Radiation

There was no doubt that slim, dark, 30-year-old Dorothy L. Burns was desperately ill. But what had caused her chest pains, coughing spasms, and the slow fibrous degeneration of both lungs?

Last week, in a suit filed in New Jersey's Federal Court, she told what she thought ailed her. In 1942, said Miss Burns, she had gone to work in Westinghouse's Bloomfield (N.J.) plant, and had been assigned to a laboratory job. Almost four years later, she learned she had been working on one of the minor processes in the development of the atomic bomb. The hot sheet metal she had been cutting into squares, she said, contained radioactive uranium.

Last June, when she read of U.S. awards to Westinghouse for its wartime atomic work, Miss Burns said that she got the first inkling that it might be uranium radiation that had caused her illness. Her suit against Westinghouse: $200,000 damages.

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