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Politics and Science is the second in a series on looking at the uses and abuses of radiation in our culture, with a particular focus on ionizing radiation, i.e. nuclear technology. This is a series on looking at the uses and abuses of radiation in our culture, with a particular focus on ionizing radiation, i.e. nuclear technology. We talked about some of the systemic and long-term cumulative effects of x-rays and other types of radiation. We also discussed radiation from power plants and many times our medical establishment compares it to less harmful things like sunlight.
We also discussed radiation from power plants and many times our medical establishment compares it to less harmful things like sunlight. Some of the isotopes that get into the air and food release particles that have an extremely high energy transfer, and so those are the worst. The others penetrate deeply and do damage along the way, but the intensity of the radiation isn't the main thing. It's how much they interact with your tissue and in what ways. So those are actual radioactive particles.
Last week we talked about those and we touched a little bit on the history of radiation. You talked about some of the scientists getting badly damaged by handling radioactive substances. We didn't really focus on the history of the uses of radioactive materials in science and medicine and the military, which is eventually how they really got popularized. Ray, could you perhaps give us a little summary of how radioactive technology crept into our culture?
Almost immediately when the Curies discovered how deadly poisonous radium and related isotopes were, the medical profession became very interested because it was a fancier way to destroy tissue instead of just poisons. Surgery and cautery and acid and such, they had a new technique that seemed technological and impressive. So it very quickly went from treating warts and tumors to all kinds of bizarre quackery. I knew people when I was in college whose facial bones were collapsing because they had had x-ray treatment for acne.
People whose hair had fallen out because they were treated for ringworm with x-rays. Total ignorance and arrogance combined to use whatever turned up. Who was treating them, Ray? Regular doctors. Just regular general practitioners? Yeah. And when I was a kid, shoe stores still had x-ray machines so anyone could look at their feet, bones, and see if the shoes fit. Just a technological gadget that entertained people. Regular doctors had fluoroscopes that would let you watch a person breathe and watch their heart move and watch their stomach and intestines move and so on.
They were pumping nearly lethal doses of radiation into people and they would just stand there talking and watching for entertainment. Some of those things were putting out 50 to 100 rads in even a short treatment. If they had come in for a weekly exam, they would have soon been dead. Just to compare that to a normal exposure from a chest x-ray, how much is that? Oh, I guess approaching a thousand times more from some of those fluoroscopes.
In the last few years, I've talked to people who had a combination of heart treatments where they put a tube or a wire up into your heart to open a clogged artery. But they use a fluoroscope to watch where it's going and these people get a tremendous amount of exposure that is cumulative and it can cause brain degenerative diseases. The heart surgeons who do that kind of work have a high incidence of brain cancer and so they are advised to wear a lead cap so they don't get brain cancer.
But the various types of physicians who work with radiologists and heart surgeons especially have a higher rate of girl children. That's the same as electricians who work around high voltage power lines and the birds that nest near the high tension lines. It doesn't have to be ionizing to have really major biological effects. Why is it that they produce girl children instead of male children? Apparently the male fertilized ovum and embryo and fetus at all stages, the male is weaker. The female has a better resistance in general. I see.
Apparently it's because all these types of radiation imitate estrogen in their biological actions and estrogen tends to bias the sex ratio of the offspring. These fluoroscopes you were talking about, they were a novelty? All through the 40s and the 50s. The shoe stores I think they were outlawed in the mid 1950s. In the 40s, did doctors have any idea of the danger of x-rays or did they just think it was a momentary danger? Doctors never have any idea about anything except what they're told is good practice.
The information was available like chiropractors and borderline people in the medical profession had pamphlets in their office at that time. In the 1940s I saw these pamphlets giving references to the research literature showing that radiation accelerates aging process. Meanwhile, real doctors were exposing their patients to doses that would not only accelerate aging but would tremendously increase the cancer mortality. Leukemia was extremely high in that period, not only from radioactive fallout from atmospheric bomb tests but from the medical x-rays of pregnant women and fluoroscoping of the general patients.
It sounds like our culture was basically in love with modern technological gadgets. Just the same as it is now. Some differences but the same principles. I'm sure most doctors if they'd heard that information from a source that they respected would have cut out many of those practices. I think they have probably cut out most of the excessive ones. Well, yeah, but the people who sell the equipment create mythologies to say, "Oh, those are just quacks that warn you that radiation will accelerate aging."
Now, 60 years later, some of the best research is showing that radiation causes the formation of amyloid, the type of substance that is incriminated in Alzheimer's disease and degenerative lung disease and kidney disease and pancreatic disease and so on. Amyloid is a plaque? It's a type of protein that forms plaques. Normally, the very common structure of a protein is that there are helix structures, a spiral piece of a chain of protein. With a certain disturbance, those spirals can break down and fold over against themselves and make a sheet arrangement called the pleated sheet.
Those sheets then can stick to a similar sheet structure in another protein, and this array of pleated sheets in different protein molecules sticking together forms a long fibril. Then those fibrils are what actually forms the plaque. First, you form the degraded protein, and then the proteins form fibers, and the fibers condense into the visible plaques that they call amyloid. That's a common symptom in all Alzheimer's patients? Yes, and it's turning up in practically all aged tissues. It's accelerated by radiation and toxins and estrogen and even microwaves and other types of disturbing energy.
Ultrasound even can, in vitro, you can produce amyloid fibrils with energy as low as ultrasound or microwaves. I thought ultrasound was actually protective of tissue, but I guess it does have some drawbacks then. Yes, everything that puts energy into cells and tissues in unbiological ways can cause some disruption. I can see how that would be. We were talking to Professor Gilbert Ling a few weeks ago, and he was basically talking about the electrical nature of living tissue, how everything is basically in an electrical relationship, all the proteins and the water within a cell.
The electrical interactions between proteins and water, that's exactly where the problem is with all kinds of radiation and even toxins. The romantic classical physics people who wanted to think mathematically about radiation and assure people that there was a threshold below which radiation wasn't at all harmful, this kind of thinking wanted to say that a unit of radio energy had to be sufficient to break a chain of DNA before anything happened biologically. That takes a direct hit on a certain high energy, so that's where the idea of the danger of ionizing radiation came from.
But before the ionizing radiation actually has a direct hit and breaks a DNA chain, it's doing many much more subtle things, causing fluctuations in the electronic system of proteins and causing subtle changes in the way water relates to those proteins. So if the medical world and physics had been paying closer attention to Gilbert Ling's work 50 years ago, most of these questions would have been settled in a very different way, with much more concern for protection than for promotion of industry.
So you feel like basically the marketing side of our culture is what's determined its medical course? Yeah, the people with an x-ray machine to sell will tell doctors that this one delivers 10 times less energy and the dose is below the threshold. So you can give a person a sub-threshold dose every six months if you want to and they'll never have any harm from it. But these little sub-threshold doses actually modify the water structure, which directs the way the tissue develops and affects things like the immune system and the way nerves pattern themselves.
And so it redirects the course of your development and in a young individual that deviation of development can produce drastic and fatal effects very quickly. In mature people it accelerates aging and degeneration more often than a quick cancer or other lethal event. So people became more and more concerned because it seems like there is more concern at this point. People were already beginning to understand it in the 1930s. I mentioned last week that Thomas Edison after 1904 became a great opponent of the medical use of x-rays.
And other people, especially in other countries, were studying the actual biological effects. And in the 1930s there was enough known that they should have shut down all medical x-rays and banned the development of nuclear industry. But the government and the nuclear industry and the medical instrument corporations were re-educating the people and convincing the public that those researchers were only unrealistic quacks that hated technology. But the subtle effects of the interaction of radiation with cellular electronics and cellular light effects and water interactions with proteins and so on.
All of those were developing along another course all through the 30s, 40s and 50s. Albert Cianciarchi was one of these people working on the subtle but essential biological interactions of electrons, water and light. For 20 or 30 years he was totally sidelined even though he won the Nobel Prize for work on vitamin C and respiration. His work on light and cell luminescence and so on just put him out of the mainstream. People who criticize industry become the victims of corporate government campaigns to convince the public not to listen to them.
The big nuclear corporations, I guess they still do it, but some of them used to have weekly seminars where they would have people come in and tell the staff, all the physicists and engineers working there, that radiation was actually good for them biologically. Then they would smear people who had presented evidence of the toxic effects of radiation or nuclear plants. For example, Stern Glass, people were convinced that he was such a quack that they wouldn't even look at his books.
Alice Stewart, who showed that medical x-rays were probably the main cause of childhood cancer, for about 30 years she was ridiculed because the corporations campaigned and taught their employees that these were basically demented or insane people. Do you think this mindset was connected in any way to the military use of radiation? Yes, the military, once they started doing their atmospheric tests, they joined up with the medical, the x-ray industry and so on.
They had massive campaigns to tell the public that fallout was good for you, that it was below a threshold and that it would actually stimulate you to be slightly irradiated. The professors who criticized that campaigns were mounted using some of the right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society to create scandals. The professor would be identified as an opponent of atmospheric bomb testing and then they would create a scandal implicating them in some kind of immoral or pro-communist activity and get them fired for something other than their expressed opposition. So it was really an organized campaign.
Yes, very involving organizations like the John Birchers and the CIA and the US Public Health Service was a major player in that campaign to incriminate the critics and hide the evidence, destroy the evidence in many cases and tell the public that they were safe. So the Public Health Service was very influential with the medical profession especially. It sounds like this is sort of the Cold War is when it started to really get bad in terms of universities being affected and all of our public health services.
Yes, there was no line between physics and biology because the people with the biological orientation, Szent-Györgyi and Gilbert Ling, anyone interested in the subtle biology, they were called quacks. Even the Cold War got involved because the idea of acquired damage other than a random mutation was identified as a Lysenko Soviet doctrine and they were fired. So you had to be a certain kind of genetic dogmatist to teach biology in the United States after 1950.
Yes, that is so bizarre. I think most people think that science is an objective, basically art, empirical art and that is basically the bottom line. A very good place to get insight into how the whole system works is to start with German romantic physics in the 19th century and see how that directly led into the 20th century nuclear physics. They were wanting to subjectify physics and make it part of a spiritual quest for unity and seeking the absolute.
Facts got in the way and it was presented as a subjective art expression and that is where the Heisenberg thing came in that you can't know things on the fine level. It is all ultimately random and so our mind, the knowing system is the only thing that counts. It is sort of a victory of subjective idealism over empirical science. That is interesting. I didn't know it started with German romantic physics. It sounds like the beginning of eugenics and Aryan pure thought. Hitler was just a business like application. The others were more refined and ethereal.
It is discouraging that that should live on to this day. It was deliberately imported. The journals of human genetics originated in the eugenics movement and they renamed themselves after the war. The German physics and genetics people were idealized and many of them were imported to become influential in the United States. You talked about the American culture and maybe most of the world's industrialized nations' culture of love of new technology.
In terms of selling nuclear technology, it seems like the equation E=mc2 and Einstein's popularity really played a big role in bringing that to the front of popular culture. I don't claim to understand what E=mc2 means except it sounds like just on a superficial level that energy is the same thing as matter, which to me is a little confusing. It sounds like it is saying that everything is the same as everything else. That only becomes really dangerous when they start saying that energy and information are the same and that knowing and matter are the same.
You can argue about how interactive energy and substance are. Einstein's position was that the field should count as matter. From Einstein's perspective, there was nothing idealistic about it necessarily. Energy was just another form of matter or substance that could be related to ordinary forms of matter. But when you invoke the quantum ideas, the Heisenberg principle, then you throw out matter and substitute mind and information. Much of the computer culture is committed to that kind of doctrine about the nature of knowing and information. It wants to take the substance out of information.
So when you say that the field is part of matter, that means that the matter is part of its environment? Is that what you're saying? Yes. All of the world, including our knowledge of the world, is part of the same substantial stuff. The process of knowing becomes substantial and physical. For example, there are people who have demonstrated luminescence in the visual center of the brain and in the optic nerve and so on. When we see a colored light, we actually light up with that color inside.
And so it's putting consciousness right into the physical interaction with different substances interacting. So you can think of our consciousness as a physical resonance. We are learning to tune ourselves up to the energy of the substance outside. There's nothing anti-material or ethereal about that kind of interpretation of consciousness. The people who talk about information being transmitted along nerves which have a simple all or nothing on or off switch-like behavior, that reduces knowledge and its interaction with substance to something mathematical. So many on switches and so many off switches are supposed to amount to consciousness.
But nothing is left that relates to how we experience reality. We're talking to Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist, physiologist, and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. So it sounds like they're reducing what you object to is that they're reducing life to something that's just basically mechanical and it doesn't really live in the environment. Yeah, and it's always if you see information as separated from substance, your interpretation, like the Heisenbergian idea, interpretation is what makes the difference because you can never know the actual details of the fine structure of matter.
And so your theory of what you're perceiving is the real thing. And so it reduces consciousness to a cluster of theories like states in the computer. It sounds like it reduces confidence too. It sounds like Heisenberg is saying that you can't know your own world and you're... You can't be sure about it. It's all probabilistic and random. And is that essentially the message of quantum physics? Yeah, and that, the really bad consequence is that it all becomes deductive. The hypothesis is tested against the reality, but the reality is merely a statistical probability.
And so the definiteness is only on the side of theory, and that means that you can think your way to the absolute and the truth, but you don't have to learn your way because out of this probabilistic quantum world, nothing definite is going to come without the insertion of that specific set of deductive mind principles. And the other way of looking at it is that knowledge is always something that is inert and in the past, except when we're learning new knowledge. The inflow from the changing world is where knowledge comes from.
When you're talking about those not being able to know the world, do you think that scientific attitude of quantum physics is used to basically say that even though there's radiation there and it may cause some harm, but we can't really know that? To me, just I guess get the general impression that it's taking away the liability because you can be a corporation out there and pollute the heck out of the world and make a lot of people sick,
but none of us can really know if that's really true. And so it's just the way it is. For decades, John Goffman went around working for the government saying that we can't know that this is causing terrible damage in the future. The idea that you shouldn't act on anything that you haven't tested empirically, you can't make your judgment as one piece of the world sensing the possibilities, but you have to do everything after the fact. The knowledge after the fact is the only thing that Goffman would recognize for years.
And then suddenly it occurred to him that if you're doing the damage, maybe it would be nice to take a precautionary attitude. And now people are talking about a precautionary principle that you should think about what harm might happen in the future, even though it hasn't been hypothesized and tested in the conventional scientific way. It's more like a common sense. You don't wait until the accident happens to avoid the accident. Yeah. No, but Ray, we have a product. We have to get it on the market. If we do that, we'll lose valuable marketing time.
Yeah. And that somehow people forget their common sense when they see people in white coats and being sponsored by big corporations and the government saying that we have no knowledge that this is going to harm you in the future. And it also sounds like quantum physics is a very good physics for an authoritarian culture. If you've ever listened to a lot of physics professors or tried talking to them, you realize that the whole physics culture has that authoritarian textbook-y quality.
They don't know anything if it isn't in the textbooks. And if it is in the textbooks, you can't question it. They are very hard people to actually talk to, except things like bowling or golfing and their weekend activities. They can act like regular people. But as professors, they are in a separate world. So the textbook basically establishes the party line. And then that has to be stuck to. Yeah. And if you read the professional science textbooks, looking at old ones, it's as interesting as reading novels to see how a given professor was constructing his textbook.
They are sometimes interesting individual works of art, but the outstanding thing is how rigid they are. When you say it's like reading a novel, how do you mean? You can see the mind of the creator at work sorting out the things that are to be emphasized and not expressing maybe this happened and maybe this is true. A novel would get very complex and confusing if they tried to be empirical about their imagination. The textbook writers are always too sure of what they are saying. And they are almost always wrong. In the textbooks?
Yeah. When you look at old textbooks, it really makes me think of Monty Python. Maybe you should put some of those skits into screenplays. We have about 15 minutes left. And I thought maybe we'd touch on a little more about nuclear power. And one of the arguments I've heard now for bringing nuclear power back is that, number one, for global warming because it's purportedly creates less greenhouse gases, although Helen Caldicott was just here and she agreed with many of the things you're saying about radiation and she said it is cumulative.
But she also said that the production of nuclear power involves tons of greenhouse gases because it's so energy intensive to not only build a nuclear power plant, but also produce the fuel that goes into it. And I think some of the arguments for bringing back nuclear power, because basically a new plant hasn't been built I think in 30 or 40 years,
is we should do what the French do, which is recycle the spent fuel rods that are slowly but surely building up in all the spent fuel rod pools outside of every nuclear reactor in this country with no place for them to go. Always one of the big technological problems of nuclear power is what to do with the fuel. And a lot of people are saying that, well, we can recycle those. And you said you just looked into that. Yeah, there's a website called Environmental Devastation Caused by Reprocessing Radioactive Waste.
And they mentioned that the French plant has annually discharged 100 million gallons of radioactive waste into the English Channel by way of an underwater pipeline. And you've probably heard of the industry and military dumping barrels, hundreds of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste dropped in the ocean about 10 or 20 miles off the coastlines all over the world. And those things are leaking, and the food chain from the English Channel, it has already drifted up to the Arctic, over to Canada, and it circulates, gets into the food chain.
And then 20 or 30 years later, the people on the continents are starting to eat the radioactive fish that have eaten the waste they dumped in barrels. But that was banned in the '90s after 60 years of dumping. Who was dumping it, the military? Yeah, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Navy, and Army, and anyone who was authorized to use it would dump it. And the dumping in barrels was banned about 15 years ago. But they didn't ban putting a pipe out under the ocean and pumping it out.
And so this website says that the plant in The Hague alone has been discharging 100 million gallons of waste every year. And another one in England, some in the United States, dumping from the reprocessing plants, dumping these immense amounts of waste, more than they dumped in barrels. So someone knew that it was bad to dump barrels of radioactive stuff into the ocean, so then they started pumping it in in pipes.
We need some kind of a concept that doesn't specify whether the behavior is governed by insanity or criminality, because it all amounts to the same thing. Yeah. The waste that's coming out of the pipes from reprocessing the nuclear waste, is it contaminated water or is it actually particles? Oh, particles. Huge amounts of even uranium and plutonium are getting into the water and the fish are taking it up. Spontaneous 90 and the shorter acting isotopes, but the whole range of junk is getting into the ocean still. Yeah, that's really discouraging.
Well, I hope that perhaps people will take a second look at nuclear power before they actually start building any more plants. It's never made any sense to me. They always claim that they would solve the technological problem somewhere down the road. But when you have a process that's basically spewing out the worst poison known to man. The United States has two very contaminated areas besides what goes into the ocean and rivers. The Hanford plant in Washington and the Greenville dump in South Carolina.
A nearby town was finding their well water was contaminated with uranium and the people reporting it said that it must indicate some natural uranium mineral source upstream in the water table. They were only 20 miles from the Greenville nuclear dump. Wells in that area are being contaminated with all kinds of isotopes. Several years ago I was driving south on I-5 going about the speed limit in Northern California and saw a huge truck coming up behind me going about 90 miles an hour.
As it went past there was this giant vat on the back, a big cylindrical tub with the only load and it said Greenville, South Carolina. So the people who transport these giant vats of waste from Hanford to South Carolina aren't the safest type of driver. I remember there was some debate about whether to allow them to move nuclear waste around the country on the back of semi trucks and they did decide to allow it.
One of those trucks going across the mountains from a Northern California reactor over to I-5, I guess heading for South Carolina, the road was so narrow it got stuck going around. It was such a long truck that it wouldn't go around the corner of the highway. They had to take the truck apart which took all day. The people in charge of the whole nuclear industry are no smarter than people who tend cars on the freeway. Yeah, it just seems like such a vulnerable thing, a vulnerable place to put such dangerous material.
Another thing I wanted to talk about that doesn't have to do with nuclear power is incineration of medical waste. Now I understand that goes on all the time and that's actually putting it into the air. Do you know anything about that Ray? No, but they in general don't worry much about, like when they put radioactive iodine into a person, they don't worry about the person's urine. When bodies are incinerated, that goes into the air, much of it is vaporized. Oh, that's true. I had never thought about that.
I mean there's actually those radioactivity or toxins that are in our bodies if you get cremated. Yeah, if they die with radium needles in their organs for example. Just the mercury in teeth gets vaporized. Oh, it's actually more dangerous at that point than it is possibly in your mouth. Mm-hmm. I see. You talked about Alzheimer's being caused by nuclear waste or ionizing radiation. Does that correspond with sites near power plants and nuclear reprocessing plants? No one is very clear about that, but I think it will turn out that it does.
People are starting to look at the various sources, microwave radiation, telephones and power lines. There are some people who have been working on that for about 25 years and claim that it's so, and I suspect it is. Mm-hmm. So you think-- Oh, go ahead. Cataracts are another interesting thing. They're easy to study in a way because the cataract is a different state of the living matter, and people have been trying to understand what happens in a cataract, and it's probably analogous to what happens in Alzheimer's disease,
but it's a much simpler system made up of very few types of protein. It turns out that in a cataract, the proteins aren't even denatured. So you would think that the radiation would have to at least change the proteins to make a cataract develop, and they are caused by--like surgeons get cataracts from exposure to x-rays, and people who work around any kind of even low-level radiation, microwaves and so on, get cataracts. It turns out that the cataract is chemically almost identical to the surrounding tissue,
but it's wetter, slightly higher water content than the healthy tissue around it, and all that happens is a slight fluctuation in the electronic state of the protein, and that lets the water get out of control and lets water accumulate rather than being under the influence of the system of proteins and the electronic fields of the proteins. So it lets you see in a very concrete way how energy of not even thermal energy in the ordinary sense,
but it is--you would classify it as thermal energy because it's just the vibrational state of the water molecules which has changed and makes all the difference between the lens that works and the lens that's opaque, and similar changes probably happen very early in a disease like Alzheimer's or cancer. If the tissue was visible, you would probably see it as a changing state of the water and electronic behavior of the proteins that would be analogous to the opacity of the lens
long before you got any of the major deposition of amyloid and plaque formation that eventually shows up in the tumors and the Alzheimer's brain and so on. So you're saying the radiation is changing the structure long before--in subtle ways. Yeah, and if just microwaves and ultraviolet light can do it, then that says that when a gamma ray or x-ray passes through your brain like bouncing off a dental x-ray, that these very relatively weak transmissions through your living tissue don't have to even ionize anything.
All they have to do is slightly add some energy to the system. It can not even be sufficient to cause electrons to get into a chemically reactive state, but just enough to cause this semi-thermal fluctuation of electrons and water vibrations. I see. And last week--we only have a few minutes left-- last week you did say that there are things that if people have to be exposed to things like x-rays or any kind of stress, there are things that as a physiologist and as an endocrinologist you say people can actually do to fortify themselves.
Yeah, keeping your energy at a peak, like getting the damage done in the late afternoon in the summer is best, but keeping your carbon dioxide up with adequate thyroid function, adequate progesterone, pregnenolone, testosterone, and so on, all of the tissue protective hormones and the nutrients, magnesium in particular, is the best established radiation protective nutrient, and coffee happens to protect against all kinds of radiation damage that have been studied. Oh, and niacinamide is a vitamin that is protective, and coffee happens to provide magnesium and niacin as well as the protective caffeine and antioxidants.
That's great. Well, we didn't really get to talk about microwaves or Wi-Fi, which I guess is another forum, but maybe some other time we'll get you back and talk about that if you're willing. And we've been talking to Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist, physiologist, and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. His website is raypeat.com. Ray, thanks again for being here and for all your work. Thank you. Goodbye. Bye. And another hour has flown by with Dr. Raymond Peat. Again, his website is raypeat.com. So, thanks for listening. This has been Politics and Science at MadRiver.com.
If you have any questions for Politics and Science, you can direct them by email to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRW LP1 95.1 FM, airing on Mondays at 5pm. And in the Bellows Falls area, it can be heard on WULL LP Bellows Falls at 101.1 FM, airing from 3 to 4pm on Sundays and from 9 to 10am on Mondays. Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization.