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Fact-Free Science

Regardless of how elegantly a scientific theory is constructed, or how satisfyingly it might fit one's ideas of the way things ought to be, the *facts* determine whether or not it is actually true. This is what makes it science, as opposed to various other ways of arriving at beliefs that people have been dreaming up through the riot of human behavior that we call recorded history.

However, beliefs don't have to be true to be effective. One of the problems that results from undue political influence over what gets presented to the public as science -- either through direct tax-dollar funding, or via ties with the institutions who in turn promote the research -- is conflict of motives. Policymakers and the bureaucrats who serve them are interested in promoting beliefs that will advance their political agendas; the perceived consequences are what make a belief acceptable. Science is concerned with what's true. Facts decide what is believed, and the consequences -- good or bad, which is a separate issue -- fall where they will.

At least, that's how science would work in any ideal world. But with support coming to depend more on official approval, what we seem to be getting instead is the unchallenged spread as scientifically proven of politically correct dogmas that appear to fly in the face of a few elementary, and readily verifiable, inconvenient facts.

Take, for instance, the commonly heard assertion that "no level of radiation is safe" -- in other words, any exposure to ionizing radiation, however small, is damaging to health. In fact, at the levels encountered ordinarily -- i.e. excluding bomb victims and patients subjected to massive medical doses, usually as a last resort in terminal situations -- no conclusive results are observed at all. Low-level effects are *inferred* by taking a known high-level point where a definite effect can measured, and assuming that it connects to the zero-point (zero dose, therefore zero effect) as a straight line. From this it is possible to read off as an act of faith the pro-rata effects that small doses ought to have. This is a bit like saying that since a temperature of 1000 degrees C is lethal, 1 degrees kills 1/1000th of a person, and therefore raising the temperatures of all the classrooms in American schools by 2 degrees will kill so many million children. This is the kind of model that the figures the media are so fond of blaring are based on. Yet research that has been known to the health and radiation physics community for many years indicates that it is wrong.

Trying to emulate the labors of Hercules would cause most of us to drop dead from exhaustion. Nevertheless, jogging a few miles a week makes lots of people feel good and keeps them in shape. A dip in the boilers of a power plant would be decidedly damaging to one's health; but soaking in a hot tub is relaxing. Things that get lethal when taken to extremes are often beneficial in small quantities.

This has long been acknowledged for chemical and biological toxins. Trace amounts of germicides can *increase* fermentation of bacteria. Too small doses of antibiotics will stimulate growth of dormant bacteria that they are supposed to kill. A moderate amount of exercise keeps the immune system fit and in good tone, no less than muscles. The phenomenon is known as "hormesis," from the Greek *hormo*, meaning "to stimulate."

For about a decade, evidence has been mounting that hormesis holds true also for ionizing radiation. Not that sunbathing during a nuclear strike is good for you; but low levels aren't as bad as many would have us believe.

In the early eighties, Professor T.D. Luckey, a biochemist at the University of Missouri, published a study' of over 1200 experiments dating back to the turn of the century on the effects of low-level radiation on biota ranging from viruses, bacteria, and fungi through various plants and animals up to vertebrates. He found that, by all the criteria normally used to judge the well-being of living things, modest increases above the natural background make life better: they grow bigger and faster; they live longer; they get sick less often and recover sooner; they produce more offspring, more of which survive.

And the same appears to be true also of humans. [2.4.3] The state that the EPA found as having the highest average level of radon in the home, Iowa, also has below-average cancer incidence.[5] The mountain states, with double the radiation background of the US as a whole (cosmic rays are stronger at higher altitudes, and the rocks in those states have a high radioactive content), show a cancer rate way below lowa's. The negative correlation -- more radiation, less cancer-holds for the U.S. in general and extends worldwide.[4] The waters of such European spas as Lourdes, Bath, and Bad Gastein, known for their beneficial health effects since Roman times, are all found to have high radioactivity levels. British data on over 10,000 UK Atomic Energy Authority workers show cancer mortality to be 22% below the national average, while for Canada the figure is 33%.[6] Imagine the hysteria if those numbers were the other way around.

This can all be represented by not a straight line, but a curve shaped like a "J," sloping upward to the right. Dose increases to the right; the damage that results is measured vertically. The leftmost tip of the J represents the point of no dose/no effect. ("No dose" means nothing above background. There's some natural background everywhere. You can't get away from it.) At first the curve goes down, meaning that the "damage" is negative, which is what we've been saying. It reaches an optimum at the bottom, and then turns upward -- we're still better off than with no dose at all, but getting less comfortable. The beneficial effect disappears where the curve crosses its starting level again, and beyond that we experience progressively greater distress, and, eventually, death.

So what optimum dose should our local health-food store recommend? Recent work reported from Japan[7] puts it roughly at two thousandths of a "rem," or two "millirems," per day. That's about a tenth of a dental X-ray, or one coast-to-coast jet flight, or a year's worth of standing beside a nuclear plant. For comparison, the crossover where the net effect becomes harmful is at around two rems per day; 50 (note, we're talking rems now, not millirems) causes chronic radiation sickness, and 100 is lethal.

On this basis, if regulatory authorities set their exposure limits too low, i.e. to the left of where the J bottoms out, then reducing levels to comply with them can actually make things worse. In a study of homes across 1,729 U.S. counties[8], Bernard Cohen, professor of physics and radiation health at the University of Pittsburgh, has found a correlation between radon levels and lung cancer mortality almost as high as that for cigarette smoking. Except, it's in the opposite direction: As radon goes up, cancer goes down.

Perhaps tablets for those who don't get enough regular exposure wouldn't be a bad idea. Or a good way to use radioactive waste might be to bury it underneath radon-deficient homes. And perhaps cereal manufacturers should be required to state on their boxes the percentage of the daily dietary requirement that a portion of their product contributes. After all, if radiation is essential for health in minimum, regular amounts, it meets (except for not being an "organic substance") the accepted definition of a vitamin!

The June 1993 issue of Omni carried an article of mine on the ozone controversy in which I said that the bottom-line test, after all the modeling and involved arguments over atmospheric chemistry, was the ultraviolet light reaching the Earth's surface. If stratospheric ozone were under relentless chemical attack in the way that we're told, the measured UV ought to be increasing. People who have measured it say it isn't.

In 1988, Joseph Scotto of the National Cancer Institute published data from eight U.S. ground stations showing that UV-B (the wavelength band affected by ozone) decreased by amounts ranging from 2 to 7% during the period 1974-1985[9]. A similar politically incorrect trend was recorded over 15 years ago by the Fraunhofer Institute of Atmospheric Sciences in Bavaria, Germany[10].

The response? Scotto's study was ignored by the international news media. He was denied funding to attend international conferences to present his findings, and the ground stations were closed down. The costs of accepting the depletion theory as true will run into billions of dollars, but apparently we can't afford a few thousand to collect the data most fundamental to testing it. In Washington, scientists who objected were attacked by environmentalist pressure groups, and former Princeton physics professor William Happer, who opposed the present administration and wanted to set up an extended instrumentation network, was dismissed from his post as research director at the Department of Energy. The retiring head of the German program was replaced by a depletionist who refused to publish the institute's accumulated data and terminated further measurements, apparently on the grounds that future policy would be to rely on computer models instead[11](!).

Critics jeered, and the depletion lobby was not happy. Then, after a lengthy silence, a paper appeared in *Science*, claiming that upward trends in UV-B were linked to ozone depletion after all[12]. So suddenly, all of the foregoing was wrong. The party line ore had been right all along. Depletion was real.

The study showed plots of ozone above Toronto declining steadily through 1989-1993, and UV increasing in step over the same period. But Dr. Arthur Robinson, a biochemist at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (which is privately funded), notices something curious: Although the whole point was supposed to be the discovery of a correlation between decreasing ozone and increasing UV-B, nowhere in the study was there a graph relating these two quantities one to the other[13]. Neither were there any numbers that would enable such a graph to be constructed. Robinson enlarged the published plots and performed his own analysis. And the reason why no consequential trend line was shown, he discovered, was that there was no trend.

For the first four years the ozone and UV-B rose and fell together: completely opposite to what the paper claimed to show. The result wouldn't have surprised depletion skeptics, however, who never accepted that UV has to go up as ozone goes down, in the first place. Rather, since UV creates ozone out of oxygen in the upper atmosphere, more UV getting through means that more ozone is being made up there. Hence, all else being equal, both quantities should change together with the seasonal variations and fluctuations of the Sun. And the 1989-1992 pattern shows just that.

But all else isn't always equal. Ozone worldwide fell through the second half of 1992 to reach an extraordinarily low level in 1993. Satellite maps for this period show the diffusion through the stratosphere of huge plumes of sulfur dioxide from the Mt. Pinatubo volcano eruption in 1991. This would extend to global dimensions the depletion chemistry usually restricted to polar ice clouds (and responsible for the notorious Antarctic "hole" -- replacement can't occur in the winter months because there's no sun).

So the low 1993 ozone was not caused by unusually low solar activity. Solar activity was normal, which of course gave above-normal UV intensity with the chemically thinned ozone cover. This one-time event was then stretched out to create an illusory trend beginning in 1989. In fact, it was produced from just four high readings out of more than 300 data points[14].

Logically, this would be like proving to the landlord that there's damp rising in the house by waiting for a flood and then averaging the effect back over four years. If the lawyers catch onto this one, it could open up a whole new world of liability actions.

People once thought that the skies turned about them. Then they noticed that the "planets" (Greek: "wanderer") moved against the background of stars, sometimes pulling ahead of the herd, sometimes failing behind. They managed to account for it by superposing smaller circles, or "epicycles," on the main circles. More accurate observations added epicycles to the epicycles, until by the Middle Ages the motions had become so complicated that no law of forces devisable by the human mind could accommodate them. The system could explain anything, but only after the facts were known. Then Copernicus put the Sun in the center, and suddenly all was simple. Kepler and Newton took it from there, and the predictive science of modern astronomy quickly followed.

HIV must be one of the most bewildering objects to challenge comprehension. And that's odd in itself, for as biological entities go, viruses are rather simple.

In the early eighties, clusters of certain known diseases were appearing with above-average incidence. For reasons that remain obscure it was decided that they were all due to a breakdown of the immune system, although only about 60% would normally be thought of as involving immunosuppression. Viruses were much in vogue at the time, which immediately prompted searches in that direction for a cause. In 1984 the Health and Human Services secretary announced that HIV had been identified as the AIDS virus, and promised a vaccine within two years. Viral diseases are infectious, and with no countermeasures available, a sexually transmitted epidemic "exploding" through the population at large was direly predicted.

But the epidemic didn't happen. AIDS diseases remained overwhelmingly confined to the same, readily identifiable, behavior-related risk groups, and within those groups over 90% of the victims were male[15,16]. That isn't the pattern of infectious diseases, which spread and tend to be distributed equally. But instead of questioning the theory, the official response was a redefinition of AIDS to cover more previously known disuses; hence, what wasn't AIDS one day became AIDS the next, causing bigger numbers to be diagnosed. This happened five times from 1982 to 1993. As a result, the first nine months of 1993 showed as a 5% rise what would otherwise (i.e. by the 1992 definition) have been a 33% drop[17]. One of the new categories was cervical cancer -- so now women were affected more equally too.

Viruses make you sick by killing cells. Flu infects 30% of the lung cells, and hepatitis almost every cell of the liver. Yet with even terminal AIDS patients, only 1 in 1000, on average, of the immune system's T-cells show HIV. In fact, HIV is so difficult to find that the "AIDS test" doesn't test for the virus at all, but for the antibody. So "HIV positive" really means HIV immune. This turns nearly two hundred years of medicine on its head. For any other disease, presence of the antibody is taken as indicating that the body has acquired resistance, not that it is susceptible and requires preemptive treatment.

To explain this, it was postulated that HIV doesn't kill T-cells directly, but by somehow tricking the immune system into attacking itself. But tens of thousands of HIV positives continued walking around quite healthily. Why weren't their immune systems committing hara-kari? Ah, yes, well....

Because HIV on its own isn't enough. It requires an unspecified "cofactor," you see. Or maybe cofactors. Others decided that it was a "slow" virus with a ten-month latency, which was why the expected epidemic was being slow. But viruses don't typically work that way. Infectious agents reproduce if they get a hold, and take effect within days or weeks. Sickness after long latencies is characteristic of the cumulative buildup of a toxin. When the ten month prediction didn't happen either, its proponents changed it to five years. Five years went by and the world didn't end, so they upped it to ten.

Then it was admitted that not only could you have HIV without getting AIDS, but thousands of cases existed of AIDS with no HIV-surely making it the most extraordinary causative agent ever discovered. Nobody ever heard of polio without polio viruses. The self-contradiction was conjured away by giving it a different name and claiming that it doesn't happen. So now, if you have all the symptoms that would qualify unhesitatingly as AIDS if you checked HIV positive, but as it happens you don't, then you're suffering from idiopathic-CD4-lymphocytopenia, which is obscurese for HIV-free AIDS.

Currently, two billion dollars per year are being spent to unravel the paradox of how the HIV antibody fails to confer immunity while neutralizing the virus; no mechanism has been found for how HIV kills T-cells; and no vaccine is in sight. The viricentric theory fads every prediction, and always another epicycle is added to explain why. But the "paradoxes" disappear if Peter Duesberg has been right all along, and HIV doesn't cause AIDS at all [18].

Professor Duesberg, of the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, U.C. Berkeley, has been saying since the mid-eighties that not only is AIDS nonviral, it's not even infectious. Drugs, behavior, and other environmental factors, he maintains, are what is ruining the victims' immune systems. Like virtually all other "retroviruses," HIV is a harmless passenger that can be passed around and become a marker of a risk group, but it's not responsible for the group's health problems. This has not made Duesberg popular with the establishment. He has been vilified, lost his funding, and been denied publication and even the right of reply. Some refuse to consider his arguments because they find the social consequences unacceptable -- as if that could change a scientific truth.

He's usually described as a rebel, but really his position is classically conservative: like Copernicus, making the simplest interpretation of what the facts seem to say. Or perhaps Giordano Bruno, who dared make pretty much the same case while it was still politically incorrect. Today, it's Copernicus who is most remembered. Bruno was burned at the stake. These days, we've done away with racks and stakes, at least. But the mentalities who would bring them back again still seem to be around. Some scientists that I talk to tell me that almost everyone in the business is running scared at the prospect of funding being cut off in response to some politically inadmissible statement, or a career being somehow otherwise jeopardized. With the kind of money available from the public trough, it's easy to sell out and lose sight of objectivity. In the opinion of some, science would be better in the long run if all government support were ended except for research essential to national defense. As Mark Twain once said, maybe so, I dunno.

But it doesn't sound much like the way science was supposed to be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James P. Hogan has written 18 novels, along with various shorter works of fiction and nonfiction. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1979, he was a sales executive in the computer industry, specializing in real-time systems for scientific applications, and prior to that, an electronics engineer. Hogan lives in the Republic of Ireland and spends part of his time in Florida.

REFERENCES

1. T.D. Luckey, Hormesis With Ionizing Radiation, (222 pp.) CRC Publishing
   Co., Boca Raton, FL., 1980.
2. T.D. Luckey, letter to Nuclear News, December, 1981.
3. J. Fremlin, "Radiation Hormesis," The Atom (London), April, 1989.
4. TD. Luckey Radiation Hormesis, (306 pp.) CRC Publishing, December, 1992.
5. EPA statement dated October 15, 1989, reported in Access to Energy,
   December, 1989 (Box 1250, Cave junction, OR 97523).
6. Nuclear Issues, vol 15, no. 12 (1993), pp. 2-3.
7. K. Sakamoto, reported by TD. Luckey, Health Physics Society's Newsletter,
   (May, 1991).
8. B.L. Cohen, Health Physics, vol 57, p. 897 (1989).
9. Joseph Scotto, et al. "Biologically Effective Ultraviolet Radiation:
   Surface Measurements in the United States, 1974-1985," Science, vol 239
   (Feb 12) pp. 762-764.
10. Stuart A. Penkett, "Ultraviolet Levels Down, not Up," Nature, vol 341
    (Sep 28, 1989), pp. 282-284.
11. Rogelio, A. Maduro & Ralf Schaurhammer, The Holes in the Ozone Scare, (345
    pp.) 21st Century Science Asso ciates, 1992 (P.O. Box 16285, Washington,
    D.C., 20041).
12. James Kerr & Thomas McElroy, "Evidence for Large Upward Trends of
    Ultraviolet-B, Radiation Linked to Ozone Depletion," Science, November,
    1993.
13. Robinson, Access to Energy, January, 1994
14. S. Fred Singer, "Shaky Science Scarier than Ozone Fiction," Insight, March 
28, 1994, pp. 31-34.
15. World Health Organization, 1992, WHO Report No. 32. AIDS Surveillance in
    Europe (Situation by 31st December, 1991).
16. Centers for Disease Control, 1992, HIV/AIDS Surveillance, Year-end
    edition. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Atlanta, Ga.
17. Robert Root-Bemstein, "Good (Hidden) News About AIDS Epidemic," Wall
    Street Journal, December 2, 1993.
18. For a full discussion of Duesberg's case and his response to the various
    claims cited above, see P. H. Duesberg, "AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption 
    and Other Noncontagious Risk Factors," Pharmac Ther. vol 55, pp. 201-277,
    1992.