S. Somasundaram (1930-2024) – Obituary

Somasundaram passed away at his home in Texas, USA, on March 11, 2024, leaving behind a large retinue of colleagues and friends who benefited from him during his long professional career with the DAE, India, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Vienna. After a brilliant academic postgraduation at the Presidency College, Madras, Somasundaram along with Somayaji joined the Health Physics Division of AEET (now BARC) in 1956. Both were top two rankers in the same college and fate willed that both together would shape the destiny of the Health Physics Division of AEET. That was the time Anil Kumar Ganguly who held a glorious academic position in the field of Radiation Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame in USA had just been selected by Homi Bhabha to organize Waste Management and Health Physics for the Indian Atomic Energy program. And, all three had a matching temperament and quickly gravitated into a wonderful team. Somasundaram was the epitome of humility but with a unique sense of devotion to duty. He started by organizing and developing the health physics documentation and setting up radiation secondary safety limits in the Indian context. Much before library activities were initiated in BARC, Somasundaram in an innovative manner organized the Health Physics Divisional Library with no demand for funds except to get half a dozen filing cabinets. He got reprint request cards printed that can be posted directly and made them available at the divisional office. Staff members were encouraged to request reports of relevant publications and reports from Western labs. Soon, such documentation flooded the division library and staff members had very useful references for their work. More familiar in those days were the ANL, BNL, ORNL, USNRDL, and ICRP reports, manuals, and data tables. He placed one of his colleagues to take care of the library with indexed filing cards. It was little known outside that Somasundaram can be described as the father of the library structure in AEET. That was typical of Somasundaram who did things silently. D. V. Gopinath, a veteran contemporary of Somasundaram remarks: “Suddenly one day in 1958 Somasundaram asked me whether I would consider publishing my results on radioactivity build up on Apsara reactor coolant as a technical report and that he would do the entire spade work.” The response from Ganguly was as expected, “Go ahead, do it.” That was the beginning of the first formalized series of technical reports in DAE, similar to ORNL and ANL reports, and we titled it “AEET-HP-Th-1: Radioactivity build up in reactor coolant water.” He quickly realized that the standard man norms followed by ICRP in setting up radiation safety would be different in the Indian context. He initiated a program to collate data to set an Indian standard man from scratch as early as 1960. He initiated work on collecting data on organ weights from hospital postmortem data of accident victims in various hospitals in India. He sought expertise on this from various leading medical organizations in India. He was one of the first from AEET to be deputed for training in the USA under the USAID program in 1961 and he creditably obtained a Master’s Degree in Public Health from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During his training, he on his initiative made personal contacts with leading experts like Karl Z. Morgan, Snyder, and others and became familiar with the ICRP methodology for data analyses. That helped him in his work on Indian Standard Man. His work was commended by the ICRP which initiated wider activities on Asian standard man and influenced ICRP on setting radioactivity intake limits. One of his innovations was to generate data on water intake by volunteers among staff members of AEET by asking volunteers to drink water from a measured tumbler issued to them along with a card to record the intakes. He developed secondary limits of hand contamination for radioactivity limits to be practiced in the personal decontamination of workers in the AEET plants and labs by carrying out measurements of actual cases of contamination and by simulation. He showed that transfer factors for such limits would be more stringent than those followed in practices of the West due to food habits in India. He surmised that since South Indian food contained several acidic ingredients and the habit of taking food by hand enabled even fixed contamination to get transferred by ion exchange into the body, more stringent practices were needed in India than those practiced in Western countries. Somasundaram put into practice the basics of organizing health physics operations in the different plants and reactors in Trombay. He initiated work on preparing a Health Physics Handbook similar to the one from ANL. That was the time Dr. Ganguly organized the health physics structure for the radioactive plants and labs in Trombay by insisting on the need for an independent safety organization and winning over the reactor engineers who wanted to follow the Canadian pattern of Health Physicists reporting to the station director. Dr. Bhabha saw the merit of Ganguly’s approach and backed it. Even today, that is the basis of safety organization in BARC. Somasundaram did a yeoman job in implementing those mandates at the working level in the plants. Once when he insisted that health physics personnel would only supervise by monitoring radiation levels in carrying out decontamination at the CIR reactor and would not carry out decontamination as practiced earlier. He implemented the spirit of the mandate he received from Ganguly. Practically, every piece of documentation and paper in health physics went through his expert editing hands in those days with his print-like alphabet-by-alphabet handwriting. When he sent me his contribution of 50 pages of neatly handwritten memoirs of Dr. Ganguly for inclusion in the Ganguly Centenary Compendium published by Indian Association for Radiation Protection (IARP) in 2018, I was impressed by his trademark handwriting even at an advanced age.[1] Recognizing his services in the area of radiation protection, his professional services were made available to the IAEA in Vienna for 4 years from 1965 to 1969. He was one of the first to be deputed from AEET to the IAEA. That marked a watershed in his remarkable career. And turned out to be another dimension of his activities that became his lifetime contribution later in internal dosimetry using body counting techniques. That became his passion ever since. He made significant contributions in this field, both in the national and international arena. His expertise was used by the IAEA in organizing the application of whole-body counting techniques both for radiation protection and medical applications. During his tenure at IAEA, he visited several countries and compiled a directory of whole-body counters around the world. He compiled and reviewed data on radiation exposure of radium dial workers. In every assignment, Somasundaram showed his mettle in organizational and documentation skills and always put his heart into it. This was noticed by Dr. Ganguly and so on his return, Dr. Ganguly asked him to take over the body burden measurements (BBM) section as its head, with the responsibility of developing internal dosimetry. Due to his international reputation for excellence in documentation and organizational ability, Somasundaram soon was given an important assignment on the directions of AEC chairman Sarabhai to act as Secretary of the First National Conference on Electronics from February to August 1970. This important conference was organized jointly by DAE and DOE to reorganize electronics activities in India. Somasundaram excelled in his duties as the secretary of this conference which set the electronics revolution in India. Somasundaram remembers that once Sarabhai showed him the communication in which PM Indira Gandhi commended the role played by him. As a result, Somasundaram was tipped to be the Secretary to the Electronic Commission being setup. However, in the end, Somasundaram preferred to resume his technical assignments at BARC rather than shift to the new arena. And, he resumed his stewardship of BBM section which had the responsibility of internal dosimetry of radio nuclides in the Indian atomic energy program. At that time, IAEA sought the services of Somasundaram for a 2-month assignment on setting up radiation protection programs for IAEA in some Asian countries which enabled him to show his mettle in organizing radiation protection. His contributions at the international level were considerable. Apart from this, the conference on environment that Ganguly organized on directive from Sarabhai for which Somayyaji was secretary also benefited from the services of Somasundaram. Another dimension of his activities was the development of body counters using shadow shield counters. The graded shielding using steel sheets that can be easily set up at power reactor sites for internal dosimetry of possible intake of gamma emitting contaminants was a special contribution of Somasundaram. Somasundaram launched and demonstrated the use of shadow shield counters for radiation medicine centre (RMC) applications and even supplied them to hospitals. A few of them were in regular use in some Bombay Hospitals. His contributions on the development of internal dosimetry can be summarized as below: Development of shadow shield counters and their deployment in various DAE sites like Tarapur, Kalpakkam, Narora, Kakrapara, and Kaiga, and front-end facilities at IRE and at NFC, and enabled the health physics units to control and assess the internal dose of the radiation workers In vivo measurement of Pu-239 and other actinides using low energy gamma spectrometry. In vitro analysis of human body tissues and body fluids for estimation of trace elements Innovated use of shadow shield counters for radiation medicine applications using radioactive tracers to study body function and in diagnostic medicine Use of body counters for distribution of K-40 in children. A shadow shield counter with advanced features was also provided to the Philippines with whom India had a collaboration program under an IAEA contract. In vivo, counting of transuranic using low energy photons to measure the pulmonary deposit of inhaled Pu posed challenges due to the very low energy X-rays emitted by these isotopes and their very low limits of body burden. The varying attenuation by the chest wall of the subjects was also challenging. Somasundaram and his team had done pioneering work in the development of special detectors and adaptation of methodologies for these measurements. Gas ionization, gas scintillation, thin NaI detector, NaI-CsI phoswich combination, etc., were tried out for this purpose. The necessary and innovative electronics were also developed in-house. At the IAEA Conference on Internal Contamination held in Sweden in 1975, Somasundaram gave the keynote address and chaired the panel discussion. Panelists included pioneers like Morgan who headed ICRP later and he was familiar with Somasundaram’s contributions. This Conference also led to fruitful collaborative programs with Newton of AERE Harwell. Under this, Newton visited BBMS and had a very useful month-long interaction with Somasundaram. He suggested the use of short-lived radioisotope Pd-109 as a tracer for the calibration of phoswich detectors to simulate Pu-239 X-rays. Kotrappa who was by then doing pioneering work on aerosol physics had developed polystyrene aerosol generators. He tagged them with Pd-109 for their use as tracers (mock plutonium) in volunteer subjects. Somasundaram volunteered to inhale these which resulted in only a minute dose and enabled him to carry out very useful research in using this method to calibrate phoswich detectors. This was carried out under the bilateral program with the same subjects being counted in Harwell as well as in BARC and produced very useful results. All these show how resourceful was Somasundaram to make use of his international openings. As an improvement of this calibration procedure, Somasundaram initiated a program with Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to develop a realistic chest phantom with a known amount of impregnated mock Pu-239. BBMS participated in this program. This resulted in an important contribution from India and was published as a report. Many international experts commended the contributions of Somasundaram in this area. From organizing internal dosimetry activities, Somasundaram was then given the wider responsibility of heading the Radiation Hazards Control Section of BARC where his expertise was put to use in putting radiation safety on a firmer footing in BARC. It is also worth mentioning that Somasundaram took on the responsibility of getting the IARP registered in its formative stages. Toward the end of his career in BARC, his expertise in documentation was an asset to the Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority. Somasundaram worked for the organization and delivered results in a silent manner projecting his coworkers. His earlier work that led to formalizing a radiation safety manual for BARC became a model for AERB. I had personally benefited from his guidance when destiny made me sit on his chair as Head of the RHC Section in 1987 as Somasundaram was shifted to AERB. He meticulously and unselfishly gave me daily guidance in the same office room for a month from which Dr. Ganguly also guided the destiny of the health physics division. I mentioned this to show how sincere Somasundaram was when he spent 1 month teaching me the nuances of management while he was being forced to leave his familiar turf. Nobody else perhaps would spend time to do this! I consider myself lucky to have been the recipient of the guidance of Somasundaram from time to time from the day I joined AEET in 1958 to this day. Somasundaram leaves a legacy, particularly for the science and art of radiation protection that should inspire a whole new generation of radiation safety scientists, many of whom had not seen him in action. M R Iyer, Former Head RSSD, BARC and IAEA Safeguards Professional

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