Radiation hormesis, the phenomenon of small radiation doses promoting health, is doubted by few since Prof Luckey's trail blazing book came out in 1980. (He has an excellent article "Hormesis for health physicists" in the Sept. 1989 Health Physics Society's Newsletter.) But fashion demands that ionizing radiation be satanic, so any of its benign properties must be disputed. And Science, which has become slightly less anti-nuclear and anti-defense since Abelson left, was back to its old tricks (8/11). A debate on hormesis will be read by few of its readers, but all will notice the authors: in favor, L A. Sagan of the Electric Power Re-search Institute, Palo Alto; opposed, S. Wolff, professor of cytogenetics and director of the Lab of Radiobiology and Environ-mental Health, U. of Calif. at San Francisco. Ha! Another case of industry covering up health hazards and trying to hoodwink the people, but courageously opposed by a professor who has nothing but pure science at heart!
In reality, Dr Sagan is a widely respected scientist who has a reputation of being overly conservative, even in matters of hor-mesis. Science could have asked many academics, including Prof Luckey himself, who was available to make the case, but Science chose to approach an industry spokesman. Wolff, an obscure small-college figure, appears to have no case, judging from such statements as "the greatest profusion of these reports came out of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s to early 1950s, in the era of Lysenko, . . ." This would be totally irrelevant even if it were not a consummate falsehood; the purpose is clearly to smear hormesis with the name of discredited pseudo-scientist Lysenko, which he uses a second time in an utterly irrelevant context again, just as he does with the name of Lamarck, the biologist whose theory were displaced by Darwin ("smacks of Lamarckism"
¾you don't want to be on the wrong ideological side, do you?) Most laughably, Wolff displays his stunning isolation from widely accepted biology in attacking hormesis in general¾even for chemical and biologi-cal toxins. But of course, as usual in such tricks, Science has per-fectly clean hands¾they let both sides be heard, didn't they?I do not believe that human history has ever seen such rapid expansion of technology as we are witnessing now in electronics, including computers and communications. It was made possible by the invention of the transistor (semiconductor), first developed by Dr William Shockley in 1947, then at Bell Labs, bringing him the Nobel Prize in 1956. On August 3, Shockley died at age 79, and the few obituaries that noted the death of one of the most meritorious scientists of this century all smeared him as being a "racist."
This is a wicked lie. Shockley believed that people with low IQs tend to marry each other, producing an underclass of low IQs, and therefore advocated that they be subsidized for not having children. As one who opposes interference by the government in the private lives of citizens, I rejected the policies he advocated, but they had nothing to do with racism. The element of racism was introduced by his opponents, who assume that blacks have lower IQs than whites and Asians, and assume that this is inherited.
Are these assumptions justified? There is no way of knowing, for scientific research on such questions is nol possible: the powers that be are afraid of the answer.
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Vol. 17, No. 2
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 17, No. 2 Date: December 01, 2004 03:08 PM Title: Inherently safe red herrings
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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