Herbert M. Parker Papers, 1940s-1994

Herbert Parker was born in Accrington, England in 1910 and studied at the University of Manchester. Parker began his career as a medical physicist at the Christie Hospital and Holt Radium Institute in Manchester, England (1932-1938), where, with radiologist Ralston Paterson, he developed a system of dosimetry for radiotherapy known as the Paterson-Parker techniques that is still in use today. In 1938, he moved to the United States to take a comparable position at the Swedish Hospital tumor Institute in Seattle, where he carried out research in supervoltage x-ray therapy. During the war, Parker was one of the first health physicists at the Met Lab in Chicago (1942-1943) and at the Clinton Laboratories in Tennessee (1943-1944). In 1944 he moved to the Hanford Engineer Works, where he remained long after the war, finally becoming manager of Hanford Laboratories, where he built a world renowned radiobiology and health physics research program. After General Electric left Hanford, Parker served as staff consultant to the Pacific Northwest Laboratories of the Battelle Memorial Institute (1965-1971), and, after retirement, formed a consulting company H.M.P. Associates, based in Richland, Washington.

Parker had the onerous task of providing radiation protection for thousands of workers in a new industry, the hazards of which were not well known. In 1944 he put forth for the first time a maximum permissible concentration level for plutonium and subsequently devised standard quantities units of ionizing radiation dose, first the rep (roentgen equivalent physical), also known as the parker, and the rem, the unit of biological dose. These serve as the historic forerunners of modern radiation protection quantities and units. Parker remained a leading force in radiation protection (health physics) for three decades, serving on the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and numerous national and international committees. He died in 1984.