[ RadSafe ] Re: "-authors do not report-" data refuting theirconclusions!

[Fritz A. Seiler]

Hi All,

As a physicist when I joined the then ITRI (now LRRI) 
in 1980, I dared - after a while at my new job - make
the suggestion that not doing any experiments at low 
exposures does inflate the experimental data set with
measurements that are in favor of the LNT.  The cold
reaction of the radiobiologists then made me feel as
if I had uttered a string of obscenities.  I can still
hear the more polite ones saying: "Testing down there
where we know that there is nothing?!"  "There is just
nothing going on down there, and DOE would not let us
waste animals and money on such fruitless duplications
of effort anyway."
I soon earned a reputation as an arrogant physicist who
wanted to duplicate measurements already done, did not
trust their older measurements and so I then kept mostly
quiet on such matters, started to give talks at meetings
and to publish papers in the open literature about the 
Scientific Method.  From this thread, I can see that the
"doing of good science" is a topic that is not generally
agreed on in these mailings. 
So here I go again! Simply stated, "Good Science" is an
epistemological process of model prediction followed by 
an experimental verification, and that has nothing to do 
with bias.  A bias comes only in when we decide not to 
verify for reasons of an unfavorable model prediction...
....See my comments above and those by J. Jacobus below!!

Best regards,

Fritz


PS: Some of our papers along that line of thinking:

	Seiler, F.A., & Alvarez, J.L. (1994). The Use of the
		Scientific Method in Risk Analysis. Technology:
		Journal of the Franklin Institute, 331A, 53-58.

And by request of the editors of HERA, we put a treatise on
the Scientific Method in our 'radon' paper:

	Seiler, F.A., and J.L. Alvarez, “Is the ’Ecological 
		Fallacy’ a Fallacy?” Hum. Ecol. Risk Assess., 
		6, 921-941, 2000.


*****************************************************
Fritz A. Seiler, Ph.D.
Sigma Five Consulting:          Private:
P.O. Box 1709                   P.O. Box 437
Los Lunas, NM 87031             Tomé, NM 87060
Tel.:      505-866-5193         Tel. 505-866-6976
Fax:       505-866-5197         USA
*****************************************************

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"This is the hour when democracy must justify
itself by capacity  for effective decision, or risk
destruction or disintegration. Europe is dotted
with the ruins of right decisions taken too late."

"America's Responsibility in the Current Crisis"
Manifesto of the Christian Realists. May, 1940.
*******************************************************


-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] On
Behalf Of John Jacobus
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 2:07 PM
To: howard long
Cc: radsafe
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Re: "-authors do not report-" data refuting
theirconclusions!


So, you say we should look for hormesis?  Would that
not lead bias the analysis?