The Lovelace Foundation owed its existence to Randolph Lovelace I, and was responsible for a clinic and hospital (the Bataan Memorial Hospital) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. By the beginning of the 1950s the Lovelace Clinic was a major contractor to the United States government in the field of research into the biological effects of nuclear weapons.
Solly Zuckerman's association with the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research dates back to 1951, when he was asked by the Air Ministry's Flying Personnel Research Committee (FPRC), on behalf of Dr W. Randolph Lovelace, Chairman of the [U.S.] Armed Forces Medical Policy Council, to go over to America and advise them on problems of blast effects, which have been given top priority by the Department of Defence [sic].
The Clinic's Director of Research was Dr Clayton S. (Sam) White and much of the correspondence in File SZ/LF/1 is with him and Randolph (Randy) Lovelace II. The first sub-file of correspondence, covering 1951-1962, deals almost exclusively with the collaborative work that Zuckerman and his colleagues at Birmingham University carried out with the Lovelace Foundation and other American agencies, in particular the Sandia Laboratories at Los Alamos. The second deals with Zuckerman's appointment as a Trustee of the Foundation in 1972, the business of the Board of Trustees, and his visits to Albuquerque. There are also references to arrangements for Zuckerman to deliver the William Randolph Lovelace II Memorial Lecture, entilted Pride and prejudice in science, in 1974.
File SZ/LF/2 consists of reports from a variety of sources on blast, wound ballistics, and casualties from nuclear explosions.
There is some complementarity with Series SZ/BUF.