This little bit of history may be of interest.....
Jaro
From page 66-67 of The Anti-Nuclear Game by Gordon Sims, U of Ottawa Press, 1990 [QC792.S45 1990]
A LEGAL BROADSIDE
The U.S.A. is a very litigious country, and so it is not surprising that there have been many lawsuits in the U.S.A. over the effects of radiation on people.
No cause and effect relationship can be established between a low-level radiation dose and a cancer. On the other hand such a relationship may be possible, so that responsibility for damage cannot be denied outright by a defendant. All a lawyer needs in a case like this is a good "expert" who can produce a case on technical grounds that radiation might have caused the cancer.
Professor Karl Morgan and Dr. John Gofman are two of the best-known radiation "experts" on the U.S.A. legal circuits and pillars of the U.S. anti-nuclear establishment. Between them they have served as plaintiff's expert witnesses on several radiation-related cases.
One case involved four workers at a plant which refurbished air-craft instruments, some of which had radium-painted luminous markings. Radium and its decay product, radon gas, can cause cancer, so that when the four workers, late in life, contracted the disease they sued everyone in sight. Twenty of the defendants settled out of court for $1.6 million. The twenty-first, the U.S. government, decided to fight.
The case was heard by a U.S. District Court judge in Kansas, Judge Patrick F. Kelly. Initially, Kelly was sceptical of the government's case. But over a period of ten months he informed himself of rems, microcuries, gamma rays, and alpha particles, and when he delivered his judgment it was devastating.
Morgan and Gofman he characterized as partisan and unfair. Gofman, he said, is an alarmist, whose testimony was not based on medical facts. Kelly dismissed the cases with prejudice and assessed costs against the plaintiffs.
- - - - - - - -
Reference:
"Testimony by Morgan, Gofman Thrown Out of Court by Judge," Atomic Industrial Forum, INFO 196 (February 1985), p. 2.
===========================================
From: John Cameron [mailto:jrcamero@facstaff.wisc.edu]
Sent: Monday January 27, 2003 9:09 AM
To: radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu
Subject: A book review of KZ Morgans "autobiography" is now available on line
The book review is also available at: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Cameron.summ.2000.html/John_Cameron.html
A Flawed History of Radiation Protection
by John Cameron, Ph.D.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Angry Genie: One Man's Walk through the Nuclear Age
Karl Z. Morgan and Ken M. Peterson
(Reprinted in full from from Summer 2000 issue)
K.Z. Morgan (1907-1999) was one of a small handful of pioneers in radiation protection. At some point midway in his career, for reasons not made clear in his biography, he became radiation-phobic. (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
<SNIP>