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|Editor’s note: Permission to create this transcript was granted by Maria Gilardin, TUC Radio. I am grateful to Maria for making available the draft text she worked with to fashion her continuity.|
Broadcast quality mp3 of the 30 minute program is here:
http://tucradio.org/JohnGofmanONE.mp3 (20.1 MB)
TUC aka Time of Useful Consciousness is an aeronautical term. The time between the onset of oxygen deficiency and the loss of consciousness, the brief moments in which a pilot may save the plane.
Shut down nuclear power plants. How many nuclear power plant accidents does it take to come to that conclusion. Even after Fukushima there is very little movement in that direction. Why is that? Are we mistaken or uninformed about the dangers of nuclear radiation? Do we believe again – and over again this time – that there are safe doses of radiation? That radiation from power plants will not stay dangerous – depending on the element – from days to hundreds, thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years? That in these long time periods radioactive particles will not eventually move from the source of the accident to every corner of the earth?
The story of an extraordinary man illustrates both the science and the politics of nuclear power. Dr. John Gofman, from 1970 on, called for the closure of nuclear power plants. The obituaries for him in 2007 quoted him as saying,
These provocative words came from a scientist who, in the 1940s helped in major ways to usher in the atomic age. His credentials are impeccable. John Gofman studied under Glenn Seaborg at UC Berkeley and, in 1943, earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physical chemistry for his work on and co-discovery of Uranium 232 and 233. Plutonium is the most dangerous substance in nuclear power and weapons. And Gofman, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, produced the first 1.2 milligrams of plutonium for J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos weapons lab.
He remembered that moment with KPFA radio news producer Aileen Alfandary in 1979.
In spite – or because – of this lab work, Gofman has done more in his life time to warn people of the dangers of plutonium and radiation than most other scientists.
One reason why Gofman is considered one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century by independent colleagues and by the Right Livelihood Committee, that gave him the 1992 award, is that his work bridged two of the most consequential disciplines for the understanding of the risks of radiation: nuclear physics and medicine.
By 1944 Gofman decided that he was no longer needed in the nuclear bomb project that was by then the domain of engineers. He finished Med School in 1946 and by 1947 had become assistant and later full Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. He remained in that position doing research from 1948 to about 1973 and made a number of major discoveries working with cholesterol, lipoproteins, coronary heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and above all, cancer.
Gofman was so widely acclaimed as scientist in both fields, nuclear chemistry and medicine, that he was asked to be part of two major projects at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, set up fifty miles east of the University of California at Berkeley under the aegis of the University’s Lawrence Radiation Lab, of which Gofman was a member.
Gofman said in an interview for the book Nuclear Witnesses: Insiders Speak Out:
Gofman ended up heading the Lawrence Livermore Lab Medical Department with 1,500 people until 1957, gaining insight and knowledge about the effects of nuclear radiation. Then he chose to return to UC Berkeley to teach and do research on heart disease and trace elements in biology. But in 1962 something happened which altered the course of things for him. Gofman said in Nuclear Witnesses,
The milkshed that is so brutally casually mentioned by the Lab director is the area of Utah where humans and dairy cattle were hit with radioactive fallout from the 1961-62 series of atomic bomb tests.
But back in 1963 John Foster promised. “[T]he AEC can’t fight the University of California, the Regents, and this lab” he said. “And I can tell you one thing, if they try to prevent you from telling the truth about what you find about radiation, we’ll back you and the Regents will back you, and they’ll just have to eat it.”
So Gofman cut his teaching down to 10 percent, and took two posts at Livermore. One as head of a new bio-medical division, the exact mission of which was to calculate and do the experimentation needed to evaluate the health effects of radiation and radionuclide releases from weapons testing, nuclear war, radioactivity in medicine, nuclear power, etc.—all of the atomic energy programs. And Gofman was given the three million dollar budget to start.
From 1963 to 1965 Gofman served as that division’s first director. To gauge the dramatic downfall of Gofman, his being censored, de-funded, and eventually forced to resign from the Lab, it is necessary to know that during this time at Lawrence Livermore Lab he held one of the nine prestigious positions of Associate Director sitting along the notorious Edward Teller in weekly meetings on all programs of the Lawrence Livermore Lab.
In 1979 Gofman gave an overview over that period of his life to KPFA news director Aileen Alfandary:
Looking back at Gofman’s stay at Lawrence Livermore Lab it becomes clear that the story of suppression of evidence, blackmail, co-optation, is a long and sordid one. And it involves government agencies, the utility industry, the manufacturers of weapons and power plants – down to the universities, their Regents and individual scientists – even including the clerks in the xerox department at Lawrence Livermore Lab who tried to prevent the copying of Gofman’s papers. Given all this and the refusal of the media to report on it, it may not be so surprising that there still is no appropriate reaction to nuclear accidents and nuclear power.
The pressure began within weeks of Gofman becoming Director of the Bio-Medical Research Division at Lawrence Livermore Lab in 1963. He was ordered by the AEC to come to Washington to suppress research by Dr. Harold Knapp. He had made some calculations of the true dose that the people of Utah got from the radio-iodine from the bomb tests in 1962. Harold Knapp said that the doses were something like one hundred times higher than publicly announced.
To their credit, Gofman and the handful of other scientists assembled looked at Knapp’s evidence, found it sound and recommended publication. Gofman said (in Nuclear Witnesses), The AEC guy “was very disappointed. But since the committee wasn’t going to do anything...to help the AEC try to suppress scientific truth, Knapp did publish. And the sky didn’t fall [in]. Unfortunately, in this society it takes a hell of a lot more than revealing some awful things for the sky to fall.”
And Gofman added, “it taught me something that was very, very different from what Glenn Seaborg had told me. (By now my former professor was chairman of the [AEC].) ... I told him, ‘You know, Glenn, you ought to think twice about my being...head of this thing. Because I don’t really give a damn about the AEC programs, and if our research shows that certain things are hazardous, we’re going to say so... And here within a matter of a few weeks one of his chief men at the AEC is asking us to help suppress the truth.”
By 1965 the bio-medical division got known in the lab as ‘the enemy within’ because they opposed things like Project Plowshares and the use of nuclear bombs to dig a new and better Panama Canal. But it was still fairly good-natured. Gofman began his work on cancer, chromosomes, and radiation essential for the proof of radiation damage. Things went quietly until 1969.
That year a man by the name of Dr. Ernest Sternglass, who had been studying infant mortality, published some papers saying that something on the order of four hundred thousand children might have died from the world-wide radioactive fallout from the bomb testing. And Esquire published an article saying “The Death of all Children” based on Sternglass’ work. The AEC was desperately worried about this because they were just then trying to get the antiballistic missile treaty through Congress, and they thought if Sternglass’ work was accepted, it might kill the ABM in the Senate. So they sent Sternglass’ paper to all the labs. Gofman said he got it, looked at it quickly, and wasn’t sure what to make of it. But Arthur Tamplin, one of his colleagues, was an expert on this. And Gofman asked him to do the assessment.
Arthur Tamplin concluded that only 4,000, not 400,000, children had been killed by fallout. The AEC, instead of being pleased with Tamplin, was “disturbed” because any kind of number did show that children died and they wanted that number removed. Gofman told the AEC representative to go to hell and Tamplin published his paper with the 4,000 number. And again, the sky did not fall in for the AEC. That was April 1969.
Then the sky did fall in for Gofman and his colleague Arthur Tamplin when they decided to give a paper in October of ‘69 that repudiated the AEC’s claim that there is a safe threshold of radiation.
The AEC maintained that there was a “safe threshold” of radiation below which no health effects could be detected. And we hear that argument to this day, including Fukushima. The so-called safe threshold provided the justification for exposing American servicemen to atomic bomb tests, for permitting workers in nuclear plants to receive a yearly dose of radiation, and for operating nuclear power plants which release radioactivity to the environment and expose the general population even during normal operation.
But in the 1960s evidence began to come in from around the world—from the atomic bomb survivors, and from people in Britain who had received medical radiation—with estimates of the numbers of cancers occurring per unit of radiation.
John Gofman on KPFA in 1979:
John Gofman with KPFA Radio news producer, Aileen Alfandary, in 1979.
Gofman said in Nuclear Witnesses,
At that point Gofman had not said anything about nuclear power. He later said that was stupid of him. But now he wondered, “Why is the electric utility industry attacking us?” He said in Nuclear Witnesses:
And they decided to fight. And in the course of that fight, they produced an amazing array of scientific documentation.
Come back for the next broadcast of TUC Radio to hear what happened next. [See Part Two.]
That was part one of a radio series on the late Dr. John Gofman, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and director of two major studies on the effects of radiation at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. In spite – or really because his close association with the Manhattan Project and the building of the bombs he became the most prominent, knowledgable, and outspoken campaigner in the cause to shut down all nuclear power plants.
Gofman’s research, expertise and legacy in print and recording are of great importance in order to understand and handle the Fukushima nuclear accident which is a cause of concern for all.
Thanks to Leslie Freeman and her book: Nuclear Witnesses: Insiders Speak Out, to David Ratcliffe and his very well researched and informative web site ratical.org. Thanks to Egan O’Connor, assistant to John Gofman from 1970 to his death in 2007. And to Aileen Alfandary and the Pacifica Archives.
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TUC Radio takes its name from an aeronautical term. Time of useful consciousness is the time between the beginning of oxygen deficiency and the loss of consciousness, the brief moment in which a pilot may save the plane.
My name is Maria Gilardin. Thank you for listening. Give us a call.