mvs@meccts.UUCP (Michael V. Stein) (07/21/86)
Mr. Carnes brought up the problem of naively beliving experts. An expert he has quoted before has been John Gofman. Let us examine the work of Mr. Gofman. The most illustrative proof of the nature of Mr. Gofman's work can be found in the case of "Johnson vs The United States of America." This was a civil suit brought against the U.S. government for supposed cancers caused to the defendants by exposure to minute quantoms of ionizing radiation that originated from luminous dials and instrument parts at their workplace. To quote from the court's decision: "The reasons this Court has given for rejecting the testimony of Dr. Gofman and Dr. Morgan are simply provided to help explain the Court's rationale, to educate the litigants, appraise the experts, and provide some insight for other courts which must face these same two whitnesses and must assume the same task of determining whether Dr. Morgan and Dr. Gofman represent a valid scientific point of view." Among these reasons was: "The Court finds that Dr. Gofman and Dr. Morgan exhibit a deliberate propensity to ignore a large amount of well established data which negates their arguments, and they cling to a small amount of highly questionable data which supports their arguments. This is not the hallmark of the type of objective scientist which a Court can reply upon in a lawsuit. It is the hallmark of a professional witness who is biased toward one side of the case." .... "To repeat, these experts' conclusions are not supported by any fact other than that the instruments are coated with a radioactive paint and each plaintiff has cancer. Beyond that there is nothing! Further, the factual data is inaccurate, incomplete, and is the product of rank speculation. The findings are unreliably assessed and professed by the most partisan, unfair sorts this Court has ever observed. Although not privy to other proceedings such as Silkwood or Allen, in which each of these witnesses has participated, it appears that in the absence of well-prepared, skilled council... it is no wonder that these two have been successful under those circumstances and that their testimony is sought in a goodly number of plaintiff cases now pending across the country." "...these whitnesses say and conclude things which, in the Court's view, they would not dare report in a peer-review format." When talking about Johnson, the Court had this to say: "...this Court must find Dr. Johnson's refusal to measure radon gas incompetence at best and deception at worst." Unfortunately I don't have space for the full 26 pages or so devoted to the plaintiff's "expert" witnesses. (Though if someone doubts the Court's conclusions, I could include more material..) Actually Gofman and Morgan are probably not any worse then the rest of the anti-nuke radical fringe. We have Amory Lovins who passes himself off as a free-marketeer and physicist while being very little of either. (Under testimony Lovins admitted he has no earned degree, his degree is honorary.) We have Ehrlich, who in an interview in 1974, said that the Rasmussen report had "serious technical flaws" and dismissed seventy man years of research with a wave of his hand. Ehrlich once even made the statement: "nuclear wastes were once dumped into one of our southern rivers in amounts so small as to be considered negligible, until oysters growing in water near the river's mouth were found to glow in the dark." When he was questioned for the source to this strange absurdity, Ehrlich replied: "My source was an AEC scientist from an eastern laboratory who told me the story casually many years ago. I suspect he may have been exaggerating, but it doesn't make any difference." Another good example is Ernst Sternglass. His misuse of statistics is almost legendary. Other activits don't even pretend to be scientists. This list would include activists such as Ralph Nader and Abbie Hoffman. I could elaborate more here, but frankly I have more important things to do. Unfortunately this has also been the view of most of the physics and health communities. This complacency has had serious consequences in the debate on energy policy. Sometimes, when scientists do try to refute these radical views, they are censored. For example, when Dr. David Rossen wrote a rebuttal to an article by Lovins, the editors of "Foriegn Affairs" refused to publish it. One of their reasons for not publishing it was: "You've addressed the radicals of the movement and neglected to notice a middle line... You're attacking an unlikely strategy that represents only the radical end of the argument." The lesson to be learned here is that just because something is written on paper, it is not necessarily gospel. Just because someone has a degree in biology, one need not immediletly add the title, "respected biologist." Or if the degree is in biology, one need not necessarily assume they are an expert in either economics, or nuclear engineering. Indeed even if they have a degree in biology, they may not even be an expert on the biological effects of ionizing radiation. A safe rule is that people who distance themselves from the main body of research in their field should not be given the same credence that is given the researchers in that field actually advancing the body of knowledge. Too much effort has been wasted on false charges. For example, time and effort was wasted disproving the Gofman-Tamplin claim that the permissible plutonium lung burden was too high by a factor of 10,000. (The latest study of plutonium workers at Rocky Flats weapons plants showed that cancer deaths are 64% of the expected number in the general population.) This is why people have been trying to use official reports and transcripts in their messages, Mr. Carnes. -- Michael V. Stein Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation - Technical Services UUCP ihnp4!dicome!meccts!mvs