ECHOES AND UPDATES

For me, a week in hospital is a vacation, and for reading mat-ter I thought I would brush up my Latin, choosing Julius Caesar's Gallic War, one of the easier Latin texts. After 52 years it was a sorry failure, and soon I just read the English translation on the opposite page, which is not without interest. Unlike the tiresome and slow-witted Gorbachev (and his mentor Bush), who to this day believes liberty and empire are compatible, Caesar wrote 2,000 years ago (Book III, paragraph 12): "He (Caesar) knew that all men are naturally bent on liberty and hate the state of slavery, therefore he deemed it proper to subdivide his army and to dis-perse it as widely as possible [among Gaul communities] before more states could join the conspiracy." It was this savage repres-sion (including much else, such as requiring leading citizens of communities to hand over their children as hostages, to be killed if the community "misbehaved") that used to make me hate this crafty militaristic old crook. Yet it was not so much old age as familiarity with senators Gore, Metzenbaum, Biden, Kennedy, etc., that mellowed me; and today I must admit that a man who regularly put the entire Senate (of a conquered state) to the sword could not have been all bad.

Congratulations to Patrick Cox, whose article in USA Today (1/22/92) pointed out that the media will ignore any story about radia-tion that is not a scare story, then reported the results of the Nuclear Shipyards Study which compared a total of over 70,000 shipyard workers in nuclear and non-nuclear shipyards. The dif-ference in mortality rates was a stunning 24% in favor of the nuclear shipyards, in fact, those with the highest chronic radiation exposure had the lowest mortality from all causes, including can-cer, and lived significantly longer than the non-nuclear workers whose health corresponded to the general population. Cox cor-rectly diagnosed the reason as hormesis.

To the contrary, Robert L. Park a physicist at the U. of Indiana, who ought to know about hormesis, and writes a weekly "What's New" column for the American Physical Society (APS) widely dis-tributed through university computer networks, just could not make sense of it. That figures. The APS, and especially "What's New," is not concerned with physics, least of all with the compara-tively inexpensive, badly needed experiments on its foundations. The object is to filch the taxpayers' pockets for the greatest pos-sible amounts in grants, and to see to it that the physics lobby, not the chemistry or some other rival lobby gets the loot. All objections to environmental hogwash are dismissed as "industry-sponsored," implying that industry will pay for lies for the sake of profits. But of course "scientists" or "APS" are clean words, for they are selfless angels who would never artificially keep their grant money flowing down over the fiscal years and decades.

In January, the long-awaited food irradiation plant Vin-dicator in Mulberry, Fla. [AtE Aug. 91], got its final permits and went into operation. On January 25, a special stand in North Miami Beach started selling irradiated strawberries, which keep fresh for prolonged periods without refrigeration. A handful of demonstrators attempting to coerce people into risks that they ap-prove of (such as rotting or chemical preservation) was unable to stop the sales. Their threat to call a national boycott of (all) Florida products also proved to be an empty bluff. Maybe stormtrooper tactics have worn themselves out. By late afternoon, the store had sold 500 pints of irradiated strawberries. Eat your heart out, cor-porate reactionaries who would rather be politically correct than clean and healthful; by that I mean the corporate harlots who gave public assurances never to use the process, including those of the H.J. Heinz Co (57 varieties of putrification bacteria assortments), McDonalds (you deserve some rot germs today), Campbells Soups (the only ones, to my knowledge, who actually supplied lethal botulism bacteria to consumers in their mmmm-good soups), and a host of other corporate Luddites, not only refusing to give the consumer a choice, but depriving their own companies of an honest profit.

The charges against personal misuse of federal funds by Donald Kennedy, at this time still President of Stanford University [AtE May 1991], have been increased by an additional $200,000 (San Francisco Chron., 1/29/92). That's fine with me, but $200,000 is a drop in the bucket as waste by Stanford and other universities goes. How about the case of Stephen Mosher? He was expelled by Kennedy from the Ph.D. program for no other reason than to ap-pease the butchers of Beijing who had protested his report on forced abortions in the Chinese countryside [AtE Apr 84, Apr 86]. Can you imagine a president of an American university who had catered to the Nazis and did their bidding? Yet the Nazis, by num-bers murdered and by degree of repression, were amateurs com-pared to the Soviets and the Chinese. So if you can't imagine such a president, take a look at Donald Kennedy, he exceeds what you cannot imagine.