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[1994] Gofman on the health effects of radiation
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/synapseP.html
John William Gofman is professor emeritus of Medical Physics at UC
Berkeley, and lecturer for the Department of Medicine, UCSF. While getting As
PhD in physics at Berkeley in the 1940s, Gofman proved the slow and fast neutron
fissionability of uranium-233. At the request of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Gofman
helped produce plutonium (not even a quarter-milligram existed at the time) for
the Manhattan Project. He got his MD from UCSF in 1946 (winning the Gold-Headed
Cane Award, presented to the senior who most fully personifies a "true
physician") and began his research on coronary heart disease. In 1963 the Atomic
Energy Commission asked him to establish a Biomedical Research Division at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to evaluate the health effects of all
types of nuclear radiation. By 1969, however, the AEC and the "radiation
community" were downplaying his warnings about the risks of radiation . Gofman
returned to full-time teaching at Berkeley, switching to emeritus status in
1973.
This interview was conducted by Shobhit Arora and Fred Gardner. It began
with discussion of a recent item from the Wall St. Journal that read, "The White
House was surprised and chagrined -- by Energy Secretary O'Leary's comment about
paying compensation to atomic-testing victims. With a super-tight budget, the
White House is now scrambling to head off a costly new entitlement."
Gofman: Secretary Hazel O'Leary is undoubtedly the first breath
of fresh air that we've seen in the atomic era. I think what she's doing is
great and I hope millions -- hundreds of millions of people back her -- because
she's going to face a ferocious opposition. It's going to be like a nuclear
firestorm in opposition to her, because she's doing something constructive. I
have for 25 years been an intense critic of the Department of Energy. I say this
because Hazel O'Leary stands for compassion, candor, and credibility -- not
because I've changed my mind about the DOE, which I think is one of the worst
organizations in the history of our government. Unless it's cleaned out we're
going to have worse things in the future. The human experimentation that has
been done is bad, and it's good that that's being cleared away. But for 25 years
the DOE has not shown any concern for the health of Americans. Their concern has
been for the health of the DOE. Their falsehoods concerning the hazards of
ionizing radiation have put not thousands of people at risk, not millions of
people, but billions of people.
* - Synapse: What if Clinton doesn't back O'Leary in the
days to come?
Gofman: The worst-case scenario is this. Ever since its
inception, the Atomic Energy Commission -- then called ERDA, then called DOE --
has had one thing in mind: "Our program is sacrosanct." And they recognize, as
I've recognized, that their entire program will live or die based upon one
thing. If the public should come to learn the truth about ionizing radiation,
nuclear energy and the atomic energy program of DOE is going to be dead. Because
the people of this country -- and other countries -- are not going to tolerate
what it implies. The key thing -- it's everything in the DOE program -- is:
"We must prove that low doses of radiation are not harmful." They have been
conducting a Josef Goebels propaganda war, saying there's a safe dose when there
has never been any valid evidence for a safe dose of radiation. Yet the DOE and
others continue to talk about their "zero-risk model."
After Chernobyl, I estimated that there were going to be 475,000 fatal
cancers throughout Europe -- with another 475,000 cancers that are not fatal.
That estimate was based on the dose released on the various countries of fallout
from Cesium-137. The DOE put out a report in 1987 and I don't think it's any
credit to the University of California that part of this report was done in the
Livermore Lab, where I once worked, and part in Davis -- saying "our zero-risk
model says that at these low doses, nothing will happen, because low doses are
safe."
How would a safe level of radiation come about? It could come about in
theory if the biological repair mechanisms -- which exist and which will repair
DNA and chromosomes -- work perfectly. Then a low dose of radiation might be
totally repaired. The problem, though, is that the repair mechanisms don't work
perfectly. There are those lesions in DNA and chromosomes that are unrepairable.
There are those where the repair mechanisms don't get to the site and so they go
unrepaired. And there are those lesions where the repair mechanisms simply cause
misrepair. We can say that between 50 and 90 percent of the damage done by
ionizing radiation is repaired perfectly. What we are then seeing is harm done
by the residual 10 or 40 or 50 percent that is not repaired perfectly.
The evidence that the repair mechanism is not perfect is very solid
today. What we wanted to have was evidence that as you go down to very low doses
-- a rad, or a tenth of a rad -- is that going to produce cancer? Determining
the answer by standard epidemiological studies would take millions of people,
and we don't have that. So it creates a field day for the DOE to say, "Well, we
don't know." But I looked very carefully in 1986 for any studies that could shed
light on that all-important question. And I presented that evidence at the
American Chemical Society meeting in Anaheim.
The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't.
* - Synapse: That the lowest doses will produce cancer?
Gofman: The answer is this: ionizing radiation is not like a
poison out of a bottle where you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of
ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a
fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and
affects it, or it doesn't. So I said "What evidence do we have concerning one,
or two or three or four or six or 10 tracks?" And I came up with
nine studies
of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks
per cell. Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I'm
concerned, it's not a question of "We don't know." The DOE has never refuted
this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can now say,
there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this
truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.
What other things does the DOE use as crutches? "Well, maybe if you give
the radiation slowly it won't hurt as much as if you give it all at once." Now
if you have one track through a cell producing cancer, what is the meaning of
'slowly?' You have the track or you don't. It comes in on Tuesday or it comes in
on Saturday. To talk about slow delivery of one track through the nucleus is
ludicrous. But they do it anyway.
There is a more radical fringe that says, "A little radiation is good
for you. And all this stuff about radiation causing harm is bad for society
because it's going to prevent the program we think should be instituted, and
that program is to give everybody in the country radiation every day as a new
vitamin." This program is called hormesis. "A little radiation will give your
immune system a kick and help you resist cancer and infectious disease." The
chief exponent is a man named Thomas Luckey, formerly of the University of
Missouri. He bemoans the fact that we can't get this program into high gear.
* - Synapse: Is anybody taking him seriously?
Gofman: The idea is manifestly absurd. But that didn't prevent
the DOE from helping to sponsor a conference in 1985 in Oakland on the
beneficial effects of radiation, hormesis. And the nuclear enterprise is really
at it all the time. They had another such conference in 1987, and another in
1992.
* - Synapse: What are the implications of there being a safe
dose of radiation?
Gofman: They don't have to worry about nuclear waste. No
problem -- there's a safe dose, nobody's going to get exposed to more than the
safe dose. The clean-up and disposal of waste has been estimated to be in the
billions, if they're really going to clean up Hanford and Savannah River and all
the rest. Recently, Dr. Robert Alexander in an exchange of letters in the
Health Physics Journal -- he was with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and
former president of the Health Physics Society -- said there's no proof that
low-level radiation is harmful... Anybody who gets half a rad a year from waste
disposal shouldn't be counted, they don't matter. They don't matter for somebody
who's apologizing for the nuclear industry. But they matter! And they're going
to matter in the millions, tens of millions and hundreds of millions if, because
of statements like Alexander's, it becomes okay to give people 10 rads. You
won't have to bury things in these fancy vaults. You won't have to worry about
transport. You can even dispose of it in ordinary landfills. That will be the
result. That's what the future will be. If low doses don't matter, the workers
can get more and their families can get more by being in the vicinity. That's
what we face.
* - Synapse: What are the limits for lab technicians and
other workers wearing badges? What's the limit now?
Gofman: 5 rems per year. That's going be cut down to one or two
rems per year. By the way, medical radiation, from x-ray machines, is roughly
twice as harmful per unit dose as Hiroshima-Nagasaki radiation.
* - Synapse: Why is that?
Gofman: It's the effect of linear energy transfer. When gamma
rays or x-rays set electrons in motion, the electrons are traveling at a lower
speed than the electrons coming out of Cesium-137. And as a result, when they're
traveling at a lower speed, they interact much more with each micrometer of path
they travel. Therefore the local harm is much greater. So medical x-rays set in
motion electrons that are traveling at a lower speed and hence producing about
twice the linear energy transfer, and hence twice the biological effect. That's
why alpha particles from radium or plutonium are so much more devastating than
beta rays set in motion from x-rays. The alpha particles, with their heavy mass
and plus-2 charge, just rip through tissue so strenuously that they don't go
very far. A deception of the crassest sort are the lectures by pro-nuclear
people showing a plutonium or radium source and putting up a piece of paper and
showing that the alpha-particle radiation on the other side is zero. "You see, a
piece of paper will stop those alpha particles, folks, there's no problem with
plutonium." Except when that alpha particle is lodged next to an endosteal cell
in the bone and producing a horrendous amount of interaction. Or that alpha
particle is lodging on the surface of the bronchi -- that's why we've got an
epidemic of lung cancer among the uranium miners! The fact that they don't
travel far is because they interact like hell!
* - Synapse: Do you think medical professionals really
appreciate how much potential there is for damage? Regardless of who you are,
you go into the hospital and you get a chest x-ray as a routine diagnostic
procedure.
Gofman: I'm sad to say, I don't think 90% of doctors in this
country know a goddamned thing about ionizing radiation and its effect. Somebody
polled some pediatricians recently and said, "Do you believe there's a safe dose
of radiation?" And 45% said, "Yes." They weren't asked, "What papers have you
ever read on this subject that led you to conclude there's a safe dose?" I think
medical education on the hazard of radiation is atrocious. What have they taught
you in radiology?
* - Synapse: Basically, whenever it's not necessary, don't
do a radiological procedure. But they have qualified that with the implication
that most radiological procedures really aren't that dangerous -- a tenth of a
rad here really isn't too bad. It's better to get the information from a
procedure than not.
Gofman: Part of that is okay. If you ask me, "Do you stand
against medical x-rays?" the answer is no. And I've written a book with Egan
O'Connor on the health effects of common exams. We take the position: if
there's a diagnostic gain for you -- something that can really make a difference
in your health and your life -- then don't forego the x-ray. But there's another
part of the picture. Up until recently -- it may be a little better now than it
was -- government studies show that most hospitals and most offices of
radiologists didn't have the foggiest notion of what dose they were giving you
for a procedure. Nor did they know that the procedure could be accomplished with
a third or a tenth of the dose. Joel Gray, a health physicist at the Mayo
Clinic, said there are places giving you 20 times the dose needed for a given
picture. And, he said, "If you ask those people and they can't answer, you can
be fairly confident that they're giving you a bigger dose than necessary." So
Egan and I, in The Health Effects of Common Exams, took the data on what
the average doses were in the United States, versus what has been accomplished
by some elegant work in Toronto to reduce the dose to one-third of what was the
average practice in 1984, and found that about 50,000 fatal cancers per year
could be prevented. That' s a million and a half in a generation! So what is
this stuff about "Most procedures don't hurt you, they're small?"
Let me say one more thing about the medical profession. It's my view
that we have a really crazy situation with respect to x-rays. You go to a
physician -- your internist, or a GP, or an obstetric gynecologist, or an
orthopedic surgeon -- these are the people who send you out for an x-ray. They
represent, or should, your ombudsperson. And they, not you, should have to find
out whether the facility they're sending you to uses five times the dose needed,
or a decent dose of radiation. But if you ask that so-called ombudsperson,
"Where you're sending me, do they know how to keep the dose down? What dose will
I get?" He'll mumble, "Don't worry about it, no problem." That's the fault of
medical education in our universities. If we turn out physicians who don't have
the attitude that they're the ombudsman for things like that, I think they're
not doing the job.
* - Synapse: A friend who had a melanoma was told there had
been a 20-fold increase in the past 50 years, but "We don't really know what's
causing it." It's as if many in the medical profession don't want to make the
obvious connection between radiation, pollution, pesticides and the cancer
rates.
Gofman: The medical profession is implicated directly. I've
spoken to Andre Bruewer, who practices in Tucson. He's a first-class radiologist
who does nothing but mammography. And he said, "John, I shudder to think of what
we were doing 20 years ago." We were touting mammography when the dose was four
to five rads, and in some cases 10 rads. Now if you give enough women four to
five rads, at something of the order of a 2 percent increase in breast-cancer
rate per rad -- that's what my analyses show, and I've analyzed the world data
on x-rays very carefully with respect to breast cancer in particular -- it has
to be that women irradiated 15, 20 years ago got horrendous doses from
mammography compared to now. And therefore, some of the present increase in
breast cancer has to be from the radiation they got; but they don't like to
talk about it.
Women irradiated 15, 20 years ago got horrendous doses from mammography compared to now. And therefore, some of the present increase in breast cancer has to be from the radiation they got.
There was a time, 20 to 30 years ago, when there were mobile x-ray
units that gave x-rays of the chest. They didn't give the 20 millirads [a 50th
of a rad] that is possible today. They gave about five rads. Children went
through those things by the thousands. And we just say, "We don't know why this
cancer epidemic is taking place now." Nobody's taken account of it. It's hard to
know how many children got it and who they were and follow them up. But you know
that a certain number of people are having cancers now as a result of what was
done 15, 20 years ago.
Back in the '50s one woman brought a child in in the middle of the night
having real difficulty breathing, and a resident said, "Maybe the thymus gland
is enlarged and pressing on the trachea. Let's give this child 100 or 150 rads
of radiation in the neck." And as with many disorders, the child got better by
morning. And so this resident put two and two together and said, "I gave the
radiation, the child got better, therefore I cured him." And so this became the
rage and all kinds of hospitals were using radiation to treat an enlarged
thymus.
* - Synapse: What' s the danger from an enlarged thymus?
Gofman: There have been careful studies now of these kids that
had the irradiation for enlarged thymuses -- which, by the way, is no longer
believed to have been a disease that existed in the first place -- and they're
having an excess of thyroid cancers, an excess of salivary gland cancers. One
hospital in Pittsburgh said, "Why should we wait till these children come into
the emergency room at night with croup?" And they, for a period of over a year,
gave x-rays to every child leaving the nursery...
There is this wall that prevents us from relating past experience to the
occurrence of cancer. The full effects are not known. It's not just what the
average dose was back then, some places were giving horrendous doses. Sometimes
they'd get a picture that was too faint. So they'd take another one, with a
longer exposure -- when the problem was that their developing solution was
getting spent. And all they had to do was change the developer. But instead of
that they gave the person an extra x-ray with a bigger dose.
* - Synapse: What general principles should a patient bear
in mind when considering a procedure?
Gofman: If I were a member of the public, knowing what I know:
if the establishment told me that something had a certain risk, I'd assume
that the true risk was at least 10 times worse. Part of the problem comes from
the patient. If a patient goes to a doctor -- especially if he's covered by a
health plan -- and the doctor doesn't give him any procedures, they feel
cheated. "You didn't even take an x-ray!" But the medical profession has to be
regarded as culpable, along with the DOE. They both have the same conflict of
interest: their work exposes people to radiation. For the DOE there have been
all kinds of people of shady character in all kinds of government posts. But
damn it, the medical profession shouldn't be shady and corrupt. I'd like to see
them really apply the Hippocratic oath to this field.
* - Synapse: Could you describe your work regarding the
retroactive tampering with databases?
Gofman: For years I've tried to believe that what was going on
in Hiroshima-Nagasaki in what was called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission --
subsequently renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation -- was the only
place where we had a huge body of data that addressed the question of what
happens to people who have been exposed to varying doses. If there is an event
like Chernobyl, or Hiroshima, we have to insist on the sacred meaning of
collecting an honest database concerning what happens to people -- (A)
doing the very best job of determining what dose they got, and (B) doing
a follow-up study that is beyond reproach. That is an obligation to humanity
that is virtually sacred. If you do anything less than the best in that kind of
endeavor, you're a scoundrel. So all this time I wanted to believe in the work
that was being done in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki studies. In 1986, because of some
questions about what the neutron dose was relative to the other forms of
radiation -- gamma rays, primarily -- they did a revision of the doses. Now I
don't have any objection to the revision of doses, provided that you obey the
cardinal rules of medical research. The first cardinal rule of medical research
is: never, but never change the input data once you know what the follow-up
shows. So because they had this idea of changing the doses, they didn't just
change the doses, they shuffled all the people from one dose category to
another, with a new dose. So there was no continuity with everything that had
been done up to 1986.
The first cardinal rule of medical research: never change the input data once you know what the follow-up shows.
* - Synapse: Who's 'they?'
Gofman: The Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Japan.
The-director is Itsuzo Shigematsu. The associate director is a guy by the name
of Joop Thiessen, who's from the DOE. It's a DOE-sponsored endeavor -- DOE and
the Japanese Ministry of Health. There couldn't be a worse set of sponsors.
* - Synapse: The Japanese have the same kind of commitment
to nuclear energy?
Gofman: Absolutely. So I said, "You can't do this. You want a
new dosage, keep the old groupings and just assign the new dose and study [the
results]." I call that "constant cohort, dual dosimetry." So I wrote a letter to
Shigematsu and said, "This is a violation of the cardinal rules of research.
There is a way to do this correctly, and you can keep changing doses all your
life, provided you just stick them alongside what you've done originally."
Shigematsu's reply is in my book. [Radiation-Induced Cancer from Low-Dose
Exposure, 1990] It's simple. He said, "Trust us." Well, the reason for the
cardinal rule of research is, nobody ever has to say, "Trust me." Because you
set things up with blinding, with appropriate procedures, so that your database
is immaculate. You don't go changing things and say, "Well we did it
objectively." I said, "Report in the old way -- the old dosage -- and the new
way." They said, "We won't do that. But we'll consider it. And we will give you
the data in the old way for three more years." What's the shape of the cancer
curve with the latest data from Hiroshima-Nagasaki? If I use the old data, it's
like this (diagonal, rising line). What's the shape of the curve with their new
dosimetry? It's like this (slowly rising line that then goes up abruptly).
If a crook makes the database, Einstein will get the wrong answer out of it.
* - Synapse: Making it look as if the low-level of
radiation is acceptable?
Gofman: Exactly. Their ultimate goal is fulfilled.
* - Synapse: How did they determine who received what dosage
at the time of the explosion? Was it based on how far away people were from
ground zero?
Gofman: Distance was the biggest factor, but also whether you
were outdoors or indoors, whether you were in a concrete or wooden structure.
They tried to do a lot of that. And they shouldn't keep changing the placement
of people! You take people with cancer and say, "Well, I guess the dose they
originally got must have been a lot higher. We'll put that person here [in this
dose category] and this one there." And with that sort of approach, you can make
truth whatever you want it to be. And there's a very important additional
lesson. Humanity needs to insist on the immaculate construction of databases
concerning any accident or major event. If a crook makes the database, Einstein
will get the wrong answer out of it. And then what happens? The Einsteins, with
the best credentials, using this lousy, fabricated, false database, will put
their findings in the medical journals. And then they get into the textbooks.
And then it's taught to medical students for the next 100 years. And what
happens? Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from cancer and genetic
diseases because the answer will be wrong. The key thing is getting an honest
database.
This is part two of an interview with John Gofman, lecturer emeritus for the Department of Medicine. On the day part one appeared (Jan. 21), the Chronicle ran a story about "that dependable fellow, Mr. Pluto" a perky little cartoon character created by the Japanese Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corp. In the Mr. Pluto video, a youngster drinks a plutonium-laced soda and declares himself refreshed. Gofman comments on Mr. Pluto: "This is their opening salvo in a huge campaign of `A little radiation is good for you, and besides, most of the plutonium goes through your gut.' Never mind the fact that as it goes through the large intestine, it gives the colon cells a dose of alpha radiation. The Japanese are the biggest promoters today of nuclear breeders and reprocessing. Reprocessing increases the hazard of nuclear power by a thousand. If you do it just leaving it as fuel rods, the possibility of an accident is bad enough. If you reprocess, you have to dissolve the fuel rods, and then you've got to handle the plutonium chemically."
* - Synapse: How did you make the transition from being a
respectable member of the `radiation community' to being an independent critic?
Gofman: I was criticized and denounced by the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) for one thing. I said that radiation was more harmful than was
previously thought.
* - Synapse: When was that?
Gofman: In 1969 -- after they had given me $3 million a year
for seven years to take time off from my teaching and set up a biomedical
division at Livermore. One week after I gave the talk! If you say something they
don't want to hear, they make a pariah out of you.
* - Synapse: They certainly managed to marginalize Linus
Pauling. Way back in the 1950s he was describing the effects of fallout,
Strontium-90 in the milk, the dangers to the people of Nevada and Utah.
Gofman: Linus's 1954 estimates were all pretty near to the
mark...
* - Synapse: Are we getting honest data about Chernobyl?
Gofman: Evgeny Chasov, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with
the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, made a public
statement that nobody has been harmed in the population at large. He obviously
wasn't referring to the people who got killed immediately. There've been all
kinds of statements to the that effect. Alla Yaroshinskaya, a journalist in
Zhitomirsk, a small city in the Ukraine, became very suspicious of the sort of
things that were being said. She found out that some of the people who were
being moved had been moved to a place that was even hotter sometimes -- it was
all just for show! Her paper wouldn't publish her investigation, and they told
her she'd be in big trouble... But she persisted, and she got Izvestia to
publish it, and she became well known. She got elected to the Supreme Soviet.
And she demanded to see the protocols of government meetings on the Chernobyl
situation. She managed to get all 40 protocols, and she wrote an article, which
is now in book form in Russian and, there's a French edition: "The 40
Protocols of the Wise Men of the Kremlin." And it shows that at every one of
their meetings, what they were saying internally was the exact opposite of what
they were saying publicly...
[Yaroshinskaya is now vice minister of mass media in Russia and a
personal advisor to Boris Yeltsin. Gofman has written the introduction to an
English-language edition of her book. For their work on the longterm health
effects of Chernobyl, Gofman and Yaroshinskaya shared the 1992 "Right Livelihood
Award," given by a Swedish foundation. In his acceptance speech, Gofman proposed
that a network of scientists who don't have to answer to government serve as
"watchdogs" and participate in every stage of the construction of the Chernobyl
data base.]
* - Synapse: Did anybody pick up on the watchdog idea?
Gofman: I met with Yuri Shcherbak, the minister for the
environment for the Ukraine. Yuri was a journalist and a physician, who also had
revealed some of the things that had been going on with the Chernobyl data. In
the new government in Ukraine he was made minister of the environment. He liked
the watchdog concept, but he said, "If I'm going to propose that to the
Ukrainian government, could you get some more scientists who would endorse it?"
So I wrote letters to about 50 people around the world, and about 47 said they
would serve on a commission to set this up in Ukraine. And I sent this off to
Yuri, but I never heard back. One of his aides was in town and called me up with
a message from Yuri. He said, "As soon as Yuri got back from seeing you, the
Ukrainian government set up a special division to handle Chernobyl, and that was
moved out of Yuri's environmental department." And a little later Yuri was moved
over to become the ambassador to Israel -- it might have been to the North Pole.
So that died. I have some hopes that Alla might be able to get the idea through
in Russia, but the nuclear mafia in Russia is very strong. They're proposing to
go gung ho on nuclear power. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are
members of the nationalist group around Zhirinovsky.
* - Synapse: How would the watchdog concept work in the
United States?
Gofman: What I'm proposing is that if the Department of Energy
spends $100 million on health-related activities -- and they have their fingers
in every university department of statistics and radiology -- $10 million should
go to a grass roots organization of scientists to make sure that the studies
being carried out are honest.
Take the worker population in America. Do you believe what the DOE says
about the doses workers are getting? I don't. I think a lot of scientists would
be interested and willing to do that work, if it were honored rather than -- you
know, you get thrown out for saying something. The scientists who were funded by
the DOE at Los Alamos, Livermore, Berkeley, Brookhaven -- they're self-censored.
They know what's okay to say, and they know what's not okay. They know my
history. And they're not about to repeat it. Which brings us back to where we
started. When I saw Hazel O'Leary come an the scene, I just got the impression
that this lady is for real. She faces a tremendous task -- just on the human
experimentation, the suggestion that people be made whole and receive apologies.
I'd like to see this lady get 100 million Americans behind her so that she can't
be weakened. I think there's a chance that in her administration the watchdog
idea could fly. If we don't get it through in her administration, I thinly DOE
will go back to just what it was before. And then there's not much hope for
humanity.
* - Synapse: Could you comment on the human experimentation
that was conducted?
Gofman: I think it was unethical. And I think that any
statements such as, "But the doses were low" -- that's a fraud. The doses in Cal
1, Cal 2, and Cal 3 [the three people who received injections of plutonium at UC
Med Center] were very high -- 11,000 rems to the bone for Albert Stevenson [Cal
1]. Albert Stevenson was injected with a huge dose of plutonium at UC Hospital
because he had a supposed cancer of the stomach. Now some are saying, "Well, we
didn't know whether plutonium could hurt anybody." They should watch out,
because they're going to be caught in a lie of profound proportions.
The radiations that we have are x-rays, gamma rays, beta rays, alpha
particles, and neutrons. Neutrons you only get near a bomb or a reactor. Alpha
particles are emitted by many elements high in the periodic table as you get up
above lead: uranium, thorium, protoactinium, neptunium, plutonium -- all are
alpha particle emitters. An alpha particle is a plus-2 charged helium atom in
high-speed motion. We describe them by how much energy they're carrying off from
the emission. Four and a half million electron-volts -- 4.7, 5.2 -- the various
alpha emitters are all in that range. And you can say that what one alpha
emitter does, any alpha emitter will do if it gets to the same place. So for
somebody to say, "We didn't know about the alpha particles from plutonium."
It's the same as saying "We know how it works in New York, Chicago,
Philadelphia, but what about Peoria?"
In the '20s we had a radium-dial painting industry to paint the dials of
wristwatches and clocks. Women sat at tables with a little pot of radium paint,
painting these dials by hand. Their brushes would get diffuse and they'd take
the brush and twirl it in their mouths to get a fine tip to paint with. And
these women came up with the most horrible bone destruction due to the alpha
particles from radium in their bone. Osteogenic sarcomas. It was all written up
by 1929, by Harrison Martland, the coroner in New Jersey who examined their
bodies. The whole world knew that alpha particles from radium had done this to
humans. Now an alpha particle, really, doesn't ask who its mother or father was.
An alpha particle is an alpha particle.
In Germany and Czechoslovakia there are regions where it was long known
that 50 to 75 percent of the miners died of what was called "mountain sickness."
In the late 19th century Hartung and Hesse discovered that this mountain disease
was lung cancer. In the 1930s, Peller and another group determined that the
reason for the lung cancer in the miners was breathing radon with alpha
particles from the uranium in the mines. So alpha particles had been proven to
produce cancer. So to say that the effects of alpha particles from plutonium
were unknown -- it's just not true. The AEC, which approved of some of that
experimentation, knew precisely what the results would be. Merril Eisenbund, a
pro-nuclear environmentalist, was working for the AEC in 1947. He went out west
to inspect what was going on in the uranium mines in Arizona, New Mexico, and
Colorado. He came back and wrote a report saying the mines are not being
ventilated, and if we don't get them ventilated, we're going to have a
lung-cancer epidemic worse than Germany and Czechoslovakia. He was told to move
over to another division, never to say anything more about the mining situation
in Colorado. The mine operators were not informed, the mine workers were not
informed, and we had the lung-cancer epidemic that had been predicted. The AEC
knew all this. Can you tell me there's any evidence that the AEC, ERDA or DOE
ever gave a damn about human health? They were the same people who approved the
human experimentation. And to try to justify it in the name of the Cold War and
things like that, that's ridiculous. The Cold War did not require knowing where
plutonium went in people's bodies!
* - Synapse: Do you think the mechanisms that are in place
today, such as the human subject committees, are sufficient to keep this kind of
research from taking place?
Gofman: I think they're better than having no committees, and
that [unethical experimentation] is not as likely now. But it just seems to me
that when grants are involved, and the prestige of the institution is involved,
if some research is exciting but maybe off-color, I wouldn't be surprised if
some of the committees would overlook it. I'm not impressed by the integrity and
forthrightness of the medical establishment. I wouldn't have said this 10, 15
years ago, but today, when I look at an article in a medical journal -- peer
review means nothing to me, that's just an old boys' club -- I say to myself,
"Why should I believe this?" I've watched stuff get in that was peer reviewed
that was absolute rubbish, and they had to know that it was absolute rubbish.
I just have lost my confidence in their integrity. A case in point. I
recently read a study that if you treat breast cancer by lumpectomy and
radiation, that's better than without the radiation. How carefully was that
study set up? Who oversaw the choice of people and the outcomes? It's a very
important issue. If you irradiate the chest of women who've had lumpectomies,
with the kind of doses they're giving, you will produce a lot of cancers in the
future. Not necessarily the cancer they had, but you're going to produce new
cancers. Those new cancers are going to come 10, 15 years from now. If indeed
the radiation prevents [patients] from dying of the original cancer, which would
have killed them in a year or two, then I say, with their fully informed
knowledge, they may choose to take the radiation therapy. But I really want to
be sure that the data collected on this benefit is right. So my answer to your
question is: I hope it's better; I think it's better than it was; I would
like to see better mechanisms still, that didn't involve grants and the prestige
of the university when the university passes on whether research is okay.
* - Synapse: What do you know about the release of radiation
at Hanford, Washington that, it now turns out, was many times worse than Three
Mile Island?
Gofman: When it became known that there had been these big
releases, the government finally promised to own up. So a big study is in
process now, it's called the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project,
fully funded by the government. And they're trying to involve the Indian tribes,
and various downwinders. The amount of iodine released at Three Mile Island was
estimated at 15 curies -- Iodine-131. The amount of iodine first estimated on
this Hanford reconstruction was 425,000 curies. The most recent estimate has it
up to 725,000 curies. I calculated the true release of radioiodine from
Chernobyl at 12.3 million curies. So the amount that was released at Hanford can
cause a lot of trouble.
* - Synapse: What kind of trouble? What does radioiodine do?
Gofman: In big enough doses it produces thyroid cancer and
severe hypothyroidism. In 1992, Kazakov, Demidchik, and Astaskhova of Minsk put
out a paper in
Nature
saying, "We have 131 cases of thyroid cancer in Byelorus alone (since
Chernobyl). The curve started up in '89-'90, and the curve is staying up there."
This has now been confirmed in Ukraine. After the paper in Nature came
out, a UN team went there to check their diagnoses, and confirmed that they were
right in 102 out of 104 cases. And still, Shigematsu and Thiessen (of the
Japanese-DOE Radiation Effects Research Foundation), had a letter in the next
issue of Nature saying "We can't really trust this, these cases are
coming up too soon, they're not really thyroid cancer. Maybe they're looking
harder now..." And in the Journal of Nuclear Medicare some of the nuclear
pundits ridiculed the word from Byelorus. These people never stop!...
There will inevitably be thyroid cancer from the releases at Hanford,
Washington. Whether they'll be able to reconstruct it and admit it I don't
know...
There's an investigator named Holm at a Swedish hospital. They've done
38,000 radioiodine scans to test thyroid function. He wrote a series of papers
showing that even though people got 50 rads to the thyroid, there was no excess
of thyroid cancer. When I first heard about it I thought, "Wow, you can give 50
rads to the thyroid and cause no cancers? Does it mean I'm wrong?" And this was
trumpeted an over the United Nations Atomic Effects Committee and everybody in
the establishment cites it. Well, I analyzed those papers -- I devoted a chapter
to it in my 1990 book (Radiation-Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure).
And you know what I this guy did? He threw 135 cancers out of the study, because
they occured before five years had elapsed. He said, "We know they can't occur
before five years." The evidence in Byelorus is that they're coming in four,
five, six years after the exposure. If you take the 135 cases and add them back,
you've got a big effect from radioiodine. That's what's being said about
radioiodine: not to worry, no problem.
* - Synapse: How do they refute your analysis?
Gofman: They're smart -- they don't refer to it.