Researchers: Flawed 1956 National Academy of Sciences report on radiation risk should be retracted

Many fear radiation without much understanding of what ionizing radiation is, how it works and what the actual risk is. This lack of knowledge and public perception combine to make people fearful of all things nuclear, which has had serious consequences. 

Fear of radiation colors the public acceptance of medical procedures involving radiation, radiation therapy and nuclear power generation.

Newly discovered evidence shows that a flawed 1956 report issued to the public by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) played a large role in establishing the erroneous yet widespread view that ionizing radiation at any level is dangerous.

Until that 1956 report became widely publicized, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had regulated radiation levels and other nuclear matters, operated under what was called a threshold approach. The AEC considered high levels of ionizing radiation to be harmful and having a cancer risk, but considered radiation levels below a certain threshold to be not harmful.

After the 1956 report, the AEC threshold model of radiation was replaced by the so-called linear no-threshold model, which held that all levels of radiation were harmful. Further, the AEC 's jurisdiction was replaced by a new federal agency, the Federal Radiation Council, which adopted the linear no-threshold model approach to radiation risk.

The factual and ethical flaws in the 1956 report came to light in March 2022, when Health Physics Society researchers were preparing a documentary on how the linear no-threshold (LNT) model came into being. In the course of their research, they discovered files, including letters and documents, on the scientific aspects of a 1960 report that included material on the 1956 findings.

The new findings

The new findings are reported in an online preprint of an article to be published in the journal Health Physics. The authors are Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist and professor in the department of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and James Giordano, a professor in the departments of neurology and of biochemistry and chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The peer-reviewed  Health Physics is published monthly  by the Health Physics Society,  a nonprofit scientific organization of specialists in radiation protection.

The report in question is a 1956 report prepared "for the general public," summarizing a technical report of the 16-member Genetics Panel of the NAS Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation group, or BEAR. As the authors explain, the report to the public had major media coverage but it was not written by or even reviewed by the panel members. Instead, it was prepared by a third party, who had not participated in the genetics panel discussions, an editor at Scientific American magazine.

The public report was rushed to publication, without the panel's review, the authors state, to coordinate with the release of a United Kingdom report on ionizing radiation effects. The report made headlines in major U.S. newspapers and copies were sent to every U.S. public library.

The researchers found a series of letters from four eminent Genetics Panel members in the files of the next BEAR report, issued four years after 1956.  Panel member Alfred Sturtevant, a geneticist, wrote, "I have felt that the [report] issued in 1956 was a mistake, since it was not checked by the committee members, and even the chairman did a rather hurried job. It contained some inaccuracies and many rather unfortunate wordings....”

In particular, correspondence from the 1956 panelists took issue with the statement in the public report that "human gene mutations, which produce observable effects, are believed to be universally harmful."

How did this happen?

When Current Science Daily asked Calabrese, co-author of the Health Physics article, how this could have happened, he pointed to a series of circumstances.

"The writing by a third party for the general public is not a bad thing," he emphasized. "It can be very effective. However, the scientific panel would need to review, and approve the report."

"In this case," he said, the public report "was supposed to be overseen by the chair of the panel.  Theoretically this might work. However, the chair of the genetics panel was not a geneticist or a biologist, but a mathematician, and this created a serious problem."

Calabrese said that the panel chairman, Warren Weaver, as a mathematician "was not able to properly understand all the important  genetics and biology features of the evaluation."

Why was Warren chosen as chair? 

Calabrese said he thought it was because the Genetics Panel was thought to be the key BEAR panel and that the NAS president at the time, Detlev Bronk, thought he could control Weaver more than he could the other panel chairs.

"Added to this situation was intense time pressure because  the U.S. and the U.K. wanted their reports published the same day," Calabrese said. "All these factors came together, thus creating the now-discovered mess."

The additional problems that Calabrese and his co-author point to are that "the NAS indicated that the report represented the views of the panel, which they did not. The NAS lied to the public and never corrected the record."

Also, Calabrese said, "the panel members were aware of the problem and never corrected it either. They became part of the problem and an ethical dilemma."

Would the panel have written it differently?

Calabrese said he couldn't speculate on whether the report would have been different if the panel members had written it. 

"It is not possible to answer, since there were 16 members," he said. "These people had strong personalities, and sometimes could not play well together, so one can never know what their discussion might have yielded."

Later, he noted, the four members whose letters were discovered to have criticized several parts of the 1956 report. 

"First, they were upset because mistakes in the 1956 BEAR report were copied and put into the 1960 report," he said. "This drove them crazy. And they were upset that the 1956 report, which was not written well, had a spectrum of errors. One of the panel members, geneticist Hermann Muller, although a proponent of the linear no-threshold theory, threatened to quit the panel if the NAS was going to continue to publish reports with his name on it without his approval."

All these elements together have had a major policy impact. 

"The 1956 report undercut the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission," Calabrese said. "It led President Dwight Eisenhower to remove cancer risk assessment from the AEC and to create a new federal group to do this, which supported linear no threshold. Later this group was incorporated into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

"It's hard to underestimate the report's impact. It affected major policy changes worldwide," Calabrese said.

NAS should correct the record

What do the Health Physics authors want the National Academy of Sciences to do now?

"I have asked the president of the NAS to be honest with the government and the general public and correct the record by retracting the 1956 report and tell the public why," Calabrese said. "It is unethical to publish a report that is not written and approved by the so-called authors. This report was the cancer-risk assessment founding document for the country and the world."

The NAS president has rejected this request, Calabrese said.

The article concludes: "In sum, given the public significance of this report, its widespread publicity and distribution, regulatory significance, and its prompting of several congressional hearings [1957, 1959, 1960] concerning radiation risks and risk assessment, the activities constituent to the development, publication, and distribution of the 1956 BEAR I Genetics Panel report to the public should be deemed unethical, in violation of formal definition of responsible conduct of research (Office of Research Integrity 2022), and injurious to both public health and trust. 

"Therefore, we opine that the evident misconduct should be acknowledged and the NAS report should be formally retracted."

---Edward Calabrese & James Giordano, Ethical Issues in the US 1956 National Academy of Sciences BEAR I Genetics Panel Report to the Public, Health Physics, preprint, July 2022. DOI: 10.1097/HP.0000000000001608.