Letters Received to H.H. Barker, March 17, 1931

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI COLUMBIA DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY March 17th, 1931 Mr. . H. H. Barker United States Radium Corporation 535 Pearl Street New York City, New York MAR 19 1931 My dear Barker: I wish to thank you for your cooperation in sending to Mr. Horace Thomas the compilation of literature on the therapeutic effects of radium taken internally. I took the package over to his house yesterday. He is sick abed at this time with a mild attack of flu; but he will make extracts of papers and I shall see to it that the book is returned to you within a week. I may add that last week the students and staff in the Department of Anatomy held their regular weekly seminar meeting at which Horace Thomas was the principal speaker. He gave a criticel summary of the work which he had read on the physical effects of radium taken internally. I must say that he m'ade a very good sum- mary. I now feel that we have a man of the type who is capable of conducting some good experiments. The members of the staff of the Department of Anatomy, including the Dean of the Medical School, asked some questions and made valuable suggestions. The cooperation of this group is in- sured and my next step shall be to get a student in Chemistry who will cooperate with Thomas in making the numerous radium determinations which the work will involve. I think I have such a man in sight and if he has a little time right soon, we shall start him on the emanation method and particularly the bisulfate fusion method of determining radium. I can show him about the care that must be taken in carrying out the work for I am now in the midst of making the radium determinations on the feces and urine residues of the New Jersey girls. I am doing the radium de- terminations on the feces residues now at the rate of about three per day. Within another week I hope to have this phase of the work complete. Then there will remain about 15 or 20 samples of urine residues which are in nitric acid storage now. Probably it is too early to make any statement about the trend of the radium determinations. We may get some surprises when we come to examine the urine specimens, but I had anticipated some rather active samples of feces residues. So far I have been rather disappointed in this phase of the work. In fact, I did not proceed with due scientific caution in preparing the samples for assay of radium: instead of do- ing a preliminary determination on the series of residues which arrived after the administration of some of the drugs administered to reduce the radiun content of the patients, I weighed out samples for the entire series of approximately