Roger Wayne Wallace, Ph.D.
Father, Teacher, Friend - Page 4
1919 -2011
Roger returned to the states on the Queen Mary and was assigned to White Sands, California to work on rockets until he entered graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley in Physics. Isabelle taught school in the East Bay. Roger worked on cosmic rays, the bubble chamber, the antimatter proton, and particle physics. He completed his Ph.D. and then worked on radiation physics. He taught nuclear engineering.
In 1964 he went around the world with the World Health Organization studying people who lived on radioactive sand in India to see its effects on long term health. Much to everyone’s surprise, while these people received 4-5 times the standard background radiation, they lived longer and were healthier than most people. It was another example of hormesis.
Roger worked at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Labs from his days as a graduate student until his late 80’s as both a lecturer and as chairman of radiation safety. He taught a course on radiation biology to physicists and tried to convince students he met to go to medical school. He spent his early research years with an experiment on cosmic rays flying a B-36. It was a plane built to drop thermonuclear weapons when Ernest Lawrence wasn’t quite sure how big they would be. The concept was that they would be smaller than two railway cars. So Truman built one hundred B-36s with a bomb bay that could accommodate a railway car. Roger used one for physics experiments. He even attended the Bikini Test shot and was knocked to the floor by the blast.
The B-36 had jet engines and propellers
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