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posted by on Friday January 20 2017, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the truth-and-perseverance-opposing-industry-spin dept.

Alexey Yablokov and Chris Busby are biologists whose efforts have been to make people aware of the negative health effects of very low-dose ionizing radiation.

Chris Busby reports via CounterPunch

There will be many obituaries published about Alexey V. Yablokov, the extraordinary Russian scientist, activist, and human being, but I would like to briefly record a few words about the man I knew. And to weep a few tears.

He was a strong [...] friend and fellow fighter for truth, and his recent death on the evening of January 10th means a lot for me--and (though we may [not] know it) for us all on this increasingly contaminated planet.

[...] He, like me, saw the issue of radiation and health as one which was fundamentally a political one, and only secondarily as scientific.

[...] In 1998, [...] Alexey and I [...] with Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alice Stewart, and (later) Molly Scott Cato [...] decided to form an alternative [to ICRP, the International Commission on Radiological Protection]: the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR).

This needed an alternative radiation risk model, and we worked on this over the next five years to create the first ECRR report which was published in 2003 and rose upon the nuclear industry horizon with the brightness of a thousand suns.

[Continues...]

Alexey organised the translation into Russian, and it quickly appeared also in French, Japanese, and Spanish. Alexey suggested we publish a series of books and ECRR reports, and quickly began to put together the first compilation of evidence on Chernobyl effects which we published together in 2006: Chernobyl 20 Years On: Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident .

[...] In 2009, he came to the Lesvos conference of the ECRR and made a presentation on Chernobyl effects which we published in the Proceedings. Later, we were in Geneva together and stood vigil together outside the World Health organisation with our sandwich boards. It was freezing. We took the message all over the place. Even after he became ill and had various operations, he would struggle along somehow: we were there in East Berlin, talking about Fukushima.

[...] What Alexey, Inge, and I had in common was the realisation that to win this battle we had to act in several domains: in the scientific literature, in the political area, and in the legal arena also. We had to be brave and accept the attacks and the lies spread about us.

We wrote up the science in books and reports and we began publishing in the peer-reviewed literature; we developed the alternative risk model and entered into court cases as experts and finally in my own case as the legal representative. And it worked: between us we have shaken the foundations of the current bogus structure. And I believe we will ultimately win.

I last saw him in Moscow in 2015 at his 80th birthday celebration to which he invited me (and paid my ticket). A sort of vodka-[fueled] scientific congress. The only other English speaker there was Tim Mousseau. The Russian scientists there were so clever. So honest. Such a change from all the time-serving bastards and idiots I meet in the radiation risk community venues like CERRIE [Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters] or more recently the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. We hugged and cried and tossed back the vodka.

But now ... they have all gone. Karl Z Morgan, John Gofman, Ed Radford, Ernest Sternglass, Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell, and now Alexey. All my old mates. Where are the young scientists to replace them? Nowhere. It is all brush and spin and jobs now.

So: Goodbye Alexey Vladimirovitch. A brave and powerful presence, a big man in every way. Perhaps the last of the warrior scientists.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday January 20 2017, @03:38AM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday January 20 2017, @03:38AM (#456365)

    Can somebody summarize the summary? I wasn't under the impression anyone thought radiation wasn't a bad thing.

    Not sure that taking something more seriously than other people who are already taking it seriously exactly qualifies someone for "hero" status.

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  • (Score: 2) by caffeine on Friday January 20 2017, @03:54AM

    by caffeine (249) on Friday January 20 2017, @03:54AM (#456372)

    I've read articles disputing the argument that if a lot of radiation is a lot bad, then a little radiation must be a little bad. The logic is we evolved in an environment with background radiation and perhaps some background radiation is healthy.

    I've no idea is the idea has any merit.

    • (Score: 2) by engblom on Friday January 20 2017, @08:08AM

      by engblom (556) on Friday January 20 2017, @08:08AM (#456436)

      All ionizing radiation is dangerous. Think about shooting a ball against a house wall. One single ball will have less chance to hit a window than let's say 1000 balls against the same wall. In the same way, the more radiation you receive, the bigger chance there is for mutation to happens that cause cancer. This mean there is a chance even for lower doses. If it just hits the wrong cell at the wrong moment, things can go wrong. Stronger doses is just more "balls", making higher probability.

      This I write as a parent to a son that been going through Leukemia treatment. This Leukemia he probably got from "safe" doses of radiation from radon in our water. The safety limit is set to 1000 Bq/l. We had 500 Bq/l in the water from our well. As reference, a typical dug well is having around 50 Bq/l. The authorities said that we do not need any radon removing device as we are inside of the limit. Now we have one radon removing device and a lot less trust in what authorities say about radiation safety.

      • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday January 20 2017, @12:40PM

        by Gaaark (41) on Friday January 20 2017, @12:40PM (#456492) Journal

        Good luck to you, and your son especially.

        Yeah, my trust in government has gone waaaaaaaay down over the years.

        My wife still thinks Hillary would have made a good President, whereas I'm thinking a revolution is coming because it is all 'same old corruption'.

        Have to wait and see if Trump makes America great again, or feeds the pigs some more. So far, I see pigs... Rich pigs.

        --
        --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    • (Score: 2) by rleigh on Friday January 20 2017, @10:14AM

      by rleigh (4887) on Friday January 20 2017, @10:14AM (#456464) Homepage

      I've read this as well, and I've also done radiation safety training while I was working in a biology lab and been to a few lectures on the subject. All the papers I've read show ionising radiation damage is strictly linear. This is borne out in the statistics for artificial controlled exposure, e.g. the probability of jaw bone cancer is directly proportional to the number of dental x-rays a person has been exposed to.

      On the other hand, the body does have repair mechanisms which are activated in response to specific types of damage, which can result in repair or programmed cell death depending upon the nature and severity of the damage. The thinking is that this can be beneficial in fixing or eliminating accumulated damage caused other causes (free radicals, random DNA replication errors etc.) by triggering the repair response.

      I don't think we have a definitive answer there. Ionising radiation is dangerous, and from one point of few there is no "safe" level at which it is beneficial; it's all down to probabilities, so it's only safe at low levels from the point of view that you only have a small chance of a serious problem occurring in the remainder of your lifetime. Maybe that's offset by some side benefit, but that's not really clear and it's difficult to test in a controlled and ethical manner; most of the data is from statistical study of the medical history of whole populations, or subsets of populations, which comes with its own caveats.

      • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday January 20 2017, @10:31AM

        by PiMuNu (3823) on Friday January 20 2017, @10:31AM (#456468)

        The evidence you cite is not appropriate - i.e. you say the probability of jaw cancer is proportional to the number of short, high dose events. That is completely different to chronic low dose i.e. increase in background radiation. I believe that the effects of ionising radiation are not linear.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @01:45PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @01:45PM (#456522)

          The effects are certainly nonlinear at the bottom end as you would easily see a correlation between incidents of cancer vs the altitude that people live, and you don't. In fact, there is even suggestions that cancer cases goes down with altitude. This goes to the heart of the Linear No-Threshold model of radiation safety, which says there is no threshold dose the body can't handle, which goes against observation as well as our understanding of basic physiology. It is based upon the reasoning that, say, if I ingest 100 liters of water in a day, that will kill me, which means that if I ingest 10 liters a day for 10 days, that will kill me; which means that if I ingest 1 liter of water a day over 100 days, that will also kill me. Clearly there is a threshold where the body can handle the water. It sounds silly when you talk about water, but it is scary when you talk about radiation because radiation is scary.

        • (Score: 2) by rleigh on Friday January 20 2017, @01:50PM

          by rleigh (4887) on Friday January 20 2017, @01:50PM (#456524) Homepage

          That's was not the conclusion drawn in the radiation training and lectures I attended. A single absorption event has a certain probability for causing damage. As you increase the event frequency, the damage frequency will increase proportionately. It's absolutely complicated by the frequency and intensity of exposure, but you've still absorbed the same quantity irrespective of the pattern. The ability to *repair* that damage *may* differ depending upon the dosage, but even then the science is definitely not completely settled. Chronic exposure is still accumulating all the damage; it won't all be detected and fixed by any means. It was thought that the body could tolerate chronic exposure; we all tolerate background of varying amounts; but the last time I was doing the training stuff for all this, that was considered less reliable than previously.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:11PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:11PM (#456557)

            It depends not on the total dose, but the type and manner in which it is applied. For instance, you can drink plutonium, called by some "the most toxic substance in the world [isu.edu]", without really suffering any problems because it isn't taken up by the body and it will pass right out of you. In fact, you can make it into a chunk (but don't make it too big!) and carry it around in your hand. However, you wouldn't want to make a powder out of it and mix and snort it with your blow. Health Physics and Radiation Safety only concern themselves with total dose and assume that there is no safe level of radiation. This is very unrealistic, but it is easy to calculate and it keeps the lawyers happy and in business.

    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday January 20 2017, @08:29PM

      by butthurt (6141) on Friday January 20 2017, @08:29PM (#456687) Journal

      The hypothesis is called "radiation hormesis"; the Wikipedia article on it mentions the term "radiation homeostasis" which I don't remember seeing anywhere else.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis [wikipedia.org]