The regulations limiting human exposure to low-level radiation are not known to have prevented a single health effect in anyone despite decades of use. But they have cost more than $1 trillion in the U.S. alone, according to Radiation, Science and Health, an international non-profit group run by radiation experts who “advocate for the objective review of low-level radiation science policies.”Guesswork about the alleged risk posed by low-level radiation is only part of the problem with the National Academy of Sciences report.
Over the last 30 years or so, the scientific establishment has become heavily invested in the notion that cancers are caused by genetic, or DNA mutations. The idea is that something — say a single molecule of a “cancer-causing” chemical, the smallest radiation exposure or even chance alone — can cause a change or mutation in a cell’s DNA, thereby turning a normal cell into a cancer cell.
In addition to regulation of radiation exposures, this supposition is the basic rationale that government regulators have relied on for decades to regulate exposures to chemicals allegedly linked with cancer risk — even though there is virtually no real-world evidence to support it.
But a new idea spotlighted by Tom Bethell in the July/August issue of the American Spectator should cause regulators to begin to re-think their decades-old-but-still-unproven assumption of gene mutation.
It was first noticed about a century ago that cancer cells exhibit “aneuploidy” — they don’t have the correct number of chromosomes. Aneuploidy occurs when cells divide improperly and a daughter cell winds up with an extra chromosome. An aneuploid cell may die, but it may also survive and repeat the error, perhaps eventually leading to cancer.
The problem with this idea is not so much scientific as political. Bethell points out that the man who “rediscovered” the old work on aneuploidy is controversial University of California-Berkeley researcher and National Academy of Sciences member Peter Duesberg, who famously had his grants from the National Institutes of Health cut off for being critical of the direction of AIDS research in the late 1980s.
Duesberg still isn’t getting any NIH money even though his aneuploidy idea has survived early challenges, according to Bethell’s article, and the older notions of cancer development are going nowhere fast.
It seems that before regulators spend another $1 trillion of the public’s money on radiation protection that may be based on faulty assumptions, someone ought to throw some research money Duesberg’s way.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRwatch.com, is adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and is the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).
Great find!