HOW IS A LAYMAN TO KNOW?

The New Yorker has at long last become hilariously funny again: Barry Commoner has filled most of three consecutive issues with an article on energy. 200 years after The Wealth of Nations, he has discovered that the oil companies are not in business for charity, but for profit. Railroads, to him, are not the prime example of an industry stifled to death by government regulation and reckless featherbedding, but one ruined by free enterprise and one to be nationalized at once. So should the energy industries, for energy shortages and pollution are a direct consequence of capitalism.

"Economists and other students of capitalism," writes Barry, "will recognize that the basic ideas I have discussed are among those first put forward by Karl Marx. . . An explanation of why Marx's prediction [of the collapse of capitalism] failed to materialize - that is, until now - emerges from the improved understanding of economic processes which is a product of the recent concern with the environment."

New The Yorker is certainly the right medium where to preach Marxism to the impoverished masses. Its advertisements offer African safaris and $6,000 chess sets handcarved by Eskimos "from fossilized walrus tusk ivory." Proletarians of the penthouses, unite!

And yet Barry Commoner is not the worst of the ecofreaks. At least he is, unlike a lot of other scientists who have discovered a shortcut to glory, an outstanding scientist in his own field (microbiology).

But how about scientists like Tamplin, Goffman, Geesaman or Sternglass who are condemning plutonium in their own field of radiology? How is a layman to know whether they might not be right?

Their science fiction has been refuted often enough by their own professional organizations, such as the Am. Health Physics Society or the Comm. on Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (of the Nat. Ac. of Sciences). Tamplin & Co are a small handful of mavericks opposed to thousands in their field.

But can such issues be settled by the scientific organizations? Wasn't Enstein all by himself in a hostile world when he challenged scientific orthodoxy?

Yes, but there were substantial differences. First, the scientists were quickly convinced when the experimental evidence began to pile up. The Nazis called his theory a Jewish hoax, but their scientists worked with it nevertheless.

Second, when Einstein formulated his theory, there was very little evidence for it. There was only the absence of an effect, plus a positive effect so small as to be on the border of observability- at the time. But Sternglass & Co are off by factors of up to 10,000,000. Minute discrepancies can provoke scientists into heated debates; differences of several orders merely make them snicker and tap their foreheads.

Third, Tamplin & Co are not up against a hostile world. They have left the hard work in the lab for the lucrative lecture circuit, for the well-heeled foundations, and for the adulating media reporters before whom they can masquerade as martyrs.

And if every other criterion fails, there is always the experimental evidence. Tamplin and Cochrane, for example, advocate a reduction of the presently permissible amount of inhaled plutonium dust by a factor of 115,000. But among 17,000 plutonium workers, not one has died of a plutonium-related health effect. And that includes 25 workers who, in 1944-45, had twenty-five times the presently permissible amount of plutonium deposited in their lungs. All 25 are alive and well. By Tamplin's theories, they would have obtained 1,500 lethal doses.