WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:14.000 If you have any questions for Politics and Science, you can direct them by email to politicsandscience@madriver.com. That's politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:38.000 Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRW LP Warren 95.1 FM, airing on Mondays at 5 p.m. and in the Bellows Falls area can be heard on WULL LP Bellows Falls at 101.1 FM, airing from 3 to 4 p.m. on Sundays and from 9 to 10 a.m. on Mondays. 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:48.000 Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization. 00:00:48.000 --> 00:01:05.000 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. 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:25.000 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. 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:41.000 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. 00:01:41.000 --> 00:02:07.000 We also discussed radiation from power plants and many times our medical establishment compares it to less harmful things like sunlight. 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:24.000 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. 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:43.000 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. 00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:48.000 So those are actual radioactive particles. 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:59.000 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. 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:12.000 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. 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:21.000 Ray, could you perhaps give us a little summary of how radioactive technology crept into our culture? 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:50.000 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. 00:03:50.000 --> 00:04:02.000 Surgery and cautery and acid and such, they had a new technique that seemed technological and impressive. 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:14.000 So it very quickly went from treating warts and tumors to all kinds of bizarre quackery. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:26.000 I knew people when I was in college whose facial bones were collapsing because they had had x-ray treatment for acne. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:35.000 People whose hair had fallen out because they were treated for ringworm with x-rays. 00:04:35.000 --> 00:04:44.000 Total ignorance and arrogance combined to use whatever turned up. 00:04:44.000 --> 00:04:46.000 Who was treating them, Ray? 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:49.000 Regular doctors. 00:04:49.000 --> 00:04:51.000 Just regular general practitioners? 00:04:51.000 --> 00:05:08.000 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. 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:13.000 Just a technological gadget that entertained people. 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:27.000 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. 00:05:27.000 --> 00:05:43.000 They were pumping nearly lethal doses of radiation into people and they would just stand there talking and watching for entertainment. 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:52.000 Some of those things were putting out 50 to 100 rads in even a short treatment. 00:05:52.000 --> 00:05:58.000 If they had come in for a weekly exam, they would have soon been dead. 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:04.000 Just to compare that to a normal exposure from a chest x-ray, how much is that? 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:12.000 Oh, I guess approaching a thousand times more from some of those fluoroscopes. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:32.000 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. 00:06:32.000 --> 00:06:54.000 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. 00:06:54.000 --> 00:07:09.000 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. 00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:29.000 But the various types of physicians who work with radiologists and heart surgeons especially have a higher rate of girl children. 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:44.000 That's the same as electricians who work around high voltage power lines and the birds that nest near the high tension lines. 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:53.000 It doesn't have to be ionizing to have really major biological effects. 00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:58.000 Why is it that they produce girl children instead of male children? 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:11.000 Apparently the male fertilized ovum and embryo and fetus at all stages, the male is weaker. 00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:17.000 The female has a better resistance in general. 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:19.000 I see. 00:08:19.000 --> 00:08:39.000 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. 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:50.000 These fluoroscopes you were talking about, they were a novelty? 00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:54.000 All through the 40s and the 50s. 00:08:54.000 --> 00:09:01.000 The shoe stores I think they were outlawed in the mid 1950s. 00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:09.000 In the 40s, did doctors have any idea of the danger of x-rays or did they just think it was a momentary danger? 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:18.000 Doctors never have any idea about anything except what they're told is good practice. 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:34.000 The information was available like chiropractors and borderline people in the medical profession had pamphlets in their office at that time. 00:09:34.000 --> 00:09:49.000 In the 1940s I saw these pamphlets giving references to the research literature showing that radiation accelerates aging process. 00:09:49.000 --> 00:10:04.000 Meanwhile, real doctors were exposing their patients to doses that would not only accelerate aging but would tremendously increase the cancer mortality. 00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:26.000 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. 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:34.000 It sounds like our culture was basically in love with modern technological gadgets. 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:41.000 Just the same as it is now. Some differences but the same principles. 00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:53.000 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. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:59.000 I think they have probably cut out most of the excessive ones. 00:10:59.000 --> 00:11:16.000 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." 00:11:16.000 --> 00:11:41.000 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. 00:11:41.000 --> 00:11:43.000 Amyloid is a plaque? 00:11:43.000 --> 00:11:52.000 It's a type of protein that forms plaques. 00:11:52.000 --> 00:12:07.000 Normally, the very common structure of a protein is that there are helix structures, a spiral piece of a chain of protein. 00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:21.000 With a certain disturbance, those spirals can break down and fold over against themselves and make a sheet arrangement called the pleated sheet. 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:42.000 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. 00:12:42.000 --> 00:12:47.000 Then those fibrils are what actually forms the plaque. 00:12:47.000 --> 00:13:00.000 First, you form the degraded protein, and then the proteins form fibers, and the fibers condense into the visible plaques that they call amyloid. 00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:06.000 That's a common symptom in all Alzheimer's patients? 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:28.000 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. 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:40.000 Ultrasound even can, in vitro, you can produce amyloid fibrils with energy as low as ultrasound or microwaves. 00:13:40.000 --> 00:13:47.000 I thought ultrasound was actually protective of tissue, but I guess it does have some drawbacks then. 00:13:47.000 --> 00:14:02.000 Yes, everything that puts energy into cells and tissues in unbiological ways can cause some disruption. 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:20.000 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. 00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:36.000 The electrical interactions between proteins and water, that's exactly where the problem is with all kinds of radiation and even toxins. 00:14:36.000 --> 00:14:57.000 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, 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:17.000 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. 00:15:17.000 --> 00:15:30.000 That takes a direct hit on a certain high energy, so that's where the idea of the danger of ionizing radiation came from. 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:54.000 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 00:15:54.000 --> 00:16:01.000 and causing subtle changes in the way water relates to those proteins. 00:16:01.000 --> 00:16:26.000 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. 00:16:26.000 --> 00:16:34.000 So you feel like basically the marketing side of our culture is what's determined its medical course? 00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:49.000 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. 00:16:49.000 --> 00:17:00.000 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. 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:22.000 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. 00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:37.000 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. 00:17:37.000 --> 00:17:51.000 In mature people it accelerates aging and degeneration more often than a quick cancer or other lethal event. 00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:57.000 So people became more and more concerned because it seems like there is more concern at this point. 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:02.000 People were already beginning to understand it in the 1930s. 00:18:02.000 --> 00:18:14.000 I mentioned last week that Thomas Edison after 1904 became a great opponent of the medical use of x-rays. 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:23.000 And other people, especially in other countries, were studying the actual biological effects. 00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:35.000 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. 00:18:35.000 --> 00:19:01.000 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. 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:19.000 But the subtle effects of the interaction of radiation with cellular electronics and cellular light effects and water interactions with proteins and so on. 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:29.000 All of those were developing along another course all through the 30s, 40s and 50s. 00:19:29.000 --> 00:19:45.000 Albert Cianciarchi was one of these people working on the subtle but essential biological interactions of electrons, water and light. 00:19:45.000 --> 00:20:02.000 For 20 or 30 years he was totally sidelined even though he won the Nobel Prize for work on vitamin C and respiration. 00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:16.000 His work on light and cell luminescence and so on just put him out of the mainstream. 00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:31.000 People who criticize industry become the victims of corporate government campaigns to convince the public not to listen to them. 00:20:31.000 --> 00:20:55.000 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. 00:20:55.000 --> 00:21:10.000 Then they would smear people who had presented evidence of the toxic effects of radiation or nuclear plants. 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:20.000 For example, Stern Glass, people were convinced that he was such a quack that they wouldn't even look at his books. 00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:49.000 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. 00:21:49.000 --> 00:21:57.000 Do you think this mindset was connected in any way to the military use of radiation? 00:21:57.000 --> 00:22:14.000 Yes, the military, once they started doing their atmospheric tests, they joined up with the medical, the x-ray industry and so on. 00:22:14.000 --> 00:22:33.000 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. 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:52.000 The professors who criticized that campaigns were mounted using some of the right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society to create scandals. 00:22:52.000 --> 00:23:19.000 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. 00:23:19.000 --> 00:23:25.000 So it was really an organized campaign. 00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:54.000 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. 00:23:54.000 --> 00:24:01.000 So the Public Health Service was very influential with the medical profession especially. 00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:15.000 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. 00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:35.000 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. 00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:59.000 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. 00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:11.000 So you had to be a certain kind of genetic dogmatist to teach biology in the United States after 1950. 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:21.000 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. 00:25:21.000 --> 00:25:44.000 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. 00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:59.000 They were wanting to subjectify physics and make it part of a spiritual quest for unity and seeking the absolute. 00:25:59.000 --> 00:26:14.000 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. 00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:34.000 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. 00:26:34.000 --> 00:26:46.000 That is interesting. I didn't know it started with German romantic physics. It sounds like the beginning of eugenics and Aryan pure thought. 00:26:46.000 --> 00:26:56.000 Hitler was just a business like application. The others were more refined and ethereal. 00:26:56.000 --> 00:27:00.000 It is discouraging that that should live on to this day. 00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:17.000 It was deliberately imported. The journals of human genetics originated in the eugenics movement and they renamed themselves after the war. 00:27:17.000 --> 00:27:37.000 The German physics and genetics people were idealized and many of them were imported to become influential in the United States. 00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:47.000 You talked about the American culture and maybe most of the world's industrialized nations' culture of love of new technology. 00:27:47.000 --> 00:28:00.000 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. 00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:11.000 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. 00:28:11.000 --> 00:28:16.000 It sounds like it is saying that everything is the same as everything else. 00:28:16.000 --> 00:28:31.000 That only becomes really dangerous when they start saying that energy and information are the same and that knowing and matter are the same. 00:28:31.000 --> 00:28:48.000 You can argue about how interactive energy and substance are. 00:28:48.000 --> 00:29:11.000 Einstein's position was that the field should count as matter. 00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:20.000 From Einstein's perspective, there was nothing idealistic about it necessarily. 00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:34.000 Energy was just another form of matter or substance that could be related to ordinary forms of matter. 00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:51.000 But when you invoke the quantum ideas, the Heisenberg principle, then you throw out matter and substitute mind and information. 00:29:51.000 --> 00:30:02.000 Much of the computer culture is committed to that kind of doctrine about the nature of knowing and information. 00:30:02.000 --> 00:30:07.000 It wants to take the substance out of information. 00:30:07.000 --> 00:30:14.000 So when you say that the field is part of matter, that means that the matter is part of its environment? 00:30:14.000 --> 00:30:15.000 Is that what you're saying? 00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:34.000 Yes. All of the world, including our knowledge of the world, is part of the same substantial stuff. 00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:40.000 The process of knowing becomes substantial and physical. 00:30:40.000 --> 00:30:52.000 For example, there are people who have demonstrated luminescence in the visual center of the brain and in the optic nerve and so on. 00:30:52.000 --> 00:31:02.000 When we see a colored light, we actually light up with that color inside. 00:31:02.000 --> 00:31:13.000 And so it's putting consciousness right into the physical interaction with different substances interacting. 00:31:13.000 --> 00:31:19.000 So you can think of our consciousness as a physical resonance. 00:31:19.000 --> 00:31:29.000 We are learning to tune ourselves up to the energy of the substance outside. 00:31:29.000 --> 00:31:40.000 There's nothing anti-material or ethereal about that kind of interpretation of consciousness. 00:31:40.000 --> 00:32:06.000 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. 00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:15.000 So many on switches and so many off switches are supposed to amount to consciousness. 00:32:15.000 --> 00:32:23.000 But nothing is left that relates to how we experience reality. 00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:29.000 We're talking to Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist, physiologist, and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. 00:32:29.000 --> 00:32:40.000 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. 00:32:40.000 --> 00:33:08.000 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. 00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:15.000 And so your theory of what you're perceiving is the real thing. 00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:27.000 And so it reduces consciousness to a cluster of theories like states in the computer. 00:33:27.000 --> 00:33:34.000 It sounds like it reduces confidence too. It sounds like Heisenberg is saying that you can't know your own world and you're... 00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:39.000 You can't be sure about it. It's all probabilistic and random. 00:33:39.000 --> 00:33:45.000 And is that essentially the message of quantum physics? 00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:55.000 Yeah, and that, the really bad consequence is that it all becomes deductive. 00:33:55.000 --> 00:34:08.000 The hypothesis is tested against the reality, but the reality is merely a statistical probability. 00:34:08.000 --> 00:34:34.000 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, 00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:46.000 nothing definite is going to come without the insertion of that specific set of deductive mind principles. 00:34:46.000 --> 00:35:04.000 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. 00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:13.000 The inflow from the changing world is where knowledge comes from. 00:35:13.000 --> 00:35:29.000 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? 00:35:29.000 --> 00:35:39.000 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, 00:35:39.000 --> 00:35:43.000 but none of us can really know if that's really true. And so it's just the way it is. 00:35:43.000 --> 00:35:57.000 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. 00:35:57.000 --> 00:36:20.000 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, 00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:33.000 but you have to do everything after the fact. The knowledge after the fact is the only thing that Goffman would recognize for years. 00:36:33.000 --> 00:36:46.000 And then suddenly it occurred to him that if you're doing the damage, maybe it would be nice to take a precautionary attitude. 00:36:46.000 --> 00:36:55.000 And now people are talking about a precautionary principle that you should think about what harm might happen in the future, 00:36:55.000 --> 00:37:09.000 even though it hasn't been hypothesized and tested in the conventional scientific way. It's more like a common sense. 00:37:09.000 --> 00:37:16.000 You don't wait until the accident happens to avoid the accident. 00:37:16.000 --> 00:37:23.000 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. 00:37:23.000 --> 00:37:38.000 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 00:37:38.000 --> 00:37:45.000 saying that we have no knowledge that this is going to harm you in the future. 00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:51.000 And it also sounds like quantum physics is a very good physics for an authoritarian culture. 00:37:51.000 --> 00:38:06.000 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. 00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:14.000 They don't know anything if it isn't in the textbooks. And if it is in the textbooks, you can't question it. 00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:25.000 They are very hard people to actually talk to, except things like bowling or golfing and their weekend activities. 00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:34.000 They can act like regular people. But as professors, they are in a separate world. 00:38:34.000 --> 00:38:41.000 So the textbook basically establishes the party line. And then that has to be stuck to. 00:38:41.000 --> 00:39:02.000 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. 00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:14.000 They are sometimes interesting individual works of art, but the outstanding thing is how rigid they are. 00:39:14.000 --> 00:39:19.000 When you say it's like reading a novel, how do you mean? 00:39:19.000 --> 00:39:39.000 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. 00:39:39.000 --> 00:39:50.000 A novel would get very complex and confusing if they tried to be empirical about their imagination. 00:39:50.000 --> 00:40:00.000 The textbook writers are always too sure of what they are saying. And they are almost always wrong. 00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:01.000 In the textbooks? 00:40:01.000 --> 00:40:10.000 Yeah. When you look at old textbooks, it really makes me think of Monty Python. 00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:18.000 Maybe you should put some of those skits into screenplays. 00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:27.000 We have about 15 minutes left. And I thought maybe we'd touch on a little more about nuclear power. 00:40:27.000 --> 00:40:39.000 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, 00:40:39.000 --> 00:40:47.000 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. 00:40:47.000 --> 00:40:58.000 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, 00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:02.000 but also produce the fuel that goes into it. 00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:10.000 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, 00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:25.000 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. 00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:29.000 Always one of the big technological problems of nuclear power is what to do with the fuel. 00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:34.000 And a lot of people are saying that, well, we can recycle those. And you said you just looked into that. 00:41:34.000 --> 00:41:41.000 Yeah, there's a website called Environmental Devastation Caused by Reprocessing Radioactive Waste. 00:41:41.000 --> 00:41:56.000 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. 00:41:56.000 --> 00:42:15.000 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. 00:42:15.000 --> 00:42:33.000 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. 00:42:33.000 --> 00:42:46.000 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. 00:42:46.000 --> 00:42:51.000 But that was banned in the '90s after 60 years of dumping. 00:42:51.000 --> 00:42:54.000 Who was dumping it, the military? 00:42:54.000 --> 00:43:08.000 Yeah, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Navy, and Army, and anyone who was authorized to use it would dump it. 00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:17.000 And the dumping in barrels was banned about 15 years ago. 00:43:17.000 --> 00:43:24.000 But they didn't ban putting a pipe out under the ocean and pumping it out. 00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:35.000 And so this website says that the plant in The Hague alone has been discharging 100 million gallons of waste every year. 00:43:35.000 --> 00:43:52.000 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. 00:43:52.000 --> 00:44:04.000 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. 00:44:04.000 --> 00:44:20.000 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. 00:44:20.000 --> 00:44:31.000 Yeah. The waste that's coming out of the pipes from reprocessing the nuclear waste, is it contaminated water or is it actually particles? 00:44:31.000 --> 00:44:44.000 Oh, particles. Huge amounts of even uranium and plutonium are getting into the water and the fish are taking it up. 00:44:44.000 --> 00:44:59.000 Spontaneous 90 and the shorter acting isotopes, but the whole range of junk is getting into the ocean still. 00:44:59.000 --> 00:45:03.000 Yeah, that's really discouraging. 00:45:03.000 --> 00:45:11.000 Well, I hope that perhaps people will take a second look at nuclear power before they actually start building any more plants. 00:45:11.000 --> 00:45:17.000 It's never made any sense to me. They always claim that they would solve the technological problem somewhere down the road. 00:45:17.000 --> 00:45:25.000 But when you have a process that's basically spewing out the worst poison known to man. 00:45:25.000 --> 00:45:45.000 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. 00:45:45.000 --> 00:46:10.000 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. 00:46:10.000 --> 00:46:15.000 They were only 20 miles from the Greenville nuclear dump. 00:46:15.000 --> 00:46:22.000 Wells in that area are being contaminated with all kinds of isotopes. 00:46:22.000 --> 00:46:36.000 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. 00:46:36.000 --> 00:46:48.000 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. 00:46:48.000 --> 00:47:04.000 So the people who transport these giant vats of waste from Hanford to South Carolina aren't the safest type of driver. 00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:16.000 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. 00:47:16.000 --> 00:47:32.000 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. 00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:38.000 It was such a long truck that it wouldn't go around the corner of the highway. 00:47:38.000 --> 00:47:45.000 They had to take the truck apart which took all day. 00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:57.000 The people in charge of the whole nuclear industry are no smarter than people who tend cars on the freeway. 00:47:57.000 --> 00:48:05.000 Yeah, it just seems like such a vulnerable thing, a vulnerable place to put such dangerous material. 00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:12.000 Another thing I wanted to talk about that doesn't have to do with nuclear power is incineration of medical waste. 00:48:12.000 --> 00:48:17.000 Now I understand that goes on all the time and that's actually putting it into the air. 00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:19.000 Do you know anything about that Ray? 00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:33.000 No, but they in general don't worry much about, like when they put radioactive iodine into a person, 00:48:33.000 --> 00:48:37.000 they don't worry about the person's urine. 00:48:37.000 --> 00:48:47.000 When bodies are incinerated, that goes into the air, much of it is vaporized. 00:48:47.000 --> 00:48:49.000 Oh, that's true. I had never thought about that. 00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:55.000 I mean there's actually those radioactivity or toxins that are in our bodies if you get cremated. 00:48:55.000 --> 00:49:02.000 Yeah, if they die with radium needles in their organs for example. 00:49:02.000 --> 00:49:06.000 Just the mercury in teeth gets vaporized. 00:49:06.000 --> 00:49:12.000 Oh, it's actually more dangerous at that point than it is possibly in your mouth. 00:49:12.000 --> 00:49:13.000 Mm-hmm. 00:49:13.000 --> 00:49:15.000 I see. 00:49:15.000 --> 00:49:21.000 You talked about Alzheimer's being caused by nuclear waste or ionizing radiation. 00:49:21.000 --> 00:49:30.000 Does that correspond with sites near power plants and nuclear reprocessing plants? 00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:37.000 No one is very clear about that, but I think it will turn out that it does. 00:49:37.000 --> 00:49:47.000 People are starting to look at the various sources, microwave radiation, telephones and power lines. 00:49:47.000 --> 00:49:58.000 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. 00:49:58.000 --> 00:50:00.000 Mm-hmm. So you think-- 00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:03.000 Oh, go ahead. 00:50:03.000 --> 00:50:08.000 Cataracts are another interesting thing. 00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:19.000 They're easy to study in a way because the cataract is a different state of the living matter, 00:50:19.000 --> 00:50:25.000 and people have been trying to understand what happens in a cataract, 00:50:25.000 --> 00:50:30.000 and it's probably analogous to what happens in Alzheimer's disease, 00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:38.000 but it's a much simpler system made up of very few types of protein. 00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:52.000 It turns out that in a cataract, the proteins aren't even denatured. 00:50:52.000 --> 00:51:01.000 So you would think that the radiation would have to at least change the proteins to make a cataract develop, 00:51:01.000 --> 00:51:09.000 and they are caused by--like surgeons get cataracts from exposure to x-rays, 00:51:09.000 --> 00:51:20.000 and people who work around any kind of even low-level radiation, microwaves and so on, get cataracts. 00:51:20.000 --> 00:51:28.000 It turns out that the cataract is chemically almost identical to the surrounding tissue, 00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:35.000 but it's wetter, slightly higher water content than the healthy tissue around it, 00:51:35.000 --> 00:51:44.000 and all that happens is a slight fluctuation in the electronic state of the protein, 00:51:44.000 --> 00:51:50.000 and that lets the water get out of control and lets water accumulate 00:51:50.000 --> 00:52:02.000 rather than being under the influence of the system of proteins and the electronic fields of the proteins. 00:52:02.000 --> 00:52:15.000 So it lets you see in a very concrete way how energy of not even thermal energy in the ordinary sense, 00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:26.000 but it is--you would classify it as thermal energy because it's just the vibrational state of the water molecules which has changed 00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:32.000 and makes all the difference between the lens that works and the lens that's opaque, 00:52:32.000 --> 00:52:44.000 and similar changes probably happen very early in a disease like Alzheimer's or cancer. 00:52:44.000 --> 00:52:54.000 If the tissue was visible, you would probably see it as a changing state of the water 00:52:54.000 --> 00:53:04.000 and electronic behavior of the proteins that would be analogous to the opacity of the lens 00:53:04.000 --> 00:53:18.000 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. 00:53:18.000 --> 00:53:26.000 So you're saying the radiation is changing the structure long before--in subtle ways. 00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:35.000 Yeah, and if just microwaves and ultraviolet light can do it, 00:53:35.000 --> 00:53:45.000 then that says that when a gamma ray or x-ray passes through your brain like bouncing off a dental x-ray, 00:53:45.000 --> 00:53:58.000 that these very relatively weak transmissions through your living tissue don't have to even ionize anything. 00:53:58.000 --> 00:54:07.000 All they have to do is slightly add some energy to the system. 00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:18.000 It can not even be sufficient to cause electrons to get into a chemically reactive state, 00:54:18.000 --> 00:54:29.000 but just enough to cause this semi-thermal fluctuation of electrons and water vibrations. 00:54:29.000 --> 00:54:31.000 I see. And last week--we only have a few minutes left-- 00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:39.000 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, 00:54:39.000 --> 00:54:47.000 there are things that as a physiologist and as an endocrinologist you say people can actually do to fortify themselves. 00:54:47.000 --> 00:54:56.000 Yeah, keeping your energy at a peak, like getting the damage done in the late afternoon in the summer is best, 00:54:56.000 --> 00:55:11.000 but keeping your carbon dioxide up with adequate thyroid function, adequate progesterone, pregnenolone, testosterone, 00:55:11.000 --> 00:55:20.000 and so on, all of the tissue protective hormones and the nutrients, magnesium in particular, 00:55:20.000 --> 00:55:26.000 is the best established radiation protective nutrient, 00:55:26.000 --> 00:55:33.000 and coffee happens to protect against all kinds of radiation damage that have been studied. 00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:38.000 Oh, and niacinamide is a vitamin that is protective, 00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:49.000 and coffee happens to provide magnesium and niacin as well as the protective caffeine and antioxidants. 00:55:49.000 --> 00:55:57.000 That's great. Well, we didn't really get to talk about microwaves or Wi-Fi, which I guess is another forum, 00:55:57.000 --> 00:56:01.000 but maybe some other time we'll get you back and talk about that if you're willing. 00:56:01.000 --> 00:56:07.000 And we've been talking to Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist, physiologist, and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. 00:56:07.000 --> 00:56:12.000 His website is raypeat.com. 00:56:12.000 --> 00:56:16.000 Ray, thanks again for being here and for all your work. 00:56:16.000 --> 00:56:19.000 Thank you. 00:56:19.000 --> 00:56:20.000 Goodbye. 00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:21.000 Bye. 00:56:22.000 --> 00:56:27.000 And another hour has flown by with Dr. Raymond Peat. 00:56:27.000 --> 00:56:33.000 Again, his website is raypeat.com. 00:56:33.000 --> 00:56:34.000 So, thanks for listening. 00:56:34.000 --> 00:56:37.000 This has been Politics and Science at MadRiver.com. 00:56:37.000 --> 00:56:45.000 If you have any questions for Politics and Science, you can direct them by email to politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:51.000 That's politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:56:51.000 --> 00:57:01.000 Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRW LP1 95.1 FM, airing on Mondays at 5pm. 00:57:01.000 --> 00:57:08.000 And in the Bellows Falls area, it can be heard on WULL LP Bellows Falls at 101.1 FM, 00:57:08.000 --> 00:57:15.000 airing from 3 to 4pm on Sundays and from 9 to 10am on Mondays. 00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:24.000 Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization.