Vol. 23, No. 2 - Access to Energy Newsletter

Fundamental scientific research is not dependent upon morality except as regards the behavior of the individual scientists conducting it. If they do not conduct their work with scrupulous intellectual honesty, then that work is likely to fail and to cause the failure of other efforts that depend upon it. Also, since good research is an activity requiring excellent physical and mental skills, individuals of debased habits are less likely to succeed consistently, although many discoveries have been made by such people during brief periods of lucidity or serendipity that are not characteristic of their lives in general.

For those fortunate enough to experience it, fundamental research is very enjoyable. Outstanding scientists who tend to "work'' nearly every waking hour of the day are often described as "dedicated, devoted, or even married'' to their work. In fact, most of them are just having so much fun that they are unwilling to stop for less enjoyable activities. (We are referring here to real scientists - not to the granta-holics who spend vast amounts of time at their desks generating paper in a never-ending search for more of the tax collector's loot and most of the rest of their time rushing to meetings where their activities reinforce this political quest.) When it became clear at age 25 years that I could have a permanent laboratory of my own in exchange for a modest amount of teaching, I often thought to myself, "This is great. I may never have to work. I am going to get to play all my life, and people are going to pay me for it.'' This reverie became more sophisticated and subsequently led to a moral conclusion - that I owed something in return to those who were financing my fun. (I was then still oblivious to the involuntary nature of their contributions and therefore to the inherent immorality of accepting tax money at all for research - except for defense research in which I was not engaged.) These thoughts led the idealistic young tax recipient to decide that he should spend half of his time doing work that was immediately applicable to human well-being, so I chose medical research. Medical research turned out to be actual work (not play) and also turned out to have moral and political components that are far more difficult to deal with than are scientific experiments.

Although initial progress can be made in simpler systems, medical research ultimately involves experiments on human beings. Humans are generally the worst experimental animal that one can choose. They are inherently complicated in chemistry and biology, subject to great individual variability, difficult to work with in large numbers, time consuming, almost impossible to control, and not expendable. In a single afternoon, one can perform a rigorous experiment on 100,000 brine shrimp. The same experiment, more crudely done, could probably not be completed on humans in an entire lifetime.

Except in certain restricted specialties, one chooses to do research on human beings solely for moral reasons - to increase the quality and quantity of human life and to diminish the amount of human suffering. These goals cannot be met by science alone, but science and engineering can be a great help. Although the ideals that motivate scientists to do this sort of work are often different from those of basic research, they are still ideals that usually are a necessary part of goodwork. Some people have other goals. They enter research on human health for fame or notoriety or, much more commonly, because it provides an easier source of money than other fields.

In a more free society, these self-serving motivations would be beneficial just as they are in any free market of goods and services. In our society, however - where most aspects of the development and delivery of medical technology are financed or regulated by government bureaucrats and where a vast industry of tort litigation stands ready to feed upon any irregularity - morality is too often ignored.

"Brookhaven Prepares for Boron Trials'' by Andrew Lawler in Science 267, p 956 (1995), provides an example. Embellished with a "photo-op'' picture of energy bureaucrat Hazel O'Leary with her arm around a recently treated brain cancer patient, this article describes a research project to test the use of boron neutron capture therapy. A boron compound is administered which concentrates in the brain tumor. A beam of neutrons then activates the compound, making it radioactive. This kills the tumor.

Brain cancer is very difficult to treat. Efforts to mitigate it with neutrons or otherwise have had many failures. Boron neutron capture therapy is controversial, but has shown very promising results in some animal and human tests. It is also politically advantageous for those like O'Leary who control Brookhaven's budget.

Let us assume, in any case, that the Brookhaven boron activation procedure is ready for a human test. What is the protocol? They plan to treat two patients per month for 8 or 9 months. Meanwhile, large numbers of brain cancer victims with 6 months or less to live are begging to serve as experimental subjects. The facility is capable of treating several patients per day. Why reject them? Typical of government programs, this experiment appears to involve a few unfortunate victims surrounded by hoards of self-interested paper shufflers.

The real scientists would undoubtedly prefer to accumulate data as quickly as possible. Time is crucial in medical research where lost time can be measured in lost lives - lives that are never recovered.

Ah, but there are other interests. Food and Drug Administration approval was required for these experiments. FDA bureaucrats are rewarded for never approving anything that might cause criticism for their superiors, not for saving lives. DOE and the smiling O'Leary will be rewarded with photo-ops as long as the program is in progress. They would probably much prefer that any potential failure be delayed. Brookhaven bureaucrats are paid for work in progress. They have instituted a lottery plan to decide which two individual dying patients will be treated each month. This is the greed side. On the fear side, everyone is looking over his shoulder at the lawyers.

All of these wonderful people are being paid large amounts of money for their meetings and "decisions'' to make sure that dying people are not killed by scientists who are trying to save their lives.

In a disaster, a morally responsible physician just wades in among the victims and tries to help regardless of the ultimate personal consequences for himself. Medical scientists should behave similarly. Unfortunately, our society is awash in people who will make sure that any such idealistic Samaritans are soundly punished for their efforts.

About every 15 minutes, someone is killed and several others are injured in auto accidents in the United States, yet our government has spent trillions of dollars to build the roads that make this carnage possible. These accidents shorten the average American life span by about four months from direct fatalities and perhaps as much as year when the indirect effects of injury, suffering, and family losses are considered. Now, we realize that this lost year is minor in comparison with the enormous loss of life caused by taxation rates that now exceed $20,000 per family per year - think of the increased safety and quality of life that money would buy if it remained in the hands of those who earned it. Still, traffic deaths are a major technological hazard. We do not, however, hear a clamor to ban automobile transportation. Various enviro groups do work to make autos more efficient and lighter in weight - which promotes the driving of additional dangerous miles and increases the likelihood of fatalities when accidents occur.

We often wonder what form transportation would have taken without the vast highway subsidies. In any case, there seems to be a belief among the American people that our motor transportation technology adds more to their lives than is subtracted by its dangers. This may in fact be true. Personal transportation has added substantially to individual freedom. Furthermore, that freedom has greatly enhanced the advance of technology of all sorts, which is largely responsible for the increase of 8 years in life expectancy in developed countries since 1950 (from 66 years to 74 years - see The True State of the Planet , edited by R. Bailey, Free Press, Simon and Schuster (1995)).

Technological advance (the increased life expectancy since 1950 in less developed countries has been 22 years) is critically dependent upon the availability of electric power. Without inexpensive electric power, world-wide life expectancies would be much lower. Therefore, it is to be expected that the antitechnology earth-huggers who wish to rid this planet of a substantial fraction of its people (not including, of course, themselves, since a few sensitive and superior beings must remain to smell the flowers) would attack electric technology by any means available to them. Among their preferred demons are the electric and magnetic fields that are associated with the transmission and use of electric power.

The electromagnetic spectrum is very broad. The low end includes oscillations of 60 Hz (hertz or cycles per second) for the ordinary power in your wall outlets or even a fraction of a hertz for the field you will generate when you turn around to adjust your reading light and thereby move the molecules in your body relative to the earth's magnetic field. The high end in the ranges around 10 ²⁰ Hz (the total range is of unknown magnitude) includes the electromagnetic radiation emitted from radioactive decay, which is so energetic that it can tear electrons away from atoms and break chemical bonds and is therefore called ionizing radiation. We are continually bathed in ionizing radiation resulting from radioactive materials in our bodies and environment and from cosmic radiation - so much so that ionizing radiation from nuclear power plants is a negli-gibly small addition.

In between are the frequencies of the Figure 1 microwaves that may have cooked your breakfast by increasing the rotation rate of the polar molecules such as water in your food and thereby heating it. (Remember those little rotators with quantized rotational energy levels that we described in the September 1995 Access to Energy.) Included also are the radio and television electromagnetic waves that bring us word from the enviros about the evils of electromagnetic radiation. (In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell combined the laws of electricity and magnetism with the laws of the behavior of light and discovered that a part of electric and magnetic fields is attenuated linearly with distance rather than as the square of the distance. This makes radio and television communication possible.) Living things are full of polar particles and biologically important electric and magnetic processes, and they do interact with electromagnetic fields. Ionizing radiation directly changes molecular structures.

In so doing, it causes the beneficial effects of hormesis (see, for example, Access to Energy 22-8, p 3, April 1995) and also, if the dose is too great, harmful effects. High frequency radio and microwave radiation can cause injuries by heating living tissue. Therefore, there are strict safety limits of exposure for consumer microwave devices and even amateur radio transmitters - limits that are far above ordinary exposure levels.

Very low frequency fields are produced by ordinary alternating current electrical devices. Their magnetic fields diminish as the first power of the distance from a linear source and as the second power of the distance from a point source, and, for practical purposes, do not radiate. These magnetic fields are difficult to shield, exert a significant force on molecules in living things, and have been shown to have numerous interesting biological properties. Although these effects are also caused by non-manmade phenomena such as the magnetic field of the earth, power transmission and use is a substantial contributor.

The magnetic field of the earth is about 500 milliGauss (mG) at the surface. This includes small oscillating fields, but is largely static. The earth is also a spherical capacitor continuously being charged by lightning (about 100 strokes per second worldwide) and discharging with a time constant of about 18 seconds. The resulting electric field at the surface is about 100 volts per meter of height. (See F. S. Barnes, "Interaction of DC Electric Fields with Living Matter'' in CRC Handbook of Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields, pp 99-119 (1986).) A changing magnetic field exerts a force on electrically charged bodies within the field. A charged body moving through a static magnetic field also experiences a force. The charged substances in a human body are, therefore, coupled to static and oscillating magnetic fields.

For example, if you turn completely around at a speed of one revolution in six seconds, the electrical forces in your body exerted by the 500 mG static earth field will be equivalent to those exerted by about a 1.0 mG AC power line magnetic field oscillating at 60 cycle per second. Walking generates an equivalent of about 0.2 mG. (See "Sources and Characteristics of Electric and Magnetic Fields in the Environment'' by D. W. Deno and D. O. Carpenter in Biological Effects of Electric and Magnetic Fields, Volume 2, ed. Carpenter and Ayrape-tyan, Academic Press (1994)).

Figures 1, 2 and 4 are from the Deno and Carpenter article. Figure 3 is from "Electric and Magnetic Fields and Cancer: The Use of Field Exposure Measurements in Epidemiological Studies'' by S. Koifman and G. Thériault in Volume 1 of Biological Effects of Electric and Magnetic Fields (1994). Figure 1 shows the spatial distribution of measured magnetic fields in a real estate office in mG. Fields near the typewriter and copier are as high as 30 mG but fall off rapidly with distance, so both chairs are at much lower levels. The chair in front of the computer terminal is at 0.2 to 0.5 mG - comparable to the effect of the static earth field if the chair's occupant does not sit very still. (For more, read Electromagnetic Fields and VDT-itis by Petr Beckmann available for $3 from Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306.) These authors also give typical approximate values for household devices as: electric blanket at 1 cm distance, 20-30 mG; clothes washer, 4 mG; dishwasher, 4 to 7 mG; vacuum cleaner, 16 mG; hair dryer at 2 inches distance, 100 mG; electric razor at skin surface, 14 mG; hand circular saw, 100 mG; and gasoline driven chain saw, 150 to 500 mG.

Figure 2 illustrates the magnetic fields measured in and around an elementary school near Ottawa, Canada, that result from a major transmission line energized at 230,000 volts passing very near the school in the right of way shown at the top of the figure along with one of the high voltage line towers. With the line turned off, values outside the school at sites 1 through 10 and 1 meter above the ground were 0.3, 0.2, 0.2, 0.1, 0.2, 1.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.2, and 0.2 mG, respectively. With the line on, the values at 1-10 were 32.5, 16.4, 5.4, 2.6, 6.1, 8.1, 16.5, 24.0, 13.0, and 5.8 mG. With the line turned off, values inside the school at sites A through M were 0.3, 0.5, 0.3, 0.7, 2.5, 0.2, 0.2, 0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.4, 0.3, and 0.2 mG. With the line on, the values at A-M were 0.6, 0.6, 1.0, 1.4, 5.1, 2.2, 0.8, 1.6, 3.4, 3.8, 2.4, 2.2, and 1.9 mG. The highest values

in classrooms were at sites I and J of 3.4 and 3.8 mG. By comparison with classrooms L and M, which are closer to the power line, we can see that about half of the magnetic field in rooms I and J comes from the padmount transformer supplying electricity to the school. Inside the school rooms, the magnetic field from the high voltage transmission line varies from an average of 0.4 mG for those rooms farthest from the line to an average of 1.9 mG for rooms closest to the line.

Aside from electronic equipment inside the office, home, or school, the greatest exposure to magnetic fields is usually from the local lines to the structure. As I write this, I may be receiving about 1 mG from my computer monitor, but I may be receiving as much as 5 mG from the power line that supplies this building and goes by outside my window. Figure 3 shows that this is complicated. The power line itself has two, mostly parallel wires whose fields tend to cancel one another, but ground loops from other sources can be important.

Figure 4 shows measurements on city streets in Alexandria, Vir-ginia. As the distance from the electric power substation on Union Street increases, magnetic fields decrease, since there is less current in the transmission lines. However, peaks of magnetic field scattered through the pattern show fields arising from other sources. These 5 to 10 mG peaks are comparable to power line fields in much of the grid.

So, as the flying instructor said in Top Gun, "you can run, but you can't hide.'' In fact, running in the earth's magnetic field may just cause your highest magnetic field exposure for the day. Perhaps this is one of the hidden health benefits of exercise. Living or working right beside a high voltage power line right of way does increase your exposure, but, if you use an ordinary complement of electrical devices, the power line exposure (obviously, this does not include hanging from the towers right under the line) is not of overwhelming importance.

What about the health benefits or risks? Well, your body does detect these fields. There is a great amount of biological research showing all sorts of effects of electric and magnetic fields on living things. Most of these experiments are not immediately relevant to humans, but, taken as whole, it is clear that the human body - which, through its biochemistry, utilizes many electromagnetic processes - is affected by forces of the magnitudes caused by motion in the earth's magnetic field and by fields from electrical appliances and power transmission.

After large amounts of research effort (see, for example, the books referenced above), still no reproducible and significant negative health effects have been demonstrated. This does not mean that none exist. The positive health effects of electric power in increasing the quality and length of human life are, however, obvious. The great cost in human lives from the huge amount of resources that would have to be expended to substantially reduce magnetic field exposure is certainly not justified in the absence of proven significant negative effects.

Turn on the power and enjoy its benefits. Being struck by lightning is probably a greater electrical danger - but, of course, lightning is "natural,'' so it is a politically correct and acceptable risk.

The 1995 Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, DDP, conference cosponsored by Access to Energy, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and Physicians for Civil Defense was attended by about 200 participants who heard many interesting and informative presentations.

Edward Teller spoke about meteorite impacts and means for dealing with them and also made some remarks about fusion weapons. Martin Kamen discussed carbon 14 and radioactive tracers. Bruce Merrifield spoke about recent work on antibiotics and vaccines using solid-phase peptide synthesis.

Potential terrorism with biological weapons was discussed by Con-rad Chester, Lowell Wood, Ed Eitzen, and Michael Baker, and with nuclear weapons by Sam Cohen.

Sally Baliunas spoke about the scientific errors and frauds that are being used to perpetuate the ozone scare, and Fred Smith discussed this and other efforts by our government to regulate and control us, while Cresson Kearny described some of the resulting deaths.

Robert Zubrin summarized his Mars Direct plan for extensive manned exploration of Mars with off-the-shelf technology at low cost.

The 50-year anniversary of the release of nuclear energy was commemorated by Ed York speaking about the Manhattan Project.

Peter Duesberg presented the experimental data that leads him to question the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus.

Jane Orient described U. S. government regulatory programs which diminish American medical care; Sharon Packer and Paul Seyfried dis cussed our government's defense programs that leave Americans without a credible strategic defense; and Arthur Robinson explained the disaster in government schools and the increase in American homeschooling.

DDP is providing sets of 16 audio tapes of all of the presentations for a price of $99. These may be ordered from DDP, 2509 N. Camp-bell, Box 272, Tucson, AZ 85719. Telephone (520) 325-2680. They also have video tapes available.

The article "Rotting trees provide perfect wildlife habitat'' in the Corvallis Gazette-Times, Corvallis, Oregon, September 24, 1995, p B12, reports that forest "scientists'' are now experimentally injecting fungus into healthy 50-75 year old trees to make them rot. This, it is claimed, will provide nesting places for birds and animals including the omnipresent spotted owl.

Currently, they are drilling holes for the fungus, but are soon to begin work on another technique - blasting the fungus into trees with shotguns. It seems that these people have decided that American forests are too healthy for their inhabitants. The described "experiments" are another sterling example of our tax dollars at work.

The same page has a large section devoted to "Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet'' complete with global warming alerts. The probability function for nuttiness increases sharply as one nears a college campus.
We predicted it, but still could not quite believe it. In The Wall Street Journal for September 13, 1995, p A14, "The Real Score on the SAT'' by B. V. Manno quotes College Board President Donald Ste-wart as saying, "This is the best-prepared [college] freshman class in recent memory, certainly in the last 10 years.'' USA Today, August 24, 1995, p 6D, trumpeted this wonderful news with barely a rhetorical wave at the truth. It turns out that 1995 SAT scores increased 6 to 8 points for the top 10% of students, 4 to 5 points for the next 10%, and decreased a little for the bottom 50%. Students taking the other major student evaluation test in 1995, the American College Test (ACT) showed no rise in scores at all. The real reason for the increase in scores is that, in 1995, the SAT was significantly dumbed down (see Access to Energy 21-7) with more time per math problem, hand calculators permitted, and the toughest section of the verbal exam eliminated. Word meanings are tested in context now, so students do not need to have as much independent vocabulary knowledge.

This hype precedes the other SAT change that has now also taken place - "recentered scores.'' Recentering just adds about 100 points to everyone's score and also makes possible a perfect score of 1600 with four wrong answers. Previously, zero wrong answers were required.

If the educrats perform as usual, we can expect to see further bragging about the higher scores in 1996 and debate in the fine print about the possibility that this might be partially the result of "recentering.''

The tax-financed Central Utah Project will deliver water to the agricultural regions in southern Utah. The actual cost of the water will be $350 per acre-foot. This water will generate about $30 per acre-foot of additional farm value. Southern Utah farmers will pay about $3 per acre-foot for the water.

This and the general world-wide tendency for cost-ineffective government water projects is discussed in "Water Options for the Blue Planet'' by Terry L. Anderson, Chapter 8 of The True State of the Planet, R. Bailey, editor, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Buy this book! - from The Free Press, Simon and Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

"The DDT ban: ecologism as a weapon of mass destruction'' by M. M. Hecht and "DDT, DDE, and Population Increase'' by T. H. Jukes in Executive Intelligence Review, Science and Technology, Sep-tember 8, 1995 pp 16-20, available from P.O. Box 16285, Washington, DC 20041. Professor Jukes exposes the recent scare about DDT effects on male reproduction which is typical of the continuing genocidal propaganda against DDT. Rats in the androgen study were fed DDE, a DDT metabolic product, at a dose per body weight 170,000 times higher than the human intake in 1965. Those humans who were alive in 1965 were also eating at least a few milligrams of vitamin C each day. Otherwise they would have died of scurvy. Ingesting 170,000 times the minimum dose required to prevent scurvy would, however, have killed most (possibly all) of them, since that is far beyond the lethal dose.
"Mortality before and after HIV infection in the complete UK population of haemophiliacs'' by S. C. Darby et al, Nature 377, pp 79-82 (1995). HIV positive haemophiliacs were ten times more likely to die of "AIDS associated conditions'' than were HIV negatives.

This may be the best evidence yet accumulated in reply to Dues-berg. ( Nature certainly is crowing to this effect.) Still, it is not definitive. Correlation does not prove causality. Presumably, they already have lots of correlational data, or the HIV-AIDS hypothesis could not have flourished in the first place. With tens of billions of dollars for research and more than 70,000 published papers, we notice that they still seem unable to complete a definitive experiment on HIV causality.
"The health effects of low-level radiation: Science, data, and corrective action'' by J. Muckerheide, Nuclear News, September 1995, pp 26-34. This is an excellent review of the death of the no-threshold linear hypothesis for ionizing radiation effects - and with it, the death of most of the myths that have politically debilitated nuclear energy. The saving and extending of nuclear power in the United States can be accomplished with the effective dissemination of truth of which this paper is an example. It cannot be accomplished by riding the fickle wave of lies about global warming and demon carbon dioxide as too many nuclear executives seem to be trying to do.
"From Love Canal to Present, Superfund Ain't So Super'' in Citizen Outlook, 10-4, pp 1-3 (1995) from the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, P.O. Box 65722, Washington, DC 20035.