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     By Mary Knudson
     (c) 1980 The Baltimore Sun (Field News Service)
     A very few people in the nation are responsible for deciding how
much radiation the rest of us will be allowed to be exposed to.
     Those who decide are government regulators. They, in turn, look to
the nation's leading scientists in the fields of radiation and the
environment to establish the risks posed by specific levels of
radiation.
     Using the risks calculated by these scientists as their guide, the
regulators determine how much radium can go into your drinking water
and how much exposure should be allowed for workers with radioactive
chemicals.
    The federal Environmental Protection Agency, under the Clean Air
Act, is expected to soon set regulations on radioactive industrial
emissions. These decisions, as well as possible revisions of
radiation levels for worker exposure and drinking water, await the
release of the latest risk estimates from a scientific document known
as the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) report. Uses
of medical and dental X-rays and other radioactive treatments also
are influenced by BEIR risk estimates.
     But the BEIR report has had an unusually prolonged birth. One year
ago it made an appearance in something of a public breech birth, and,
in an unusual act, was promptly slapped back into the womb by the
president of the National Academy of Sciences. Last week, a rewrite
committee produced a born-again version of the BEIR report, a
compromise of the 1979 version and its dissenting viewpoint.
     This arrival of what is considered as scientific truth can be
critically questioned. The report that appeared a year ago stated one
set of risks, the rewritten report, another. What is to be believed?
     Just how much do the nation's most highly regarded specialists know
about low-level radiation? How reliable are other scientific reports
produced through the academy or reported in well-respected scientific
journals? How much of science is indisputable fact and how much is
rhetorical debate used to win votes?
     The following description of the BEIR report's evolution is not
just an interesting story about a quarrel among high-ranking
scientists. It is a lesson in how our top scientists set rules the
rest of us are supposed to understand, then live by.
     X X X
     It was considered a major press conference, and the turnout of news
media representatives in Washington one year ago was large. It wasn't
long after the Three Mile Island controversy. A committee of the
nation's most respected radiation specialists was issuing its
long-awaited report on low-level radiation risks.
     Dr. Edward P. Radford, chairman of the National Academy of Sciences
Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation
(BEIR), gave the committee's report.
     Then Dr. Harald H. Rossi, a committee member, countered Radford's
report with a minority report lowering the risk estimate
considerably. What's more, Rossi said, his minority report had
growing support from committee members.
     The two scientists' disagreement stemmed from methods used to
arrive at ''low-level'' risk. Radford used something called a linear
approach, extrapolating damage caused by radiation from high doses
down to lower doses. Rossi insisted on a quadratic method, which says
a cell reacts to the square of the dose of radiation that it absorbs.
     As reporters tried to draw out the extent of the differences. Dr.
Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences,
listened in the back of the auditorium with growing dismay. Then came
his breaking point: Radford took the microphone and publicly
challenged Rossi to a ''debate'' on the issue.
     Handler recalled: ''I was so shocked that I got up and walked along
the side and walked up to the front and stared at them. I listened to
the chairman issue a challenge and I was aghast. Not because I have
any reluctance to display controversy in public, but because they had
had all this time to thrash it out in the committee room. (The report
was two years in the making). And I was appalled that there they
were... It was quite unusual.''
     Handler talked extensively with this reporter about the BEIR affair
in an interview at his summer home in Woods Hole, Mass., last August.
He said that by then, three months after the press conference, ''what
that day was called the minority view was really the majority view,
if you count noses.''
     The controversy displayed at the press conference ''persuaded me
that we didn't have a report,'' Handler said.
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    Knudson xxx Handler said.
    
     As a result, the Academy head appointed a committee within the
committee to rethink and rewrite the report. Hoping to eliminate
polarization, he deliberately excluded from the new committee Radford
and Rossi.
     But the rewrite committee has had tough sledding. Dr. Albert
Hilberg was the staff scientist assigned to the BEIR committee before
he retired in 1979. ''The problem that developed immediately was that
there was no middle ground they could meet on,'' he says.
     ''It was linear versus quad. So, Fabricant (Dr. Jacob I. Fabricant
whom Hilberg identifies as the chairman of the rewrite committee)
asked, 'Isn't there a middle ground we could meet on?' So they
accepted linear plus quad.''
     In other words, the new committee combined the essence of the
majority and minority reports and gave an estimate of risk of cancer
deaths that cuts by half the risk estimates of last year's report.
     The latest BEIR report offers three choices in a series of tables
of risk from low-level radiation-the linear, giving highest risks,
the quadratic, giving lowest risks and the linear-quadratic (the
report's official version) which gives a compromise,
middle-of-the-road estimate. Variations of the estimates vary from
two-fold to 18-fold to infinity.
     Neither Radford nor Rossi accepts the new report, though Rossi
feels kinder toward it than Radford. Each wrote a dissenting view,
sticking to his own theory. Hilberg, too, regrets the rewrite order.
''I think the whole issue was clear last May as far as the academy
committee was concerned and I think what the subsequent subcommittee
has done has simply confused the issue.''
     Handler disagrees. ''Truth cannot be found by voting on a
committee,'' he said. ''Either the evidence compels truth, or the
reality is that there is insufficient evidence to know what truth
is.''
     The question of human health risks from low-level radiation appears
to fall in the latter category, Handler suggested. ''If they're
uncertain of one rad, then that means they know nothing of very low
doses,'' he said. Human exposure to radiation usually is measured in
millirems. It takes 1,000 millirems to equal one rem or rad. The
latest report gives risks for 10 rads of a single dose of radiation
and one rad over a lifetime.
     ''What is useless is pretending to know something that you don't
know,'' Handler said. ''If they say 'this is our range of
uncertainty,''' such a report is ''a lot more valid than...splitting
it down the middle, because that's a lie.''
     Meanwhile, as one year passed with the new BEIR report still in the
rewrite stage, federal regulators grew impatient. The first BEIR
report appeared in 1972 at the request of the federal Environmental
Protection Agency. The current BEIR report was made also at the EPA's
request.
     ''We thought sufficient time had passed to re-examine some of the
biological data since the 1972 report,'' said Dr. William Mills, a
biophysicist who is director of the criterion standards division
office of radiation programs at EPA.
     ''We wanted to use the most up-to-date information we could in
setting standards,'' he said. ''We had made great use of BEIR 1'' in
setting standards for nuclear power plants, Mills said. ''It is
obviously unfortunate that there has been such a long delay'' in
getting out the new BEIR report, he added.
     ''From my understanding, it will not be a report that most of the
scientific community can accept,'' he said. When the report does come
out, ''we will look at it and then if we feel we have to go with
something different, we will and we will defend ourselves,'' he said.
     Last week he had not seen the new BEIR report, but said that
judging from the complexity of the draft version he saw, it will take
EPA six months to review and understand it. He said he is sure the
report was made ''in good faith'' by the scientists, and that now EPA
will have to select which risk model to use for which regulations.
Likely the linear and the linear-quadratic models will both be used
for different types of radiation, he said.
     The EPA sets basic standards for use of radioactive chemicals in
nuclear power plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must use EPA
standards in facilities which it licenses, and can then make even
stronger regulations. The EPA also regulates radium in drinking water.
     One area which the EPA has not yet set standards for, but which
Mills says has become ''one of the biggest problems today,'' is the
buildup of houses of radon, a radioactive gas that seeps out of
uranium in the soil. It is especially a problem in parts of the
country where soil is thick with phosphate ore, which has a
higher-than-normal concentration of uranium, he said. Radon, a decay
product of radium, is the substance known to cause lung cancer among
workers in uranium mills.
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    Knudson xxx in uranium mills.
    
     Buildup of radon is a factor that needs to be considered in any
house where precautions are taken to keep heat and air conditioning
in and outdoor temperature out, the EPA official said.
     Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA can now set air standards-limit
the amounts of radioactive emissions coming from industries. This is
another matter awaiting the new BEIR report.
     Another major agency that looks to BEIR as a guide is the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. ''We would use it to develop our regulatory
strategy,'' said Dr. Michael A. Parsont, chief of the NRC's radiation
health standards branch.
     Handler describes the Academy's fact-finding process this way:
''All matters brought to us are controversial. If they weren't
controversial, no one would ask us to look at them...The government
comes to us with questions.
     Fabricant declines to discuss the charge to the rewrite committee
or anything about the committee's workings.
     Radford said that Hilberg told him the academy doesn't like
minority opinions. The academy, under Handler, especially doesn't
like public controversy, according to Radford.
     Mention Handler's reaction to his call for a public debate with
Rossi and Radford retorts: ''It's not the way (things are) done, but
it damn well ought to be. Doing things behind closed doors like a
club is wrong. If people hold dissenting views, they should say so
publicly. I issued that challenge because I was very angry at what
happened. I'm still angry.''
     What angered Radford?
     ''The progressive wearing away of the committee'' as Rossi and he
argued over approaches. ''Rossi would agree to something and then 10
months later would say he hadn't...We had some pretty heavy
exchanges.''
     ''The whole thing is supposed to be run like a Cosmos club,''
Radford said. ''It isn't done (to bring disputes out in public). The
fact of the matter is, we didn't get these things resolved in
committee.''
     ''The breakdown of the BEIR committee was significant,'' its
chairman said, ''because I felt I was not getting the scientific
expertise I expected (from all committee members).''
     Radford was asked, during a recent interview, whether it is
possible to arrive at objective answers to scientific questions. ''I
think it's getting more and more difficult,'' he replied. ''I frankly
am so affected negatively in my thinking of the academy that I do not
support the academy as a means of getting at scientific truth. I will
not serve on another academy committee. And I have served on one or
more academy committees for the last 10 years.
     ''The academy is now very much a big business,'' Radford said. ''It
is in the big business of producing scientific reports. We were under
enormous pressure to get this report out...pressure from the staff,
because the EPA money ran out.''
     Fabricant, who disclaims chairmanship of the BEIR rewrite
committee, said during a telephone interview from his Chicago office
about the committee's rewrite task, ''I don't think it's a question
of whether it should or should not be done.''
     The key thing the public ought to know, he said, is, ''We're
working in an area where we're trying to exceed our capabilities in
science, in medicine, in mathematics, to answer a question we don't
have the capability to answer.
     ''In this case,'' he said, ''we don't even know how to define the
question. We do not know the basic mechanisms of carcinogenesis, nor
do we understand teratogenesis (development of abnormality in a baby
before birth) or genetic effects.
     ''These are little things that God has kept from us, and is going
to keep for a while longer.''
     ENDIT KNUDSON
    
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