Five years after the atomic bomb was tested at Alamogordo, N.M., Army Lt. Col. John H. Rust became the first to disclose to the public the incidence of cancer and other effects of radiation among a herd of cattle that grazed downwind from the blast.
He also reassured the nation during the height of the Cold War that cattle subjected to radiation could be safely eaten if the need arose.
Dr. Rust, who held doctorate degrees in veterinary medicine and pharmacology and who once served as director of animal research at the University of Chicago, later investigated the 1978 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island for Illinois officials looking for ways to prevent similar disasters here.
And in 1992, he was part of a select team of western scientists to visit the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Dr. Rust, 91, one of the earliest experts to investigate radiation effects on animals and humans, died Sunday, Feb. 11, in the University of Chicago Hospitals of complications related to leukemia.
“He was one of the top people in the United States who dealt with the effects of full-body radiation on animals,” said Dr. Willard J. Visek, professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “There was nobody that I know that could touch him in the veterinary field.”
Dr. Rust trained to be a veterinarian at Kansas State University and earned his doctor of veterinary medicine in 1932, the same year he married the former Mary Jo Cortelyou. Strapped for money, he joined a veterinary practice in New Hampshire rather than pursue further medical schooling. Three years later, he joined the Army Veterinary Corps, and after World War II, was sent to Duke University and the U. of C. for training in medicine, biophysics and radiation biology.
He was assigned by the Army in 1950 to serve as pathologist for an Atomic Energy Commission agricultural research program in Oak Ridge, Tenn., now the focal point of a class-action suit that claims contaminants released from government programs there sickened people for miles around.
While a pathologist with the Army, he revealed to reporters in 1950 that precancerous conditions were discovered in cattle following the Alamogordo test.
In 1954, Utah ranchers accused Dr. Rust of helping the government cover up the cause of widespread deaths among sheep, fatalities alleged to be the result of radiation poisoning. (Dr. Rust impatiently blamed starvation and a bitter winter.) In 1954 while still with the Army, Dr. Rust studied the effects of radiation on metabolism at the U. of C. and two years later earned a PhD in pharmacology from the university. After leaving the Army in 1958, he briefly lectured on food safety and toxicology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to the U. of C. as a faculty member.
In a 1959 interview with the Tribune, Dr. Rust acknowledged public uneasiness with atomic energy, but he stressed that radiation was “here to stay.”
“It can be servant or master,” he said at the time. “What we will try to do is see how we can live with it.”
While in Chicago, he continued to do research on the detrimental effects of radiation and directed the U. of C.’s animal research laboratory from 1967 until 1972. He retired from the university the next year but continued consulting for public utilities and pharmaceutical companies until 1990. He wrote or contributed throughout his career to more than 150 research papers and eight books on the uses and effects of radiation.
“His scientific stature was stellar. He was one of the big guys back in the early days of nuclear medicine,” said Dr. John Fennessy, former chairman of the department of radiology at U. of C., adding that Dr. Rust never lost his down-home gentility. “He was one of these odd fellows that never talked about himself, never boasted about himself and was a most unassuming sort of fellow.”
Dr. Rust is survived by two daughters, Mary Townsend and Joan Johnson; two sons, Jim and Jack; eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
No memorial service is planned.
