Clayton Sam White

White died on April 26, 2004, at the Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 1977, on the centennial celebration of the founding of the University of Colorado, Byron and Sam White received Alumnus of the Century awards, in law and medicine, respectively. Among other awards, Sam White received a U.S. Air Force Exceptional Service Award in 1960 and the National Disaster Preparedness Award in 1962.

In 1974, White left Lovelace to become President of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, a non-profit that conducts biomedical research in the treatment and cure of human disease.  In 1979, saying he missed the New Mexico mountains, he returned to Albuquerque to serve as President of the Lovelace Center for the Health Sciences.

For nearly three decades, White led wide-ranging, enterprising research at the Lovelace Foundation, first as Director of Research, then as President after William Randolph Lovelace II was killed in a private plane accident in 1965. White established the inter-disciplinary Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute at Lovelace to examine not only the effects of inhaling small fission particles produced by nuclear tests but also the environmental impact of consumer products on the ozone layer, and the health risks of inhaling manmade fibers, diesel exhaust and other substances.  Within years of its founding, the institute “earned worldwide distinction in the field of inhalation toxicology research.”

White’s younger brother, Byron Raymond White, served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1962 to 1993 and as Deputy Attorney General under John F. Kennedy.

Another area of White’s focus was the physiological effect of the high atmosphere on the human body. His research in aviation medicine contributed significantly to the exhaustive physiological and psychological tests conducted in 1959 on the thirty-two candidates competing to become the Mercury Seven astronauts, as depicted in the book and film The Right Stuff.

Many of the legendary test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in California, such as Scott Crossfield and Chuck Yeager, routinely visited Lovelace for medical consultation.In 1958, White and Randy Lovelace assembled the medical team that designed and conducted the exhaustive battery of tests on the thirty-two candidates competing to become Mercury astronauts. The so-called Mercury Seven, the first American astronauts to fly in space, included John Glenn, Scott Carpenter and Alan Shepard. The tests at Lovelace were graphically depicted in the book and film, “The Right Stuff.”

From his collected data, in 1957, White and his team produced a “nuclear bomb effects computer,” essentially a circular slide rule designed to “calculate 28 different effects, ranging from blast to thermal radiation, initial nuclear radiation, early fallout, crater dimensions and fireball dimensions.” The device was updated over the years and included in a sleeve at the back of Samuel Glasstone’s book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. A 1962 edition of the computer is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. It is also displayed at the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The computer appears in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, when Peter Sellers, playing the president’s demented scientific adviser, pulls the circular device from his jacket pocket to calculate how long people might need to remain in underground bunkers after a nuclear attack.

In addition to authoring more than 125 scientific and technical articles, some of which remain classified, he wrote two books: Physics and Medicine of the Upper Atmosphere (1952) and Blast Biology (1960).

In 1951, White assembled an international symposium on aviation medicine which became the basis of his book, “Physics and Medicine of the Upper Atmosphere,” and demonstrated the need for collaborative work among disciplines. He stressed work across scientific disciplines throughout his career, stating he was “more and more concerned that we in this country and the world have moved way too far in the direction of specialties and not far enough in developing generalists and integrative endeavors.”

In 1951, the Lovelace Foundation received its first major contract from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and White launched the work for which he is best known, the field of “blast and shock biology.” At the time, most studies of the damage resulting from the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki focused on radiation. But White was drawn to the unexplored devastation caused by the blast and shock wave emanating from the detonations. Observing the post-bombing landscape in Japan, he was fascinated by “how a bomb could flatten one building and leave an adjacent building untouched.” He eventually developed mathematical formulae to explain the phenomenon. As he also noted, the teams that went to Japan to aid the bombing victims spent “more time … picking window glass out of victims than in treating any other injury” including radiation sickness.

Much of White’s research was conducted at nuclear tests in the desert of the Nevada Test Site (an area established in 1951 for the testing of nuclear devices, now called the Nevada National Security Site) and at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque where he and his team designed “shock tubes” through which air was forced at high velocity to mimic the effects of atomic blasts. In Nevada, White measured the effectiveness of bomb shelters, often using models and dummies he constructed in a small tool shop in his Albuquerque home garage.

In 1947, upon completion of his military service, White moved to Albuquerque as Director of Research at the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research which became “world renowned in terms of research and teaching.”

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, White enlisted in the Navy. He completed medical school in Colorado as a naval reserve officer and, in 1942, was assigned to Alameda Naval Air Station in Alameda, California. Shortly after, he was sent to the Naval Air Station Pensacola in Pensacola, Florida, where he enrolled in courses in aviation medicine and flight training at the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine. He was designated a flight surgeon in 1944.

White captained the Oxford lacrosse team and, in 1938, earned a degree in physiology before returning to the University of Colorado to start medical school. As a student he began publishing scientific papers. One, on the effects of botulism on the nervous system, sparked a lifelong interest in neurology.

After graduation, White began pre-med graduate courses while working in a medical lab to earn money for medical school. In 1935, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and left for England on what would be his first trip outside his home state of Colorado. Until 2006, Sam White and Byron White, a Rhodes pick in 1938, were the only siblings to be selected as Rhodes Scholars

Though neither of White’s parents attended school beyond sixth grade, they preached the value of education to their sons. White was a star student and athlete at Wellington High School, and valedictorian of his 1930 graduating class. Upon high school graduation, White accepted an academic scholarship to the University of Colorado where he majored in psychology with minors in physics and mathematics. He was president of the student body and played basketball and football, earning all-conference honors as a football end. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1934.

Clayton "Sam" Samuel White (October 11, 1912 – April 26, 2004) was an American physician, nuclear physicist and medical researcher best known for developing the field of “blast and shock biology” which explored the effects of blast and shock waves from nuclear bombs and other explosions. By bringing together the disciplines of mathematics, physics, biology and anatomy, White was able to measure the impact of nuclear weapons on physical structures and the human body.

Clayton Samuel White, known as "Sam," was born in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1912 to Alpha Albert White, a sheep ranch hand and lumberyard manager, and Maude Elizabeth Burger. He was raised in Wellington, Colorado, then a hamlet of 550 residents. His first job, in grade school, was picking beets for $1.50 a day. In high school, during the Great Depression, he and his brother worked the fields after school and on weekends.