs’ Nob. 
Mr. McDaniel: Snobs’ Nob – 
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: But at the lollipop street had a – 
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Straight road going in, then a circle at the end – 
Dr. McDuffie: Circle and then a tag off of that.
Mr. McDaniel: Then a tag off of that.
Dr. McDuffie: Down to the other side. So it was high, and it was a wonderful place to be. The climate was usually better up there. I could take my car and drive down Georgia Avenue toward Downtown, and I could see the smoke getting thicker and thicker, because we all burned soft coal at that time. They just dumped coal down in the little box on your front yard, and you carried it in. I shoveled coal from one summer and – I mean from one winter, and the next summer, we dug a hole and got a tank for a Sears Roebuck oil burner conversion kit and converted the furnace over to oil, which was a great help. Let’s see, now, I got involved with Oak Ridge from the beginning. We were entranced and delighted by the pool, which was such a big pool. We used it, and then down at Grove Center, they had this summer drama. That summer was the first time that Paul Ebert was in Oak Ridge to do a program, and we did Love Rides the Rails. So you can imagine what that was. It was not a sophisticated drama. It was summertime fun. 
Mr. McDaniel: Was it one of those Miller dramas – 
Dr. McDuffie: It was a Miller drama, for sure. [Editor’s note: Love Rides the Rails was written by Morland Cary.] But then, we heard a summer concert of the Oak Ridge Chorus. Now, they gave a very impressive concert. When we talked with them – talked with the people afterwards, it turns out they were planning to do the Bach B Minor in the fall. That was enough for me; I decided to join the chorus because of the quality of the music they were doing. Now, the conductor was a nice young fellow, but we couldn’t keep him. They got him and took him to West Virginia to be in charge of a community program up there. The Jaycees, y’all may remember, were – had annual performances and some in between. I had a chance to sing at some of those. I was first bass. The ORCMA [Oak Ridge Civic Music Association] was active with summer programs and coffee concerts, what they called them. We used to go to the coffee concerts, and occasionally would perform for them. I can remember one that was a very good one: Ruth Lisso was one of the soloists, and we did some things from South Pacific at that time. Now, Ruth left and went up to Paducah where her husband was going to work, so I lost her. But I met Waldo Cohn, learned about his orchestra and its history. Later, in Kingston, Waldo directed the orchestra in the Brahms Requiem, and I sang with them. Betty sang with them too, that time. Then later on ORCMA put on an opera – they put on La bohème with the Oak Ridge soloists. I was one of them. I was one of the minor ones. But we did put on an opera and it was nice to have done that. So there we had opera and play and fun from ORCMA. The Playhouse was active as it is now. They solicit people to work on the – to be in the productions, and people to work on them. They decided to have Brigadoon, which is a famous production. So I was picked to work in that. I think it was because I owned a kilt, and they needed Scottish flavor to things. I was the father of the bride. 
Mr. McDaniel: Now how did you come about to own a kilt?
Dr. McDuffie: Oh, well, that’s because at that point, I had joined one of the clan societies, the one that covers McDuffie as a name. It is called Clan McFee, and McDuffie is one of the parts of it. We had a clan society, and Bruce got me to join it with him, my brother, Bruce. We got interested in it right then, and then it was choirs until I retired. At that point, I got into the genealogist business for a major retirement program and stayed with it for twenty years. I’ll tell you about that later. I joined the First Methodist Church choir, which earlier had met in a theater at Jackson Square, where we didn’t have a building. Our church first had rooms in the high school, the old high school on the hill, above Jackson Square. Then the church had a building in the Fire House Center in Grove Center, and we had some services there. Then we had our own building up to the bottom. We didn’t have money enough to go ahead, but we built the first floor, the ground floor up to a certain level and stopped. So I can remember painting concrete blocks in that first church, in the basement to get them sealed and ready and useable for Sunday schools and other classes. 
Mr. McDaniel: Now, was that at the location where it is now?
Dr. McDuffie: Where it is now. 
Mr. McDaniel: So the church met, I guess, at the Center Theater – didn’t they, initially?
Dr. McDuffie: There for a while – 
Mr. McDaniel: For a while – which is now the Oak Ridge Playhouse. 
Dr. McDuffie: Yes. Bernie Menke, who as I said lived almost across the street from me, he was active in the Boy Scout work. He talked to me and said, “You ought to get in this too.” So I said, “Yes, sir.” He made me one of the neighborhood commissioners, sort of a liaison person between the Boy Scout organization and the local organization of a troop or pack or whatever. I enjoyed that. Then went ahead to become the training chairman for the district. Then the district commissioner, district chairman after we had consolidated several districts into what is now called the Pellissippi District, had been almost about the time I got there. 
Mr. McDaniel: Now, I imagine that the ’50s, ’60s scouting was – I mean there were a lot of young people in Oak Ridge – 
Dr. McDuffie: A lot of young people – 
Mr. McDaniel: Lot of young people, so scouting was a big thing – 
Dr. McDuffie: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Wasn’t it, I mean a lot of – 
Dr. McDuffie: So we had lots of young boys coming in to be Cub Scouts and coming up to be Boy Scouts. There were three brothers in my family when I grew up, three boys and one girl. Two brothers and I, all three of us, made Eagle Scout in Atlanta. I had gone on to be a Junior Assistant Scout Master before I came up to Princeton. So I had had a hiatus, you might say, in my scouting work, and Bernie Menke took care of that by putting me to work in the Pellissippi District.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were a good person to do that, though.
Dr. McDuffie: Well, it worked out all right. Later on they awarded me what’s called the “Silver Beaver” for having lived so long and worked so hard in it. There was another hiatus, when I was working so hard at the lab. Until about two or three years ago when Jim McCauley got very active in Scouts and invited me to be on the Eagle Scout Board of Review, which is the last step the Scouts take before they’re awarded Eagle Scout. At that point, we don’t examine them on their scouting and their skills. We want to know what kind of boys they are. We don’t care what they did to the wood. We want to know what the wood did to them. That’s a great position to have, because you get the cream of the crop, and it still is true that only a small percent of the boys make it to Eagle Scout. But if you’re an Eagle Scout, it’s a tremendous help to you all the way through life, on down. Jim McCauley and I have plans for proposing a new merit badge. We think it ought to be in “conflict resolution,” because that’s such an important topic these days. But we have to decide what we’re going to say. We have to decide on what are going to be the requirements. Like, I think every young boy ought to have a requirement of going down to listen to Judge Judy for about three hours, and then they would know what not to do. In sports, I joined the Oak Ridge Country Club, which is about the only – one of the two options open to me, because I love to play golf. The second was that I like to swim and I was always a good swimmer. I swam in college and then I started swimming here. I swam with the Masters Group that was active with John Crews, when he was alive, and with Winnie Krogsrud. She was in charge of the Master’s Program, I can remember. That was good. Then later on, I swam with the Seniors and did very well with them, stayed in shape, and set records when I was age seventy-five to ninety.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Dr. McDuffie: Uh-huhn. Now, in the year 2000, I developed a back problem of getting into and out of my golf cart, and finally that took me down. I went to the doctor, and he sent me to a neurosurgeon in Knoxville, a Dr. James Killeffer, who is a third generation doctor in his family from – 
Mr. McDaniel: Roane County. 
Dr. McDuffie: Down in Roane County. You know it. Do you – 
Mr. McDaniel: Down – I grew up in Roane County, and I knew a Dr. Killeffer.
Dr. McDuffie: Oh, well, this was – 
Mr. McDaniel: That was either his father or his grandfather – 
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah. I know that there were two ahead of him, but he was a terribly nice fellow. He did a big operation on my back. As far as I know, I never saw one like that. He went in and took five of the segments of my back down there, the lumbar segments, and removed the lamina or little bridges across to keep the – to protect the nerves. He set them free, so they would – but he did set them free, because they were being pushed from behind by the bulges from the discs in my back that had – the gaskets, if you like, had been squeezed out between the vertebrae and they were pushing on the nerves. Well, that – I retained most of my lost mobility at that point, but time went on and inevitably it got worse and worse and worse, until now – now, the latest MRI showed that I had eight vertebrae that had disc protrusions in them. In other words, all the gaskets are coming loose, and nothing left but the nuts and bolts. But, fortunately for me, I’ve never really had any pain. I haven’t had much back pain at all. I’m glad of that, and I try to keep working to keep my back strong. But in May, I collapsed. In May of 2009, I got suddenly sick and collapsed. They took me to the hospital, and put me in intensive care for a while and kept me there for a week. Couldn’t find out first what was the matter; finally found it was the gall bladder. They took that out, and then I got better. They cleaned up my blood and they got me back and put me next door to their rehab facilities. I stayed there for two months, rehabbing. I had lost all my strength. I was weak as a kitten, and my legs were not functioning well at all, so we had the sessions with the therapy people every day. Now, at that point, they sent me home, so now I stay on the second floor most of the time, until I get two strong men to come and help me downstairs or upstairs. I’m working toward a goal of being able to stand up and not have to collapse after a few seconds. But I have to hold on to something. I’ll probably not regain my stability for balance, but I’m working anyway to do the best that I can. Now, that sort of brings me up to date, except for an interesting turn in my life that took place about three years ago, when I went to a meeting of the Roane Anderson Professional Society. At that point, I heard Dr. Tim Scott, Timothy Scott. He’s the son of Chuck Scott from Chemical Technology Division in Oak Ridge, and a very bright young man who had been to Dartmouth, a chemist. He told us about Rose Bengal, an old organic compound that has been used as a food coloring and a dye, and a stain. Here’s the solution of it, right here, beautiful red color, American flag red or maybe a little blue in it, and very soluble in water, not corrosive or anything like that. But they learned that it kills cancer cells on contact and does not bother normal cells. Well, the lack of patentability came because in the U.S. patent law – and that’s something I’d picked up on my way when I was studying patents – there’s a famous case that established the rule that a new use for an old compound is not patentable. So here is this drug that probably can be very helpful in fighting cancer, and nobody would do the work to qualify it under the FDA rules so that prescriptions could be written for it. They just left it entirely alone and stayed with the high price cancer drugs. This one is only ten dollars a gram or pennies per milligram. So I tried at some five institutions to get help. I finally sent a letter to the editor of Chemical & Engineering News – that’s one of the major publications to chemists and chemical engineers in the U.S. and goes to about 160,000 people when you count them all up – and telling him of the situation, and suggesting that the Veterans Administration should do the laboratory and clinical work to qualify this drug, since they didn’t have to do any work to discover it and develop it. It’s already there. So the main work was done, and all you got to do is jump through a few hoops, and you already know it’s not toxic because they use it in foods. So my letter was accepted by the editor and it was published in the November 16 issue, this year; it went out. So here I have sent the VA a letter and I have sent the Secretary in the Cabinet, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, that’s General Shinseki, who came over from Hawaii, I think. But he is the supreme person in the VA, and that’s where I have sent him my information. I also sent a letter to the VA itself asking them for their cooperation in starting this. Yesterday, one of my old scientists called up and said that he had spent his whole career working on Rose Bengal and that he’s delighted that I’m doing this. He’s sending me some of his special research papers, so I can learn what he’s been learning all of his career.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right – 
Dr. McDuffie: That’ll – it’s nice when you go to evaluate material that you have all this chemical information available to you. So right now, it’s happiness all around, and we’re waiting for the VA and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to say, “Yes, this is a good idea. We’ll look at it, and try to develop a non-toxic, inexpensive substitute for some of these high-priced chemicals that are causing the cost of cancer to be so high. That’s where we are today, on that side of me.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, let’s – there’s one other thing I wanted to ask you about. Then we’ll take a quick break, before we move on to the next part, your work history. Were you involved in politics at all in Oak Ridge?
Dr. McDuffie: Well, it happens that somebody asked me if I would run for City Council, and they said they would be my – what do you call it, my manager – 
Mr. McDaniel: Campaign manager – 
Dr. McDuffie: Campaign manager. I said, “Okay, if you want to, and I’ll try it.” So I got out, and every afternoon after work, I walked through my district and knocked on doors, and introduced myself and got to be pretty well known for that. I won my race, and although my opponent was a fine gentleman, he just wasn’t as well-known as I was by that time. I joined the City Council and was on there until Dr. Weinberg tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to go to India to represent the United States and the United States Atomic Energy Commission in the country of India for two years. That’s another – that’s part of the other – the next story.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. When were you elected to City Council?
Dr. McDuffie: I was afraid you were going to ask that, because I went about – I went in 1969 and ’70, so it was about 1968 that I ran.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, all right. Well, all right. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll be back in just a moment.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. We are back with Mr. McDuffie. We’ve learned about your personal life, and how you ended up in Oak Ridge, and your activities and the things that you’ve done up until today. But we’ve not talked at all about your professional work here in Oak Ridge. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. McDuffie: Good. When I first got to Oak Ridge, they put me in a division that didn’t have a director. I think it was called Reactor Engineering Division, but we had some nice people to work with. One of the things that we were doing were classified projects for the Materials Testing Reactor, which was a major reactor that the DOE was building out in Idaho somewhere. So our group was working on that. I helped them out with – for a couple of weeks with preparing some reports and editing some. Then Dr. Weinberg said, “I think you ought to go to school. We have a good school here called ORSORT, Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology.” I think they’d had one or two of seasons of courses in order to help out some of the people who were destined to become technicians and operators of the submarine reactors, which were not too – which were aqueous or water moderated reactors, and they were – provided all the power for the submarine, and you had to be real careful not to have it all leak out in the submarine while the men were in there. 
Mr. McDaniel: Now, that school was the same school that Admiral Rickover attended, isn’t it?
Dr. McDuffie: Admiral Rickover went to that school and some of Rickover’s men were there along with me.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Dr. McDuffie: They worked very hard so when they went back they would be useful to him. So I went to ORSORT and took the basic courses that they had. There was one course that in Reactor Controls. It was lots of math in it. When they got up to a place where they were talking about – I could understand when they talked about the neutron flux would be in a cycle, like it was thirty seconds to double itself or three minutes to double itself or six minutes, wherever they control it. So those were positive pile periods, as they called them. They got to talking about negative pile periods, and I couldn’t understand that concept. That was about when I – when something else happened. But Herb Pomerance, who was around the laboratory for a long time, was in charge of the laboratory work, where we came and worked with blocks of different material and tested their ability to moderate neutrons or to hold up gamma rays and beta rays and learned about all those things and how to measure them – very practical course. One of the gentlemen, I can’t say his name right now, who was teaching us reactor theory, was working on a book with Weinberg on nuclear chain reaction. I think there was a mathematician named Louis who taught us math and was very competent at that, and then another one who taught us reactor physics. You can see all of the problems that reactors faced, they were trying to hit with the teachers who could get us started in those directions. Anyway, summer was coming up, and Dr. Weinberg, asked me if I would go over to the Y-12 area, where the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion [ANP] program was located. They had already run sort of a first reactor of the kind that the airplane – they thought an airplane could use. The reactor makes a lot of heat, and so they would use that heat to run the airplane. But the ANP Program was focused on either a high flying airplane: one that they could fly so high that they couldn’t shoot it down or one that was a ground skimmer that would go so fast they couldn’t find it. I didn’t really get excited about either one of those; I thought they were just asking for trouble and too much trouble. They had another one called the “tug tow,” in which the reactor flew itself, and then a long, quarter mile cable came out behind carrying the control lines for the reactor. Some people lived in a little cabin – 
Mr. McDaniel: Hold on just a second. Would you mind getting him a drink of water? No, not me. He’s a little froggy. Okay.
Dr. McDuffie: Thank you, ma’am. That’s better. You should have gotten some when you can.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, no. I’m good.
Dr. McDuffie: I’ll put it right there.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. So you’re with the airplane program, nuclear – 
Dr. McDuffie: I was with the airplane program in the summer. They wanted – and Professor Loomis, from Illinois, had been assigned to evaluate the program and write a report, and I was helping him with that. Then we came to the end and Loomis went back to teach, and they asked me to stay on with the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program. Well, I talked to Swartout, I said, “I would rather, if I can, go back and be a chemist. It’s just what I started to be.” He said, “All right.” I was worried, because I already knew about the proximity fuse that we had developed and how they were using that to shoot down enemy airplanes. I thought that those nuclear reactors either flying or skimming along the ground were just going to be ducks for knocking them down, and time, I think, has proven that right. So John Swartout sent me over to the Chemistry Division, where they were providing support for a major reactor program in which aqueous solutions of uranium sulfate were used as – the center of the reactor was spherical, and they surrounded it with water to – and heavy water to reflect neutrons back into the inside, like having a bunch of mirrors to increase the light when you turn on the light. This spherical reactor about eighteen inches in diameter was a model for a bigger reactor which they hoped to do to make a power run of one or two megawatts. Ultimately, they were hoping that a reactor based on circulating a solution of uranyl sulfate into a chamber that made it critical, and with a swirling motion, it created a vortex, vertical vortex in the center. They injected it along the equator. Into this vortex would go all of the – would go steam and all of the gaseous fission products and go out through a tube to the – and be let down in pressure to the tanks that would handle it from there on, and that worked very well. They were actually burning – they actually had a burner design to handle the hydrogen and oxygen mixture that was released. Now, I say hydrogen and oxygen, because the fission fragments, when the nuclear fission occurred in a uranium atom, the two fission fragments each held like a hundred MEV of energy and were going at a high rate of speed through the water and with a high charge. So that would tend to decompose the water as they went through, so much that a one megawatt reactor would produce ten standard cubic feet per minute of a hydrogen oxygen mixture to the one. That’s a dangerous thing you got to take care of. So we were trying to burn it. But in the meantime, the chemists were studying the effects of N-power radiation on little tiny samples of like five or six cc’s of uranium sulfate in a titanium – we called it a “bomb,” a little pressure vessel, solid on the outsides, solid on the ends and machined down on the top so that it would take a standard pressure fitting, so that we could add a tap on the end that fitted into – conical tap that fitted into a conical hole and was pushed down by a screw nut that fell on top of it. The capillary was thirty feet long, and maybe ten mil wall thickness, very delicate operators. The capillary ended up in a connection to what they call a “strain gauge pressure gauge.” The pressure in the water would be translated to the deforming mechanical constituents of the pressure gauges surrounding them. Every time the water had a push, it would move the gauge a little bit, and that would alter the resistance in the lines, and what we measured was that and had it calibrated so that we knew what the pressure was. That tiny little capillary was sealed into this tube of fissioning uranium solution. The whole thing was in the small furnace that we built with the resistance elements to go around the “bomb,” that we called it. There was a thermocouple in there, so we knew what the temperature was, so we were able to record the temperature and pressure of this apparatus, and we could control things by controlling the power to the furnace in that position. We used for the experiment a vertical hole that went all the way into the center of the Graphite Reactor. We had a place up – we had a little room upstairs on top that we could go into and had all our operators in there so that if something happened, the mess would be restricted from getting all over everything. Well, it never did, so we were fortunate. That was an experimental program that I was asked to work on under Dr. Harold Secoy, who had two groups, our group – it included John Boyle, Fred Sweeton, Fred Manneschmidt, Al Smith. We were the doing the in-pile experiments. There was another group under Bill Marshall that was doing phase studies, solubility studies of uranium sulfate in water and the effect of fission products on that and the stability of it, and what happened when you changed the ratio of sulfuric acid to uranium oxide. That was all the programs that Dr. Secoy had. We were able to help. First we were able to show that there was something in the solution, some contaminant that was causing the hydrogen and the oxygen to recombine into water and we searched to find what it was. Well Secoy and I put down a list of about fifty elements that we wanted to look at. But what happened was that my wife went to a church circle meeting one night and I didn’t have anything to do, so I took out the handbook for chemistry and started looking at it, and I was looking at the EMF Tables for the Electromotive Force series for various reactions. I found that the copper to copper 0, cupric copper to copper 0 or cupric copper, copper 2+ to copper 0, was one very favorable reaction. I thought, well, why don’t we put a little copper sulfate in with the uranium sulfate and see what happens? So the next morning we did. We had an experimental facility in the basement of the 3019 Building, behind the barricade, so that we could work with hydrogen and oxygen, and not get everybody hurt. Well, we set up the experiment, and the pressure started up in the pile and turned right over and went right back down. The hydrogen and oxygen was consumed smoothly, because the copper was acting as a catalyst. The copper catalyst got lots of attention right away, and at the high levels, and that didn’t do me any harm, really made a difference. Not only did I find something interesting, but I was able to present it in an interesting way and so people could understand it. I think that impressed John Swartout, who by this time was head of the Chemistry Division. Dr. Bardwell had gone on to be responsible for the design and construction of a whole new building, the 4500 building that was going to last us – it’s still operating as a functioning laboratory. So this made a hit with Swartout and he kept his eye on me, and he got me involved in editing all of the quarterly reports that came out that he had to send out. He wanted somebody who could put them into English and make it sound interesting. So I helped him with – edited lots of reports. Of course, that kept me involved with all parts of the business, and that was helpful too. Well, soon Alvin found – Dr. Weinberg – that what we call the fundamental research people in the Chemistry Division were not responding quite as well to the needs of the reactors programs that he had as he’d like. So he established the Reactor Chemistry Division, and he took people from the Chemistry Division and he took people from Y-12, and he brought over Warren Grimes from Y-12 to head it up. He asked me to be one of his associate directors. After a short period, we ended up with three associate directors instead of one assistant director: myself, Ed Bowlman, who was in charge of Corrosion, and George Watson, who was in charge of Reactor Safety and Gas Cooled Reactors. Well, so I had – I had my responsibilities in the Reactor Chemistry Division and they were the Aqueous Program and support for the Molten Salt Program. Warren Grimes was deeply involved in the molten salt work from the beginning in Y-12. He kept his finger on all of that work, but he had – but I had the groups all reporting to me, so we’d keep things running all right and handle any problems that might come up. In the Aqueous Program, I had – Bill Marshall was working on the theory and practical aspects of phase diagrams for the uranium sulfate solution. He had programs on measuring the conductivity of water to higher temperatures and pressures. Arvin Quist was helping on that. We were rebuilding – Paul Bien, B-I-E-N, and I were rebuilding a high pressure isopiestic unit in which dishes contained – 
Mr. McDaniel: Let me just say that my transcriptionist is going to have a heck of a time with this – 
Dr. McDuffie: Isopiestic? That means constant activity, isopressure.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. 
Dr. McDuffie: So in the isopiestic unit, we had a big tank or vessel with a pressure vessel top on it. Inside we had an analytical balance that was made so that it sent out an electrical signal, asked for the weight on the pan. Then inside this vessel, we put little pans of different solutes or different amounts of solutes that we wanted to equilibrate. So we turned that on and brought it up to a certain temperature and waited until all these pans came to equilibrium temperatures, which meant that they all had the same activity of water pressing on them. That meant that you could get a good measurement of the activity, chemical activity of these solutes at those particular concentrations, which we could determine by measuring the weights of the pans, one by one, while they were still inside the pressure vessel. Well, we improved the original design which Vince O’Donnell had run. We were trying to make a better one, things were made out of titanium, so they wouldn’t corrode. We had the instrument people involved with that, and that went along very well. Jerry Brownstein’s wife did her Ph.D. work on the isopiestic unit. Then, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Fuller, Dr. Gammage, all used it for different things. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to extend a whole field of chemistry which had previously only been done in water at room temperatures or even up to 100°. Now you can go up to 250° if you like and see how things change in those temperature regions, which they do, you see. Well, we had Fred Sweeton working on the dissociation constant of water at elevated temperatures. Dr. Bays and Dr. Mesmer worked on beryllium fluoride complexes and aqueous media. We’ll get down to it later, but the molten salt reactor ran on a solution of beryllium fluoride and lithium fluoride. Now, beryllium fluoride is a mess. It’s sort of like candy. You heat it up – it’s brittle, but if you heat it up it runs like honey or syrup. So you mix it with lithium fluoride and it becomes quite fluid and we were able to use it as a coolant in our molten salt reactor. Because it’s beryllium, we get neutron moderation. Beryllium is a small atom and it hits – neutrons hit it and lose energy quite easily. 
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s stop for just a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: All right. 
Dr. McDuffie: Coming over to the Molten Salt Program, we had a number of different groups of very competent men. Roy Thoma had a group that worked on phase studies of molten salt mixtures. George Brunton was working on crystallographic studies of the products. Dr. Bays worked on the thermodynamics of molten salt systems, and their equilibria with mixed oxides. You would take a lithium beryllium mixture and drop mixed oxides in, wait and let it all come to equilibrium and find out what the crystal structure was of the compounds that were there and what the chemical composition was, and you’d begin to learn how they would react in a full-scale reactor. 
Mr. McDaniel: Did you work in that program? Did you work in the Molten Salt?
Dr. McDuffie: Yes. I had the responsibility for a bunch of – about ten or so groups.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, sure. 
Dr. McDuffie: They were good people, so I let them do what they wanted to do, and I’d try to stay out of their way. But I had to beat on them and make sure they had all their reports in at the right times and that they learned how to write English. Engineers and chemists don’t always learn how to write very good English. Sometimes they’re terrible.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that because they write in technical terms that are too complicated – 
Dr. McDuffie: Right, and – 
Mr. McDaniel: Or they just don’t write very well – 
Dr. McDuffie: They don’t make good sentences. They make them too long. But Stan Canter was working on thermodynamic properties. Jim Shaffer had a group over in Y-12, and they were responsible for producing large batches of molten salt mixtures for the rest of us to use. Later on, they made all of the fuel for the molten salt reactor. So they had a very important role to play. Not only did they have to make the fuel, but they had to make an arrangement for living with beryllium. So they had a whole suite of rooms that were set apart so that you could work with beryllium in one end and take a shower and come out the other end clean. Or coming in, get suited up for what they needed to be done, because we didn’t – and don’t – know how toxic beryllium is. We talk about berylliosis and what it does to you, but we don’t really know enough about it. We haven’t studied it medically nearly enough. Well, let’s see, Clay Weaver had worked on complexes, and had worked on lanthanum fluoride electrodes. Robbins and Brownstein had worked on electro conductivity of molten salt. Billy Hitch and Bays had worked on thermodynamic behavior of LiF-BeF2, that’s lithium beryllium fluoride, [symbolized as] L2B, two lithiums and one beryllium, and that’s the way – that’s the composition that was the solvent for the fuel in the molten salt reactor experiments, was lithium beryllium.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me stop you there. We don’t have a whole lot of time left – 
Dr. McDuffie: All right.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me just ask you some questions. What – so you were involved in that for how long? Until you retired from that division, that group – 
Dr. McDuffie: No. It was about nineteen – I have this wrong, if I remember, 1969 to 1970.
Mr. McDaniel: And that’s about the time you went to India. 
Dr. McDuffie: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So you – so Dr. Weinberg asked you to go to India – 
Dr. McDuffie: He twisted my arm a little to go to India for two years. I went. I was hosted by the State Department and they took very good care of us, got our housing for us, and somebody sent over a white jeep. We got to drive that.
Mr. McDaniel: Why India?
Dr. McDuffie: Why India? India has aspirations to be an important company. India has a great deal of thorium in its deposits. India knows that thorium can be made into a nuclear reactor, not immediately. You first have to get yourself some uranium that will generate a fissionable situation. Then you surround that with thorium oxide, probably, and the thorium catches the neutrons that escape and is converted ultimately through additions and subtractions of different particles. It ends up as uranium 233, whereas we started with uranium 235. So we end up as uranium 233, which itself is fissionable. 
Mr. McDaniel: So it’s a fissionable – 
Dr. McDuffie: If the Indians can surround one reactor with thorium they can start reading U-233 for as long as they want to keep them running.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you went there for two years.
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah. I was – I say I was hosted by the State Department. I had an office in the Consulate right across the high wall – across the hall from the Consulate General. I was given every courtesy by the U.S. and also by the Indians. Dr. Valodi was their representative of the State Department, and Homi Sethna, who had been educated in Michigan as a chemical engineer, was in charge of their – the whole Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Dr. Ramanaya who had gotten his work in the University of Missouri, I think it was, in India, he was their chemical director. And I worked with a young fellow named D. D. Sood, S-O-O-D, and a small group at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. They were a small group of chemists. I brought them a collection of Reactor Chemistry reports since the supply was limited. They were very nice. They let me go anywhere I wanted to go in the whole area, and drive my little white jeep anywhere. I would wave at them as I came in. I’d wave at them and security as I went out. That did change after I left.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did your family go with you? Or did they stay here?
Dr. McDuffie: They all were there, at one time or another. Betty and Greg lived with me the whole time. Greg went to school in India. Yes, we have another interruption. Betty is here, and she’s got my battery and it’s all charged up. I want to put it into the – 
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
Dr. McDuffie: I got to India. I helped them, Dr. Sood’s group. I helped them with the design and construction of a facility in which they could handle alpha emitting compounds like plutonium and not have them escape. One of the things we had to do was to find an appropriate filter for a filtration device they had. They could equilibrate a molten mixture of salt with some solids in the bottom, but then they wanted to be able to separate the solution from the salt. So they needed a filter screen, fine size. I knew we had some in Oak Ridge, and so a package of the filter screens went in the State Department pouch over to India and over to the group and they were happily ready to take them and build those in to their filter sticks that they need. So we had a cooperative group. We got work done that needed to be done, and I got to look at all of the Indian atomic energy facilities, including a trip to the – oh, what’s the – Singhbhum thrust belt of India where they had their mine and mined uranium ore. 
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right.
Dr. McDuffie: I went down to the bottom of the mine, so I’ve seen it all, from the bottom up.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Dr. McDuffie: Went down to Hyderabad where they were just building a new facility for technical operations down there. Went through what they had down there and looked at their reactor that they already had running down there.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you came back from India – you spent two years there – you came back to Oak Ridge – 
Dr. McDuffie: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: What happened then?
Dr. McDuffie: Well, I came back at the end of the second year which was Christmas and New Year’s. I found that Dr. Chris Keim, who had been the first director of the program that made all the stable isotopes for the country – and then he had become director of the Technical Information Division – he was retiring, and they could see that Reactor Chemistry was approaching the end of its life because of the lack of DOE support. So Weinberg offered me the position to head the Information Division and he threw in some other stuff, so that the library and information centers, public information, and technical information were all included. That was sort of a basket of work, and I had great trouble in getting approval for only one computer station in the library to access the databases. Well, this was nineteen – did I say 1970? Yes. This was 1970 and that was – this is 2000, so that was early on. All of the programs that were funded by the Research & Development money were able to get things like computers, and did. But the library was part of the organization that was funded by company money and that – this was the service money, if you like, and it was very hard to get any more of that. So that was a trouble. Herb Pomerance volunteered to teach the people in the library and the people running the library how to use a computer for accessing their data and all of the DOE data. Now, that was a beginning. So we did. We had a really good functioning printing department with a dominant leader, fought for raises for her people. Nevertheless, a few of them decided they didn’t like that and they went out and opted to join the union. When you join the union, Carbide Corporation takes over and they – you don’t have any life to yourself for a while, while they negotiate. That’s a terrible waste of time. A little later, I’d decided I’d had more fun during the time before retirement. I went back to chemistry and Herman Postma let me do that and put me in a section of Chem Division where I was studying chemical reprocessing in such a way as you couldn’t divert streams of it unknowingly to somebody else, so that we had to work on different ways of processing. We couldn’t use just plain nitric acid or hydrochloric acid to dissolve things. We had to do things without water. So that’s called pyrochemical and dry processing. In connection with that, I had the help of the technical information people from DOE in building up a very large database of references. Just to show you what a thing like that looks like, this is a selected bibliography of pyrochemical and dry processing methods that just got many of these things, and they almost selected them with a machine, which they did. Because ultimately, we would specify the terms we wanted them to look for, and they would, with their machines, look for all the publications that had those terms in it. Then they would combine the number of terms – extra number of terms in each one of these, into the whole, so that we had a bigger and bigger and bigger collection of terms to put into our test programs. That was a big help. And you want me to get rid of this [referring to the paper he is referencing]. So I was working – I had a little side project in which I – and still was no water, in which I learned how to extract protactinium from fresh fuel elements into a separation from – and how to wait for one of the intermediate products to decay. Then after I would wait for a year, I could take that material and extract it again and get back some pure material that we could use after all the decays of the other stuff had gone away. I wrote that all up and then after I retired from there, they continued that work and checked it out in the laboratory and found that that was all right, that we had written it up right, so it worked. Then ORAU came along, and said if you want to retire, we’ve got a little spot for you over here. We’d like you to come over here and manage an industrial energy use data booth for us. So I did that. I went over to Y-12 – I mean to the ORAU offices. I got together some people from the West Coast who were economists and managers and some people who were from local, who were really on the ball and worked hard. They went around and we got experts in fourteen different fields of energy use who came in and took their field and wrote a little story about it, and developed all of the details of how much they use in the baking industry, how much they use in the glass industry, and so we had a different chapter on the fourteen major energy uses of the country. That now is in an ORAU report that’s kind of heavy, but these are all of the results of this study. It didn’t have a very large distribution because the DOE ran out of money, and that was a shame. But a private company published it, and they sold some copies. I guess everybody got moderately dissatisfied with the result. But that information is in those books, and it’s available to people to use and there’s a tremendous amount of it. 
Mr. McDaniel: Then, so how long did you stay at ORAU?
Dr. McDuffie: Oh, a couple of years to get that done and I went over and did some work for Weinberg in his Institute for – what kind of analysis? Anyway, everything that was important politically.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, sure. Let me ask you a couple of questions before we wrap things up. What would you say would be – you feel like was your biggest contribution to your – in your time at Oak Ridge, personally? What do you feel like – 
Dr. McDuffie: My time at Oak Ridge – 
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. I mean your time here, working here or your industry or, what would you feel like was the – your biggest contribution? Or one of the things that you’re the most proud of?
Dr. McDuffie: Well, we turned out some fine young men. They’re going to about now become citizens; they were in the Boy Scout Program. I made lots of friends from singing. I made countless friends in the laboratory and in the technologies associated with nuclear materials. Technically, those were probably the biggest things, influences, and biggest effects that I’ve had. But there’s a lot left for people to do, and I’m glad to see that people have come along to follow up on some of the things we did. I’m surprised that the study of nanoparticles has proven so interesting and temporarily at least so rewarding to all the people. I know that the nuclear fuel people were probably studying nanoparticles to make fuel elements out of because they will conduct the heat better or they can put gas through a porous bed of them. So I would say that the association with such a fine group of chemists is an outstanding result that helped me, is to know these people and appreciate what they’ve done. 
Mr. McDaniel: What would you say you would want people to remember as your professional legacy? 
Dr. McDuffie: Well, I guess as a manager and coordinator and able to appreciate and see what they do at the bench. What do you think?
Mr. McDaniel: That sounds good to me. Do you have anything else, any other comments, anything else you want to – 
Dr. McDuffie: Oh, yes. An idle mind is a terrible thing to waste. What’s the other one? A waste is a terrible thing to mind. But in November of 2006, I attended a meeting of the Roane Anderson Professional Society, and that was where I learned about Rose Bengal and the ability to kill cancer cells, but that nobody could patent it. 
Mr. McDaniel: Right, right.
Dr. McDuffie: So now I have succeeded in getting a letter to the editor of Chemical & Engineering News published to 160,000 different recipients. I have passed that information to the United States Secretary for Veterans Affairs with a suggestion that the VA do the laboratory and clinical work necessary to qualify this compound under the FDA rules, so that prescriptions can be written for it. I hope that will happen soon. I guess I lucked out in recognizing that that route was open when I heard about this compound, recognizing that there was no reason you couldn’t go and do the work necessary to use it. That may turn out to be, from the Boy Scout’s point of view, my good turn to the USA, is bringing Rose Bengal to their attention. I’m hoping that will work out that way. 
Mr. McDaniel: Well, sir, I appreciate you taking the time to share your – some of your life, and some of your stories with us today.
Dr. McDuffie: Well, I was happy to do it, but I was frightened at the thought of what I had to do. I surely did not do well enough by the molten salt people in terms of reporting their accomplishments. But they all know me, and I love them all. 
Mr. McDaniel: Well, thank you so much. 
[end of recording]