Is it time for BEIR VIII?

Figure 1. BEIR VII Cover. I have no idea what the little black stripe is about.

The National Academy of Sciences(NAS) has a Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. This committee was formed from the remnants of the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) Genetics Panel, which had been set up by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1954 in an effort to stop atom bomb testing by promulgating LNT. After the Neel Study of 70,000 pregnancies of atom bomb survivors showed no genetic effect on kids conceived after the bombs has been dropped, the focus switched to cancer, and the name was changed to the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. (BEIR)

The first BEIR report, "The Effects on Populations of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing radiation" was published in 1972. Between 1972 and 2006, the BEIR Committee published 7 major reports with similar titles. The basic idea of each report was to update and summarize all the new information we have on the health risks of radiation since the last report. Since 2006, the Committee has gone silent.

The Committee is self-selected. It is dominated by epidemiologists from the radiation protection profession. Medical radiologists who have hands on experience with radiation and humans, and laboratory scientists who study the mechanisms of DNA damage and repair are grossly under-represented.

Although it is almost 20 years old, BEIR VII is the committee's most recent report. The report starts out with a version of The Dumbest Graph and maintains that static view of a dynamic process throughout. The report is over 400 dense pages long. The US shipyard workers, Evans studies of the Radiothor drinkers, and most importantly, the radium dial painters are never even mentioned. The Committee carefully avoids populations that have have received large doses over protracted periods, which is a test that any radiation harm model must pass. But in its Statement of Task, the BEIR VII Committee defines its job:

The primary objective of the study is to develop the best possible risk assessment for exposure to low dose, low linear energy transfer(LET) radiation in human subjects. In order to do this, the committee will (1) conduct a comprehensive review of all relevant epidemiologic data related to the risk of exposure to low dose, low-LET radiation; ... In performing the above tasks, the committee should consider all relevant data, even if obtained from high radiation exposures or at high dose rates. \cite{beir-2006}[p vii][Emphasis mine.]

The Committee had to put that last part in because their results are almost entirely based on the atom bomb survivor data, collected by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF). These exposures were large to enormous doses in a very brief period. But it makes their omission of the dial painters and the other large dose populations from a self-proclaimed "comprehensive review" scientific misconduct.

The unsurprising bottom line associated with this purposely blinkered approach is:

The Committee concludes that current scientific evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a linear no-threshold dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of cancer in humans.\cite{beir-2006}[p 15]

Since BEIR VII, a great deal of new information has become available, including on the epidemiology side:

2007) The Taipei apartment dwellers in which some 10,000 people absorbed up to 4000 mSv over 18 years from Cobalt-60 contaminated rebar. These people had a lower cancer incidence than the general population, which could be due to other factors.

2009) Nair et all study of the 70,000 person Karunagappally cohort. People who received over 500 mSv's over 10 years had slightly less cancer incidence than their neighbors who had received less than 50 mSv's over that period.

2011) The massive Fukushima release, from three meltdowns and three explosively breached containments. More than 10 years later we can't detect any increase in cancer, even in the plant workers some of whom received up to 500 mSv over a period of a few days.

2012) MIT irradiated two groups of mice. One group received 105 mSv in 1.4 minutes. The other group received the same dose over 5 weeks (2.9 mSv/day). The latest techniques were then then uses to look for DNA and other cell damage. The acute dose resulted in lots of leftover damage. The 3 mSv/day profile resulted in no increase in residual background damage.\cite{olipitz-2012} The mouse repair and clean up processes were able to keep up with the damage.

2017) BEIR VII and the earlier reports base their preferred model almost entirely on the RERF "Goldstandard" data. But even in 2006, the radiation protection establishment had admitted that the RERF leukemia incidence was non-linear in acute dose. And the 2017 Grant et al update of the RERF bomb survivor data clearly and admittedly shows a near-quadratic relationship between acute dose and cancer in males.\cite{grant-2017} The study also shows evidence of curvature for females, which is insignificant only if you fallaciously assume LNT is the null hypothesis. Grant et al admit these results are "provocative". The authors of the Grant study include (former?) LNT luminaries such as Preston, Ozasa, and Mabuchi. Mabuchi was principle consultant to BEIR VII.

2019) The Harvard Medical School study which failed to find any excess cancer mortality in the Ukrainian districts adjacent to Chernobyl.\cite{leung-2019}

2021) Zupunski et al found no statistical difference in breast cancer between high dose rayons near Chernobyl and low dose.\cite{zupunski-2021}

2021) Amma et al's update of the Karunagappally cohort, which confirms the earlier Nair et al findings but with much reduced error bars.\cite{amma-2021} The Karunagappally database now contains 2.9 million person-years, almost the same number as the RERF database. The quality of the dose data is far superior to the quality of the RERF data, which even the RERF admits probably has a standard error of 35%. The Karunagappally cohort should be the new Goldstandard.

Perhaps more importantly, we know far more about DNA damage and repair than we did in 2006. Hundreds if not thousands of papers on the subject have been published. In 2015, three Nobel Prizes were awarded for describing how our bodies repair DNA damage. We now know that normal metabolic damage to our DNA produces 200 to 5000 times as many Double Strand Breaks as background radiation. We have considerable evidence that closely spaced Double Strand Breaks are the one form of damage which our amazingly effective repair processes have a problem with. This argues for a highly rate dependent harm process.

Clearly it is time for a BEIR update. But the LNT careerists know all of the above and that is why they want no part of a BEIR VIII. These people dominate the NAS apparat that controls the BEIR committee. The Trump administration could and should overrule them.

There are a number of potential pitfalls which must be avoided.

1) The BEIR VIII Committee must be balanced: something like one-third epidemiologists, one third medical radiologists, one third cancer biologists/chemists. Each third should be picked by a separate group of people in that specialty.

2) The last thing we need is yet another interminable study of "low dose" radiation. We need a replacement for LNT and we need it now. The goal must be a completely defined, quantitative model, by which I mean code for converting any given dose rate profile into predicted cancer incidence. The model must work for any dose rate profile, including a very large dose received over a very long time, such as the radium dial painters. It's only in situations where people have received very large doses that we can reliably separate the effect of radiation from all the confounding factors.

3) The Committee must not fall into the Muller trap. If the argument becomes a debate between LNT and No Threshold, LNT will win by default. If the Committee comes up with a model that accepts the No Threshold doctrine, both medical and political acceptance becomes far more likely.

If Musk/Ramaswamy convene such a committee, humanity just might be rid of LNT and all its works. We can then move on to rethinking how we regulate nuclear power based on a radiation harm model which reflects biological reality.