About a decade ago, then-DOE Secretary Watkins removed control of epidemiological studies of DOE nuclear sites from DOE because of the obvious conflict-of-interest and a troubled history involving efforts to suppress studies that showed harm from DOE activities. Additionally, there is a similarly troubled history involving National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council nuclear studies. The apparent stacking of the BEIR VII panel must be seen in the context of this history, briefly described below.

In the 1960s, the director of the radiation and human health research program at the AEC’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was Dr. John Gofman. So long as his work supported AEC claims that radiation from fallout and other AEC activities was not particularly harmful, the AEC supported him. However, in the late 1960s, Dr. Gofman and a colleague, Dr. Arthur Tamplin, performed calculations indicating that if the U.S. population were exposed to radiation at the levels considered "acceptable" in federal radiation guidance, approximately 16,000 people would die annually from cancers induced by the radiation exposure. The AEC tried to prevent Drs. Gofman and Tamplin from publishing their calculations or even presenting them at scientific conferences. When they proceeded to do so anyway, the AEC cut their budget and eventually in essence drove them from Livermore. Ironically, the official risk estimate today of the AEC’s successor agencies, based largely on BEIR V, are almost identical to the "heretical" estimates of Drs. Gofman and Tamplin thirty years ago that led to the full weight of the AEC being applied to suppress them. Also ironically, the entire BEIR process began because of a request by the federal government to NAS to establish a committee to review the Gofman/Tamplin estimates.

In the 1970s, a similar episode occurred regarding the scientist hired by DOE to evaluate radiation risks to DOE workers, particularly at Hanford. So long as Dr. Mancuso was working in a direction that suggested no harm from the radiation exposures, DOE was happy. When a Washington State epidemiologist releasedwork showing an excess of cancer, Dr. Mancuso was directed by DOE to rebut him. Dr. Mancuso resisted, indicating the research was not complete. He eventually brought in Dr. Alice Stewart and George Kneale from England to assist in the evaluation, and their work demonstrated that indeed radiation from activities at Hanford was resulting in excess cancers. DOE cancelled Dr. Mancuso’s contract, and tried to remove his access to the data he had painstakingly assembled. DOE then arranged for one of its own employees to move to Pacific Northwest Labs, long associated with DOE, and take over direction of the project; Dr. Mancuso’s Hanford work was given to Dr. Ethel Gilbert, who proceeded to do for DOE a series of attacks on the Mancuso, et al. work. This conflict-of-interest, in having DOE try to suppress findings of harm from its activities and having DOE contractors favorable to it attack independent work, led to congressional investigations. The incident was one of the prime examples of DOE interference that led to the decision of then-DOE Secretary Admiral Watkins to remove DOE from control of epidemiological studies related to its facilities. Dr. Gilbert, despite the controversy that has attended to her because of this episode, has been appointed to BEIR VII, but Dr. Stewart, for example, was not even asked to serve.

A similar episode occurred with regards Rocky Flats. Dr. Greg Wilkinson, then of DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, was performing a study of Rocky Flats workers. When his work indicated an apparent elevated risk of certain cancers associated with their radiation exposures, he was directed not to publish it, being told that he should be more concerned about what DOE, the funding source, wanted, than about what was happening to the workers at Rocky Flats. He published anyway, and was essentially driven from the DOE fold.

These are but a few examples of the troubled history of radiation research, in which the AEC and its successor, DOE, tried to suppress troublesome findings and used researchers on its payroll who were more sympathetic to its interests to attempt to demonstrate its activities were not harmful. (For a detailed discussion of the troubled and conflicted nature of DOE’s involvement in radiation epidemiology, see Geiger and others, Dead Reckoning.) This conflict provides a backdrop to the controversy now surrounding the appointment of DOE-friendly scientists to the BEIR VII panel, financed in part by DOE.

As indicated above, the NAS’s history of nuclear studies contracted for by agencies such as AEC/DOE has been equally controversial. The best description of some of these conflicts can be found in Philip Boffey’s The Brain Bank of America: An Inquiry into the Politics of Science . In a chapter entitled, "Radioactive Waste Disposal: The Atomic Energy Commission Brings the Academy to Heel," Boffey describes the scandal that occurred when the AEC, unhappy with critical reports on its radioactive waste program by the Academy’s board on radioactive waste, demanded suppression of a critical report and threatened to eliminate AEC funding of the NAS if the latter didn’t terminate the existing committee and replace it with a new one with AEC having implicit veto power of the new members. To the Academy’s discredit, it agreed, and a new committee, consisting of people closely tied to the AEC, was appointed. After that, reports from that Board were far more friendly to AEC/DOE waste positions (with DOE remaining the primary funding source for the studies). Much of the contamination now recognized to exist at the DOE complex can be traced to the failure of the AEC to heed the warnings of the original NAS committee and the AEC’s insistence, with NAS unfortunate concurrence, that the committee be reconstituted so as to prevent further significant criticism of AEC/DOE practices.

Recents studies by committees of the NAS Board on Radioactive Waste Management have come under severe criticism for being stacked by people with strong ties to the nuclear industry and DOE. (See, e.g., reports on the conflicts involving the committees on Ward Valley, Yucca Mountain, and the New York radioactive waste siting process, prepared respectively by the Southern California Federation of Scientists, the State of Nevada Nuclear Waste Projects Office, and the Cortland County (NY) Radioactive Waste Office.)

The BEIR process has been no less controversial. The most troubling episode occurred with regards BEIR III. In that situation, the BEIR III subcommittee on somatic effects had voted to employ the linear no-threshold model as the most appropriate. The full report was written and approved and the BEIR III committee publicly issued its report. Thereafter, parties allied with those institutions who interests are involved in lower radiation risk estimates, prevailed upon the President of the Academy to take the extraordinary step of taking authority for the already-released study away from the committee’s chairman and its majority and establish a new subcommittee dominated by the minority of the full committee and permit that minority to rewrite the majority’s already-released report. The resulting revision, issued over the vehement objections of the committee’s chairman (who had also chaired the original somatic effects subcommittee), changed the assumption of linear dose-effects to a linear quadratic estimate that had the effect of lowering substantially the estimated risk from low dose radiation. Ironically, when BEIR V was issued, it concluded that the BEIR III revisionist risk estimates were indeed substantially too low.

BEIR I was prepared in part to deal with the Gofman/Tamplin controversy that erupted after AEC tried to suppress their work. BEIR III erupted into its own scandal when an already-released study was modified by the NAS President and a minority of the panel, overriding the chairman and the panel majority. BEIR V occurred in part because it turned out AEC/DOE had miscalculated doses at Hiroshima, having the effect of underestimating radiation effects from gamma irradiation. The advocates of relaxed standards have pinned their hopes on BEIR VII, and the imbalance in the composition suggests that the controversies of the past handling of radiation research for DOE and NAS reviews thereof are not behind us.