INNOVATIVE NOTEBOOK RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT 1995
Late this past October I took one of my grand kids to the Open House at The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory complex, a Department of Energy facility nestled high in the hills overlooking the UC Berkeley campus and devoted to problem solving in energy, environment, health, and basic research. Included in this array is a Genome Research Lab, one of three such labs supported by the DOE to explore the human DNA genome through robotics and digital microscopy. The exposition attracted students from all walks of life.
In Bldg. 2 is the historically aging Betatron, last powered up in 1993, a relic of the Nobelladen experiments of yesteryear. But dwarfed by this massive cyclotron was a minuscule lexan window exhibit of a neonfilled multistage spark chamber, where cosmic rays from “somewhere out there” zapped through every few seconds, silently ionizing the highvoltage charged neon gas with segmented orangecolored streaks, first at one angle then at another.
The school lesson here, as a student attraction, is that such energetic cosmic particles have been soaking the Earth for untold eons, noiselessly bathing us in an ionizing shower that has possibly defined the radiation threshold of our quality of life since the beginning of biological time.
By happenstance, shortly after this fascinating excursion in Berkeley I attended the American Nuclear Society gathering across the Bay in San Francisco where a series of international interest meetings were devoted to low level radiation and its concomitant effects on our present quality of life. The average person living in the US, for example, gets about 360 milli-rems radiation per year from both cosmic and terrestrial sources. The cosmic sources are from galactic and extragalactic particles while terrestrial origins are principally from diffusion of radon gas. Estimates range as high as 15,000 particles per second per person.
Some curiosities were brought out at this ANS meeting that defied explanation. Bernard L. Cohen, professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, had made an independent comprehensive survey of some 1600 counties throughout the US, a study that purportedly was designed to onceandforall define if not sustain the theory of linear, nothreshold distribution on cancerinduced radiation as espoused by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, this was not what he found at all.
关于这些事情的标准图表从ZeroLevel辐射阈值开始，并朝向一些任意高死亡率线性上升。但是，直到几百毫米 - REMS没有可辨别的效果。显示的是辐射诱导的癌症在左右几百毫克的微小而统计学上显着降低。此外，统计曲线然后向下浸出给出负斜率，只返回到每年约5个剩余的基线上方，每年的NRC的约五十次。然后开始一个广泛的灰色区域，每年珍贵的少量众多约100个雷姆。
This finding was supported by researchers from Japan, who in the course of their own investigations had also used the statistics supplied by the US for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where a study of nearly 80,000 survivors were divided into control and exposed groups. The normalized distribution of carcinomas showed about 120 more incidences in the unexposed group, which ran counter to every expectation.
The question is, what’s going on?
The statistics for Denver and the Colorado plateau are also skewed. These folks get an additional 90 millirems per year from both cosmic and terrestrial sources, but have less than average incidences of cancer. This same skewness exists for people who live in higher radonlevel areas, seemingly contrary to what we read in the mass media. Moreover, those persons having plutoniumpowered cardiac pacemakers can add 100 milli-rems to their annual dosage.
这似乎沸腾的是被称为血腥，一种生物学术语，它描述了在无毒水平下毒毒性物质的刺激浸润的效果。许多这样的化学毒素是已知的，例如砷，铜或硒，其在相对低的浓度下在代谢中起次要但显着的密封作用。
Does this mean that radiation also is a necessary “nutrient” in the metabolic broth, that there’s a minimum daily requirement?
I would wager that it does. For one thing, Homosapiens has proliferated and thrived for mega years in this milieu. For another, mankind has extended its individual life span substantially over the last few centuries, due to better living conditions, increased nutrition, and more effective medical and sanitary practices. Humankind now encounters otherwise rare physical insults and diseases because we live long enough to experience them.
以类似的方式，升高水平高达100个REM的辐射曝光可能只在老化过程中显着，我们尚未真正学习如何控制该方法。
