Scientists Silencing Scientists
Recently, uncovered emails from scientists at four major federal health agencies demonstrated how political controls are used to silence other scientists with opposing views. This is indicative of how, perhaps more than at any time in recent memory, researchers have been inhibited from challenging existing scientific paradigms. Science is a process of discovery which advances through critical reviews of the status quo. When it stagnates, society suffers.
One key event that only recently came to light occurred when, in 2015, a senior EPA manager — the head of the Radiation Protection Division — said he did not want to hear any counter perspectives to what’s known as the “linear no-threshold (LNT),” and that no review of the EPA’s “set-in-stone” policy would ever occur. Though the details might sound technical, the lesson is not.
The exposed emails discuss the old assumption used to manage both radiation and chemical risks: that any level of exposure is dangerous. When used in regulations, the LNT implies that when a high level of exposure to any substance or stressor is deemed dangerous, then the government should limit our exposure to the substance as much as possible.
The manager was responding to Dr. Ed Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Calabrese has been studying the origin of the LNT theory and what actually happens to people who are exposed to low doses of these substances for four decades, producing over 600 published papers. He and others have found in hundreds of thousands of pieces of research a body of evidence indicating that low doses of radiation (and many chemicals) are not dangerous. In other words, they’ve found a threshold below which there may be some beneficial effects on living creatures.
This concept is called hormesis, and for humans includes increased fertility, faster healing, decreased chances of lung cancer and an increase in lifespan. The most obvious example of hormesis is water. A human needs water to survive, and yet consuming too much too fast can cause death. In 2013, one of us (Dr. Simon) published the first edition of “Environmental Risk Assessment: A Toxicological Approach,” explaining both thresholds and hormesis. (As he was editing it in a Starbucks, he explained these effects to a waitress who was studying to be an X-ray technician but, nevertheless, believed her own textbook that said, “there is no safe dose for radiation.”)
The controversy continues, and scientists like Calabrese have been attacked personally and silenced. One particularly noteworthy incident occurred in 2018 with the retraction of a prior invitation to deliver the keynote address at the American Academy of Health Physics. At the time, this organization was also unwilling to hear any views counter to the LNT.
Yet for those willing to listen, the evidence is compelling. Last year, John Cardarelli, the newly elected president of the Health Physics Society, posted video interviews of Calabrese describing LNTs history going back to the 1920s. Cardarelli has also suggested in letters to Congress that using the LNT to determine cleanup levels will result in huge costs (over $500 billion) and that agencies should “acknowledge the lack of scientific basis for the use of the LNT model in the low dose range.”
While risk aversion is human nature, we must allow science to point us toward what’s truly beneficial. Although fear of radiation is decreasing in the United States, 44% still oppose nuclear energy, perhaps because of fear of radiation poisoning. Interestingly, not a single soul perished from radiation exposure during Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster; in comparison, over 1,700 have since died from causes related to the evacuation.
This fear extends to medicine, causing some people reject diagnostic X-rays. Sunlight is radiation, but without it, life on Earth would never have existed. All life forms have evolved to repair almost all DNA damage that may result from low exposures to chemicals or radiation.
The dictators in science today are often policymakers in government agencies and editors of mainstream journals whose scientific beliefs are based on policy preferences or personal opinions rather than evidence. They’ve lost the most important quality any scientist can possess: humility. A good one — and there are many — keeps an open mind. The great discoveries were brought about by complete changes in thinking. In science, today’s dogma may be tomorrow’s fable.
Richard A. Williams is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a former director for social sciences at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Ted W. Simon is a former senior toxicologist with EPA’s Atlanta regional waste management division.
