AEC Support for Heart Disease Studies
GOURLEY:	Was AEC interested in this?
GOFMAN:	Not terribly; they weren't. The AEC did support my work.
GOURLEY:	How did that work?
GOFMAN:	Why did the AEC support it?
GOURLEY:	Yes.
GOFMAN:	AEC supported Donner Lab as an entity. So, I share[d] in that support. But actually, as a matter of fact, with an expansion of that work, Shields Warren, who was then head of the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine, suggested that we get [the American] Heart Institute['s] support. And I did. A lot of money from the Heart Institute and a number of private grants, too. Because [of] the AEC, we were doing some things with tracers and the study and lipoproteins, but they didn't regard it as mainline AEC work. That's why I did get the additional support from the Heart Institute. But the initial support was because we were an AEC Lab.
GOURLEY:	Right.
HEFNER:	So there really is no close connection between the blood lipids and your radiation sickness study?
GOFMAN:	There were some. Two of my graduate students (one of them is an adjunct professor now), Tom Hayes and John Hewitt, [were] doing studies on lipoproteins in connection with fatal irradiation. Saw some very interesting effects of the lipoproteins that were predictive of whether animals would live or die with radiation. There was a big AEC interest in [that] aspect of the work.
GOURLEY:	So, did you work with them on that?
GOFMAN:	Yes; they were graduate students of mine but that wasn't my main line. My main line was on the heart disease aspects. We were able to show [that] lipoprotein levels were [predictive of] heart disease.