At the RRU and Hal’s Forced Resignation

Abstract

At the start of 1946, Hal was appointed senior physicist in the Radiotherapy Research Unit (RRU) of the Medical Research Council (MRC), located at the large and very prestigious postgraduate Hammersmith Hospital in West London. The RRU was established soon after the start of the Second World War as the result of a medical disaster at the Westminster Hospital in treating cancer patients. They were harmed by receiving excessive ionising radiation from radium, because there was no physicist at that hospital, nor anyone else there who fully understood the dangers of high doses. All radium treatment in that hospital was then promptly stopped and much bad publicity resulted. However in the popular press, this news was eclipsed by ongoing war news. The RRU was intended to serve both patients and researchers to prevent any repetition of the Westminster Hospital debacle, though until Hal joined all research at the RRU was clinical. An MP, who was a medical doctor, asked an embarrassing question about the Westminster Hospital disaster in the House of Commons, but he was persuaded by two lords (Presidents of the Royal College of Physicians and that of Surgeons) not to take the issue further. After a joint Privy Council and MRC report on the matter, it was appreciated that radiobiological knowledge was essential for the safe use of ionising radiation in treating cancer. This led to the founding of the RRU in 1941, at the instigation of Sir Edward Mellanby, secretary-general, and boss, of the MRC.