CNR: "Selected Interviews with Dr. John Gofman"

Human Radiation Studies: Remembering The Early Years
Oral Histories: Dr. John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D.,
conducted December 20, 1994
United States Department of Energy, Office of Human Radiation Experiments, June 1995
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  This section, of Remembering The Early Years with Dr. John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., "covers Gofman's research at the University of California, Berkeley; his pioneering studies in heart disease; his founding and directing of Lawrence Livermore's biomedical program; his conflicts with the Atomic Energy Commission; and the evolution and controversy of his opinions on radiation risk."
Gofman on the health effects of radiation:
`There is no safe threshold', and `Challenging The Nuclear Establishment'
January 1994 2-part interview in synapse, a publication of UCSF.
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  . . . ionizing radiation is not like a poison out of a bottle where you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't. So I said "What evidence do we have concerning one, or two or three or four or six or 10 tracks?" And I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I'm concerned, it's not a question of "We don't know." The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.
A Conversation with John Gofman, Ph.D. '43,
California Monthly, The magazine of the California Alumni Association, April 1993
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  Q: Let me confront you with some of your critics. Philip Boffey wrote in Science magazine in 1970, following your initial claims about radiation and human health, that you were "indulging in verbal overkill" and alienating your peers and undermining your credibility.
  A: [W]hat I would like to say to such critics is this: Can they cite a single instance in which I said something of scientific merit on what radiation does, on how many cancers result, on what the mechanisms are -- can they cite something I said on those matters that could be construed as overkill or false? . . .
  Q: More generally, what would you hope for in the years ahead?
  A: I think that the idea of an independent second opinion on all pollution matters has been long, long overdue.
  Q: All pollution?
  A: Yes. If you're going to talk about dioxin, I don't want to trust the EPA or any government agency which may feel it has to cater to some industrial interest. I think this is very important. If you're going to say you're concerned about an evaluation of whether people should or should not be exposed to such things, then you should have an independent group, responsible to citizens, doing the evaluations.
  Watchdog scientists -- this is a crucial idea. It seems to me that if society is going to defeat the pollution problem, nuclear or any other, the most important thing is a public demand that watchdogging becomes an honored profession.
The Patient's Right-To-Know,
June 2000 Interview With Dr. John Gofman from The Women's Menopausal Network
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  Radiation is described as an electromagnetic phenomenon. You can think of it as having some of the properties that way, but it's much more easily understood if we think of another property. Mainly that there is a packet of energy. When you are in your home you have electric lights. Light represents packets of energy in a certain punch. Then there are a little bit more punch in packets of energy from ultraviolet such as sunshine. Then if you go up one more step beyond ultraviolet you have packets of energy that have enough punch more than ultraviolet to just yank an electron out of atoms of all kinds in our body. Those packets just above the ultraviolet expand into the kinds of powerful gamma rays that were generated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That whole region is called the x-ray and gamma ray region. . . . Medical x-rays cause exactly those free radicals by ripping electrons out of atoms. An x-ray won't do anything except when an x-ray hits your body. Some of the x-rays go right through your body and come out the other end and they don't cause any damage. The damage is caused when the x-ray in your body interacts with the tissue to take an electron out and those electrons are traveling at speeds nearly the speed of light in your body. It's those electrons that cause the destructive effects by injuring our chromosomes and DNA, which are all the instructions that tell cells what to do.
The Plowboy Interview: Dr. John W. Gofman, Nuclear And Antinuclear Scientist
1981 Interview in The Mother Earth News
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  . . . in October of 1969 I was slated to give a talk at the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers. It so happened that Tamplin and I had just completed our cancer and radiation calculations, so I used the results as the topic for my speech. I described the three generalizations we had learned about radiation and health: that all forms of human cancer can be induced by radiation . . . that, per unit of radiation, there's a certain linear percentage increase in the production of cancer . . . and that children are far more susceptible to radiation-induced cancer than are older people. I also explained that our data showed the cancer hazard resulting from radiation to be 20 times worse than we, or anybody, had thought . . .
  With that speech, the AEC's facade--the claim that it really wanted to know the truth about radiation--began to crumble. . . .
  It's really a rather common story: There's just no room for scientific truth in government-funded work when the truth in any way goes against a program that the government--or any of its special interests--wants to carry through. And I believe it's an outrage that we're taxed to support dishonest scientists . . . or to finance science that's being paid to provide a facade.
Chapter 4, John W. Gofman, Medical Physicist
from the 1982 book, Nuclear Witnesses, Insiders Speak Out
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  Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder. First of all, when you license a plant, you know what you're doing--so it's premeditated. You can't say, "I didn't know." Second, the evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond doubt. I've worked fifteen years on it [as of 1982], and so have many others. It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses. . . .
  Society has to reorganize itself. The structure we have now is, the sicker you are socially, the more likely it is that you'll come out at the top of the heap. . . .
  Even if you made an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, but you left established power structure in the U.S. and the USSR, they'd go on to research mind control or some chemical or biological thing. My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have a disease. I call it the "power disease." They want to rule and control other people. They are a more important plague than cancer, pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put together. They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use each other. They use people as nothing more than instruments to cast aside when they don't need them any more.