Re: Hormetic Effects of Radiation should not be limited to cancer

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 9/4/2004 9:31:08 AM Central Standard Time, 

jrcamero@wiscmail.wisc.edu writes:

While there is much we don't know in the hard sciences, our ignorance in 

biology is comparable to the knowledge of the hard sciences in the middle ages

Actually, that is not true at all.  A great deal is known about how the human 

body functions, and a lot of it is known at the chemical level (I am not 

going to say "we know" because I don't know who "we" are).  



The persistence of the LNT is not due to ignorance about how the body 

functions, but to the large regulatory investment in that theory.  Moreover, people 

(even scientists!) are often unwilling to see the evidence that destroys their 

pet theories.  Ignorance of the mechanisms of hormesis are not due to 

ignorance about the human body, or about the physics of ionizing radiation, or about 

the interaction of ionizing radiation with chemical bonds.  We don't know much 

about the mechanism of hormesis because even the observation of hormesis is in 

its infancy.  Is there a good discussion somewhere of observation of hormesis 

as an isolated phenomenon (like the early observation of thyroid uptake of 

iodine as an isolated phenomenon)?



An analogy is the marked decrease in calcium metabolic efficiency with 

menopause.  Osteoporosis in post-menopausal women was observed for decades, but the 

mechanism was only elucidated wih measurement of calcium metabolism on human 

subjects. This was long after the mechanism of calcium metabolism was well 

understood, but what was missing was the effect of estrogen on that mechanism.    

The fact that there are pieces missing in our understanding of healing 

mechanisms, or of metabolic mechanisms, does not mean that our ignorance of 

physiology is comparable to the state of chemical knowledge before Priestley!



Ruth