[ RadSafe ] LNT

Mon Sep 26 19:01:09 CDT 2011

Jerry, benefit of LDR  CAN be "proven".
Evidence increases since your July 2002 Health Physics Symposium.
Scan www.aapsonline.org  "Journal" (in the right column) for a pertinent title in most issues,
from - Can Cancer Be Treated With Low Doses Of Radiation? 
Cuttler and Pollycove, Winter 2003 to 
A Guide To Radiation Hazard Evaluation, Applied To Fukushima Recovery Workers
Bobby Scott Fall 2011
Cohen, Luckey and other reliable researchers also state their cases in those AAPS journals.

There is greater longevity with 1-10 cSv/yr (more than most Americans get), 
so I sit on a Denver dose of thoriated welding rods.
Any volunteers want to join me in an experiment similar to the (unintended) experiment with CO 60 radiation in Taiwan apartments, (in one of those articles)?

Howard Long MD MPH

On Sep 26, 2011, at 1:50 PM, Jerry Cohen <jjc105 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Those who do not subscribe to LNT have the same problem as atheists. 
> Just as it cannot be proven that there is no God, it cannot be proven that 
> there are no harmful effects from low-dose radiation exposure. 
> Philosophically, a negative can never be proven. 
> So, it seems the debate may continue indefinately.
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: "Brennan, Mike (DOH)" <Mike.Brennan at DOH.WA.GOV>
> To: The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) MailingList 
> <radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu>
> Sent: Mon, September 26, 2011 10:24:40 AM
> Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Researcher Points to Suppression of Evidence On 
> Radiation Effects by Nobel Laureate
> 
> Without intending to disparage anyone on any side of the issue, reading
> someone's archived correspondence doesn't necessarily give you complete
> insight into their thoughts and motivations, and publishing "key
> excerpts" does not always capture the truest picture.  
> 
> But regardless of what was thought or known or believed in the 1940s, it
> is time to systematically revisit Linear No Threshold.  LNT is at its
> heart a statistical argument, and there is perhaps no single field in
> which the available tools have changed so much as our ability to
> manipulate lots and lots of numbers.  Even if there were no basic
> disagreement about the validity of LNT, it would STILL be time to look
> at it again more closely.  
> 
> I believe that it shouldn't be too difficult or expensive to put
> together an experiment that will have the power to pretty much answer
> the question about LNT's legitimacy.  The trick is that it should not be
> done by people who think LNT is wrong, or by people who think it is
> right.  Instead, several researchers with enough street cred to make
> people listen, and who are on opposite sides of the issue, should get
> together and design the experiments together.  If they work to make sure
> that all possible objections are addressed before the experiment
> actually begins, they should produce something truly impressive.  Yes,
> someone will be proven wrong, but they will have been proven wrong in
> the best possible way, and any prestige they loose from being wrong will
> be more than replaced by being shown to be scientists in the finest
> tradition.  
> 
> So, someone out there; get to it. 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu
> [mailto:radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu] On Behalf Of Miller, Mark L
> Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 4:04 PM
> To: The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing List
> Cc: Johnson, Dr. Janet @ MFG; Roberts; Glenn at agni.phys.iit.edu; Bob
> Meyer; Little, Bonnie Colleen; Mark Miller @ home
> (marklmiller at comcast.net)
> Subject: [ RadSafe ] Researcher Points to Suppression of Evidence On
> Radiation Effects by Nobel Laureate
> 
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110920163320.htm
> No Safe Level of Radiation Exposure? Researcher Points to Suppression of
> Evidence On Radiation Effects by Nobel Laureate
> ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2011) - University of Massachusetts Amherst
> environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese, whose career research shows
> that low doses of some chemicals and radiation are benign or even
> helpful, says he has uncovered evidence that one of the fathers of
> radiation genetics, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller, knowingly lied
> when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation
> exposure.
> Calabrese's interpretation of this history is supported by letters and
> other materials he has retrieved, many from formerly classified files.
> He published key excerpts this month in Archives of Toxicology and
> Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis.
> Muller was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery
> that X-rays induce genetic mutations. This helped him call attention to
> his long-time concern over the dangers of atomic testing. Muller's
> intentions were good, Calabrese points out, but his decision not to
> mention key scientific evidence against his position has had a
> far-reaching impact on our approach to regulating radiation and chemical
> exposure.
> Calabrese uncovered correspondence from November 1946 between Muller and
> Curt Stern at the University of Rochester about a major experiment that
> had recently evaluated fruit fly germ cell mutations in Stern's
> laboratory. It failed to support the linear dose-response model at low
> exposure levels, but in Muller's speech in Oslo a few weeks later he
> insisted there was "no escape from the conclusion that there is no
> threshold." To Calabrese, this amounts to deliberate concealment and he
> says Stern raised no objection.
> Calabrese adds, "This isn't an academic debate, it's really practical,
> because all of our rules about chemical and low-level radiation are
> based on the premises that Muller and the National Academy of Sciences'
> (NAS) committee adopted at that time. Now, after all these years, it's
> very hard when people have been frightened to death by this dogma to
> persuade them that we don't need to be scared by certain low-dose
> exposures."
> Within a year after Muller and his group persuaded the NAS to accept the
> linear model for gonadal mutations, the practice was extrapolated to
> somatic cells and cancer. Twenty years later, NAS adopted the linear
> approach for chemicals. Soon thereafter, the U.S. Environmental
> Protection Agency announced it would use the linear model for risk
> assessment, Calabrese points out.
> Some can accept that even the most distinguished scientists have human
> failings, he acknowledges. But his view is that "the regulatory research
> community needs to hear about this. The implications of my findings are
> that we should revisit our exposure regulations because our regulatory
> history is founded on a deception. We have seen literally hundreds of
> thousands of cleanup decisions based on a model that was fraudulently
> derived. I think we should probably have drastically different exposure
> standards today, and far less fear."
> Calabrese believes, "The die was cast by Muller and regulations adopted
> since then have gone unchallenged. I think he got his beliefs and his
> science confused, and he couldn't admit that the science was unresolved.
> So he went ahead and expressed an opinion about how to handle the public
> health situation."
> Geneticists in the 1950s came to embrace the "linear dose-response
> model" of risk because at the high exposures they tested, there was no
> level below which DNA damage did not occur. They felt medical doctors
> didn't grasp how significant were the dangers. As the smartest and
> brightest, Muller anticipated the risk of atmospheric atomic testing and
> became passionately committed to protecting society, Calabrese explains.
> Muller and Curt Stern had done many of the key experiments. Muller
> himself served on the NAS's Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation
> (BEAR) committee, through which the linear dose-response approach to
> risk assessment became firmly entrenched. The two successfully
> suppressed last-minute evidence from the fruit fly experiment conducted
> in Stern's lab by postdoctoral researcher Ernst Caspari, and the rest is
> history, Calabrese says. It marked the "transformation of a
> threshold-guided risk assessment to one now centered on a linear
> dose-response."
> "To me this all raises the question, what happens when a scientific
> field lies to the public, to federal agencies and the president? It's a
> very scary situation that the radiation genetics community in the 1950s
> assumed that something was correct without requiring the necessary
> documentation to support it," the UMass Amherst toxicologist says.
> Stern's group published a paper in 1947 not long after Muller's Nobel
> Prize acceptance speech in which they tried to discredit their own
> study, further evidence of a deliberate cover-up, Calabrese says. "It's
> been hidden in the bowels of the Atomic Energy Commission for decades
> until I found it. They revised it to remove the one sentence suggesting
> this experiment might provide evidence for the threshold model."
> "One could argue that Muller single-handedly undermined above-ground
> atomic testing, which is a good thing," Calabrese says. "But after
> uncovering this lie, I'm starting to contemplate what society would have
> looked like if the regulatory community had felt free to use a threshold
> model. Members of that 1956 NAS BEAR committee didn't see the domino
> effect of their
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