When Linus Pauling died, the world lost an excellent chemist. Moreover, as John Donne wrote, "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.'' Pauling was also one of the world's great beneficiaries of the hypothesis that cancer risk at high doses can be extrapolated smoothly to zero with no negative values - the no-threshold hypothesis. Pauling parlayed this hypothesis into a Nobel Prize for Peace and also a Lenin Prize, which he told me was his favorite of the two. Pauling successfully fought the men who were building American nuclear weapons with the argument that they were causing great numbers of cancer deaths. Building on his example, a whole generation of agitators has used this hypothesis to cripple the American nuclear power industry and to mount an increasingly irrational attack upon technology in general. Never, however, did Pauling or anyone else have data to support this hypothesis. Now there is data. The no-threshold hypothesis is clearly wrong. Figure 5 shows this hypothesis as currently purveyed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in
Note that this figure correctly portrays actual data only at high radiation doses. Until recently, there was no reliable data at low doses -the doses potentially deliverable by most radioactive waste and most ordinary exposures to environmental levels of radiation.
Figure 6 shows experimental data from "Test of the Linear-No Threshold Theory of Radiation Carcinogenesis for Inhaled Radon Decay Products'' by B. L. Cohen,
Health Physics 68, pp 157-174 (1995).The lines in Figure 6 labeled "theory'' correspond to the line labeled "ideally fitted linear relationship'' and, with slope properly reduced, also correspond to the line labeled "linear term'' in Figure 5.
Cohen's figures use radon data from hundreds of thousands of homes in 1,601 counties of the United States. His paper describes detailed examination of the possibility that this epidemiological data could be biased by smoking (shown in the figures) or by any one of 53 other potentially confusing variables.
Cohen demonstrates that, at the levels found in most American homes, increased radon levels correlate with
decreased lung cancer mortality. If the Pauling-Teller debates were held today, it is Teller who could take the moral high ground by calculating the number of children who would die if Pauling's view prevailed.
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Vol. 22, No. 8
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 22, No. 8 Date: April 01, 1995 04:04 PM Title: Science, Technology, and Defense
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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