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The next item is an installations engineer facility. The requirement for this facility is 30,400 square feet. The requested facility along with the assets existing both at Canaveral and Patrick main base will fill the requirement for this activity.

The last item is for an automotive maintenance facility. This will provide a small automotive maintenance facility at Cape Canaveral. Up till now vehicles have been maintained at Patrick, a distance of some 17 miles round trip away.

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection.

Colonel JACKSON. The next one, Mr. Chairman, is Patrick Air Force Base, on page 324. The authorization requested here is $2,147,000. The major items are an airman dormitory, and officers' quarters.

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, that item is approved.

Mr. KELLEHER. Mr. Chairman, I might point out there will be an amendment with respect to Patrick later in the bill in connection with the road that was constructed down there, but not at this point. The CHAIRMAN. All right.

Mr. Kilday.

Mr. KILDAY. Mr. Chairman, at this point may I ask consent to take up another matter?

It does not properly belong under Research and Development Command, but there is no place in the bill where it could very properly belong, but it is probably more related to research and development than any other subject. I would like to have it presented at this time for fear we may get a reorganization bill that would make it a felony for a member to attempt to add something to the Department of Defense that he wants. [Laughter.]

The CHAIRMAN. I trust, in connection-may I interrupt you? I trust every member at least will give time and attention to the remarks made by the distinguished gentleman from Texas yesterday on the floor of the House. It was my privilege to hear him deliver his address to the House. I consider it one of the greatest statements that has been made during the years that I have been in the Congress. It is worth every member reading it.

Mr. KILDAY. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Now go ahead.

Mr. KILDAY. General Benson, the commandant of the School of Aviation Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base is present. I want to make it clear he has not volunteered. I have requested through the staff that he be made available. He is here and I would like to have him heard at this time.

The CHAIRMAN. General, will you please come around?

Mr. RIVERS. Speak before they demote you.

The CHAIRMAN. This is the hospital-research, medical research? Mr. KILDAY. Right.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Kilday, have you an amendment to offer? Mr. KILDAY. I will see about that after we develop a few facts from General Benson. I saw the general in the audience after I got here. Mr. Chairman, I have a bill pending-I don't have the number before me now, but it reads as follows:

In addition to all construction heretofore authorized, the Secretary of the Air Force is authorized to proceed with the construction of operational training

facilities, research and development, test facilities, supply facilities, hospital and medical facilities, administrative facilities, troop housing, community facilities and utilities, ground improvements, to the School of Aviation and Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base, Tex., in the amount of $22 million.

This bill was offered by me immediately-a day or two after the young man had spent a very considerable time, a week, I believe, in simulated space. It gave the opportunity to point up the very bad manner in which the School of Aviation Medicine had been treated. This is due primarily to actions by the Bureau of the Budget in insisting that the installation proposed as they originally proposed the aeromedical center, be restricted.

We have thus far authorized in 1 authorization $8 million. And in the past public works bill there was an authorization of about $900,000 covering an altitude chamber or laboratory.

The amount that I had offered was the balance contemplated in the original concept of the aeromedical center.

I would like to now ask General Benson if he is in a position to give us and perhaps in order of priority-priority of importance to the School of Aviation Medicine, in its development, the additional items which would be necessary at the School of Aviation Medicine, or if the general has a statement, that he would be permitted to read it at this time.

General BENSON. Thank you very much. I would like to read a statement, if I may, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. You may proceed.

General BENSON. And make a couple of comments then.

The request for additional facilities for the School of Aviation. Medicine, USAF, represents longstanding requirements of the Air Force. Even the fullest utilization of facilities now under construction under the terms of the previous authorization and appropriation will suffice only to modernize and approximate the present activities of the school. The plans and the original Air Force request for $30 million would have provided timely anticipation of the problems of the missile and space age now upon us. Even more compelling, the restrictions of funds have made it necessary to design and construct components of the facility so narrowly that flexibility to meet the challenge of the present, let alone the future, is absent entirely in the most critical areas of needed research.

The School of Aviation Medicine, USAF, is the focal point of graduate teaching, and aviation medical research. It provides answers to complex problems of man in flight and in control of supraterrestial vehicles, and transforms these answers into design information for new weapon systems and into teaching flight surgeons, flight nurses, and aeromedical technicians the new arts of aviation medicine. It is essential that the fundamental information necessary to the preservation and maintenance of the health, well-being, and operational efficiency of Air Force personnel be available before and not after the need for the information occurs.

Pressing requirements which the present facilities now under construction fail to provide, are those for assessing the damage, and cure of radiation effects on living substances, the precautionary methods and measures to be taken against airborne bacteria and infectious agents, and the toxic effects of vapors, fumes, gases, and other

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hazards which have newly arrived with rocket and missile operation. Space is itself a challenge to man. To the future of the Air Force, which may be compelled to operate there, the study of man in space, a study already under preliminary investigation by the school, must be expanded to include the ecology of closed systems and to provide indoctrination of medical personnel.

Present-day research investigates the large and small, and without a clear picture of both comprehensive understanding of even commonplace events is lacking. The effects of new Air Force environments on the cellular structures of man demands multidisciplinary attacks in vibrationless, stable temperatured antiseptic environments where independent and related work of dentistry, biodynamics, bionucleonics, and their components of the school may find solutions at the cellular level.

Tremendous forces operate on man in modern and projected weapon systems. The often bizarre and previously unexperienced forces of gravity and acceleration are part of the new environment of the Air Force. Who can stand these stresses, after what illnesses and traumas, and in what patterns? Not only are research answers required, but the school has the very practical problem, though a new one, of weeding out those cases referred to the school for clinical evaluation because of poor responses to flight stresses.

The heart of a research and teaching institution is its library, documents, and data collections. The goal of the scientist is to make his information known to others, and to do so he must have a place to write, to think, and to plan. A library and professional building, available to all, is essential to meaningful research output as any other in the facility.

The men and women, officers, airmen, and civilians, who work in such a facility as this are inextricably tied to the schedules of their experiments. A radiation schedule may permit a normal 8-hour workday, but it is unlikely. Scientists and technicians work as required, and all work more than the accepted 8 to 5 o'clock pattern. They must be near their work. The more convenient the better. Housing for the key personnel of such an institution is accurately described as essential. Bachelor quarters for officers and nurses are also a requirement. These students, who, except for the nurses and aeromedical technicians, are already practicing doctors of medicine, are assigned postgraduate homework. A place in which to live and to study must be available and adequate to their needs. The numerous cases of flying failures or inadequacies which are now referred to the school for diagnoses and recommendations should be housed close to the facility and they should be willing to stay on base during their examination period, which may extend from hours to days.

Ancillary to the housing and, in fact, all personnel is the need for places to worship, to dine, entertain, and to lead generally normal lives.

Some auxillary support in the form of warehousing for temporarily unused scientific equipment and supplies, firehouses, and maintenance shops are included.

These functions and facilities, combined with those now under construction, will enable the school to pursue its mission and to meet the challenges of advancement in sciences and applications for as far into

the future as it is presently safe to estimate. It will provide sufficient flexibility to meet new directions of research and teaching, with minimum demands in the future.

I would now like to say that the mission of the school in education is the research and clinical consultation. We are training all of the young men that go with the Army aviation. I think now we have trained approximately 90.

We are training 10 to 15 per class at the school. We are training at the present time I have 20 from NATO and other countries, friendly countries from all over the world, 10 from West Germany at the present time, including the surgeon general of the new Luftwaffe. Up until 1938 we trained the Navy.

We see all the problem cases of the Air Force. that we have to have a home base for research.

Now my feeling is

Very recently there was a symposium here in the city of Washington that was sponsored by the American Institute of the Biological Sciences, by the National Academy of Sciences, and by the National Science Foundation. Four or five of our schools participated, and I sent two or three others as special observers. They all came back and said, "We did not learn very much."

Now, that is to say that the knowledge right now for much of this space thing is unfortunately not in the universities, but it is in the very few small laboratories that are Government-supported. These are the people who have had the responsibility and have been doing the work over the years.

I think you have to have an installation at which this knowledge can be developed or where a responsibility for such development exists. We just seem to knock ourselves out in briefings from industry, from universities, and from everywhere. But the minute industry gets a contract, we get them all in our front door to find out how they will get answers to these things in the biomedical areas.

Now, we are spending full time on our tasks-and I think that is a very important thing. I would say that universities, by and large, and other types of institutions, can't solve problems where you have to have human investigations, human experiments, of a dangerous kind. They go to penitentiaries, very often under Government sponsorship-they can't handle arduous and dangerous experimentation. I have yet to see the university or private foundation that can do that type of thing.

And always we have to end up by proving things out finally on the man, before we actually, as I say, send him aloft.

I think, Mr. Chairman, that I have said enough here.

In answer to Mr. Kilday's questions, we are requesting seven principal professional or scientific buildings.

Mr. GAVIN. Scientific what?

General BENSON. Buildings, in this increment, in this $22 million. One is a very, very important building on bionucleonics. It is really a building to study radiobiology. There is a wing for toxicology.

I have mentioned the new exotic fuels that are constantly creeping in and increasing all the time in numbers and in the complexity of these things.

We now do a lot of work in radiation, but our laboratories are scattered. We support a laboratory at the University of Chicago. We

are supporting a laboratory in which we jointly work at the University of Texas.

We would still support some of this work in universities, but we would like to have a better degree of concentration of our efforts. I think it would be economical and I think we would get along with our work a little more rapidly.

We have the responsibility for the Air Force for all of the human and biological effects of nuclear propulsion. That is a responsibility of my institution.

Another very important building is really a tremendous laboratory for space medicine studies. I have some photographs here of where space medicine is today, and it is a pretty primitive setup. I would be glad to show them to the committee.

Mr. RIVERS. May I inquire, Mr. Chairman, of the doctor, is this your main school in the United States?

General BENSON. My Navy friends, I think, would agree with me. The answer, sir, is "yes."

Mr. RIVERS. I was not speaking for them.

General BENSON. Sir?

Mr. RIVERS. I was speaking about the Air Force.

General BENSON. Oh, yes; as far as I am concerned, there is one School of Aviation Medicine in the world.

Mr. KILDAY. The school is very old, Mr. Chairman. It was established in 1928. The new facilities are authorized by the committeewhat was it, about 6 years ago?

General BENSON. Yes, sir.

Mr. KILDAY. And then we went along in a constant battle with the Bureau of the Budget about getting any funds. But it is now under construction at its new location. As the general had testified, it actually constitutes only a replacement-perhaps more space than he now has in the existing School of Aviation Medicine.

General BENSON. Very little more.

Mr. KILDAY. Little more?

General BENSON. Very little more space than we now have in a group of temporary buildings.

Mr. KILDAY. And not taking care of the new problems which are created by the new speeds and altitudes and space?

General BENSON. Yes, sir.

Mr. RIVERS. Of course

Mr. KILDAY. Now, General, I want to show you here a document entitled "Proposed Utilization of Additional Funds for the School of Aviation Medicine." I believe this originated at the School of Aviation Medicine. It was furnished to me by the Headquarters of the Air Force.

I would like to have it identified and ask that it be included in the record at this point.

Mr. GAVIN. What is the total cost of the overall projects-the seven buildings?

General BENSON. Of those seven buildings, approximately $12 million, sir.

Mr. GAVIN. What are you asking for now?

General BENSON. The proposal is for $22 million.

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