HISTORY OF LABORATORY

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30289, 15 November 1963, Page 29

HISTORY OF LABORATORY

Lecture Given By Mr Roth The history of the organisation which is now the National Radiation Laboratory of the Department of Health was described to the annual meeting of the New Zealand Medical Physicists’ Association by the director of the laboratory (Mr G. E. Roth>. Mr Roth was delivering the Strong Memorial Lecture, in memory of Mr J. E. Strong, the first head of the organistaion and Mr Roth's immediate predecessor. Mr Roth described how in 1933 the New Zealand branch of the Briitsh Empire Cancer. Campaign Society, with financial support from the W. H. Travis Trust, set up a laboratory at the Wellington Hospital from which Mr Strong started to build up a physical service to all the eight radiotherapy departments then existing in New Zealand. - The laboratory was transferred to Christchurch in 1937 and set up in the basement of the physics department at Canterbury University. It was then called the Travis Radiological Laboratory, which later developed into the Dominion X-ray and Radium Laboratory, recently renamed the National Radiation Laboratory. The Health Department has contributed financially to the operation of the laboratory since 1938 when the physicist in charge was made an inspector of hospitals. Since 1950 the entire responsibility for the operation of the laboratory has been carried by the department. In 1955 the laboratory moved into its new premises in Victoria street and later extended its activities to the measurement of fallout throughout New Zealand and New Zealand territories in the Pacific, in addition to its radiation protection service and primary standardisation work.