Remarks on Receiving the Founders Award of the Health Physics Society

West Palm Beach, Florida. 28 June 2011.

Ralph H. Thomas

Mr. President, Honoured Guests, friends and colleagues. My purpose tonight is, simply, to say “Thank-you!”

Earlier, in a brief chat with our president Ed Maher I reached the conclusion that had he been a director of a symphony orchestra he would have had a preference for music annotated “vivace”. So, to the best of my ability here goes!

First, please allow me to introduce two very special guests who have travelled from the San Francisco Bay Area to “be with their Dad” tonight: my younger daughter Susie Homer and her husband Dave.

Last May, Dick Burk announced his retirement. Dick and I first worked together while planning the Health Physics Society’s 20thAnnual Meeting, held in San Francisco during the Bicentennial Year. Later, when serving as Society Treasurer, I came to know Dick better and found him, of course not only extremely competent, but also a joy and fun to work with. So may I join with those that have already congratulated Dick and sincerely wish Sue and Dick great happiness for their future?

Tonight I must confess to being, what psychiatrists call, “conflicted”. I really do want to brag about this award. It is certainly bragworthy, BUT- as the Brits say - to do so just “wouldn’t be cricket”!

By the way cricket is one of the games that the Brits invented along with golf, rugby soccer and tennis. However, cricket just doesn’t seem to have taken on in the in the States as well as well as all those other games. When, however, the advertising community finally wakes up they will learn that cricket games take three to five days to complete and by the nature of the game there are many “natural breaks”-(the players even stop to have lunch and afternoon tea!). Plenty of advertising space and revenues to be earned.

My English Mother, Phyllis, taught me that gentlemen never, ever, boast. (What on earth she would think Donald Trump AKA “The Donald” these days I wonder!)

She knew intuitively what Blaise Pascal the French Mathematician so elegantly wrote, "If you wish people to speak well of you, never speak well of yourself."

Taking Pascal’s good advice let me share a few anecdotes with you.

As you have already heard my working life began in 1948, at Harwell in England: a lad of almost sixteen, with the grandiose title of Assistant, Scientific, (Temporary), Ministry of Supply!

A year or so later I was a permanent British civil servant with the right to retire at age 47 on half pay. My monthly salary at the time was about $25 per month and it occurred to me that it might need increasing before I did retire. Nowadays it seems people just won’t let me retire!!

Assigned to work at GLEEP, at that time the only nuclear reactor in Western Europe, my many duties included:

 ● Measuring half lives of various radionuclides.

● Handling a Ra-Be neutron source (containing no less than a gram of radium!).

and

● Chemical preparations of ten curie-sized samples of Co⁶⁰.

As you may well imagine, if only as a matter of self-preservation, we youngsters, although weren’t “health physicists” (the name wasn’t in general use then!), quickly became educated in sensible radiological safety practices!

Of course, with my family name, it is impossible to escape being called a “Doubting Thomas”. Unfortunately the term is usually used nowadays in a disparaging way but it really shouldn’t be. Its proper definition is “someone who rarely (note not always) trusts or believes things before having proof”.

Isn’t that just what a scientist ought to be?

In science isn’t progress made by continually challenging the status of our current understanding and attempting to eliminate any logical errors in our thinking?

My experience has been that my colleagues actually welcomed challenges to their work. In the sixties challenging skyshine and shielding data led me to the privilege of meeting Burton Moyer (well known to the Society) and later to an invitation to Berkeley, where the greater part of my career was spent.

There must inevitably be a bitter-sweet aspect associated with a lifetime award because –In Lord Byron’s words “-- the sword outwears its sheath---”.

However, this “tinge of sadness is absolutely overwhelmed by the knowledge and pleasure that it is my colleagues and friends in the profession who have given me this honour tonight.

Sixteen hundred years ago John Chrysostom (kris'ustum), an Early Father of the Christian Church, exactly expressed my feelings of this moment when he wrote:

“I have been deemed worthy of a great honour that far exceeds my merits.”

Truly, I am overwhelmed. Thank you all so very much.