ESSENTIAL TO LIFE

If sensationalism were all that motivates the media, the networks would have dwelt no end on a conference that took place in Oakland, Calif., on August 14-16. As it is, you have to learn about it from an obscure pink sheet: it was the first international Conference on Radiation Hormesis.

Sensational? Yes: both hormesis itself and the strides made by knowledge about it in a scant five years.

Let's go over it again [AtE Oct 81, Mar 82, May 83].

Hormesis is the beneficial stimulation of living organisms by small ("subharmful") doses of poisons. The phenomenon has been known since at least the last century for chemical poisons; later it was found to apply to biological toxins as well, and in 1980 T.D. Luckey, then professor of biochemistry a the U. of Missouri (now retired and living in Colorado) published a landmark book, Hormesis with Ionizing Radiation (CRC Press), presenting abundant and detailed evidence that the phenomenon is equally valid for radioactivity. In a model scholarly work drawing on thousands of documented cases, Luckey showed that by any measure of health, such as resistance to disease, fertility, rate and extent of growth, etc., low levels of ionizing radiation have a beneficial effect on living organisms. In fact, since life evolved and always existed in a bath of natural radioactivity, it seemed probable that it could not exist without it. (This has now been confirmed by Prof. Luckey's experiments.)

The logo of the conference (see figure) symbolized the hormesis curve: if the horizontal axis represents the absorbed dose, and the vertical axis the health effect (say, cancer incidence), then it is only for large doses toward the right that the curve takes off in the conventional "the higher the dose, the bigger the risk;" on the left corresponds to the actual hormesis: within that range, the higher the dose, the fewer cancers.

Some of the evidence comes from correlations, for example between incidence of lung cancer among women (who before 1970 were largely non-smokers) and the concentration of radon in their places of residence. Cumberland County, Pa., has 9 times the average radon exposure, but has well below average cancer rates, and some areas in Finland and China give even stronger evidence. The converse also appears to hold: high lung cancer rates in places where radon levels have been studied (e.g., England, San Francisco, etc.) also have low radon levels. However, data from regions selected especially for this purpose are only now being collected, and the evidence is not yet conclusive.

Prof. Luckey has been studying withdrawal symptoms in lower organisms. Withdrawal of essential agents of growth, such as vitamins and minerals, produces quantifiable effects and permits judgment on the interactive effect of deficiencies of several such agents. His experiments on lower organisms leave no doubt that radiation is an essential agent for growth and other beneficial health indicators. Experiments on human cells are now in progress, and if they confirm these results, it will soon be time, he suggests, for health agencies to study methods by which to increase background radiation levels to optimum values.

The conference was sponsored, among others, by the local sections of the American Health Physics Society and the American Nuclear Society, and we will inform readers when the full proceedings are published.