Dr. Conca reports that in answer to the title question: Yes, indeed, but not the way you might think. It turns out we need a little bit of radiation to function in tip-top shape. And it’s all about our genes. The latest studies from New Mexico State University demonstrate that the absence of radiation is not good for organisms. Performed by Hugo Castillo, Xiaoping Li, Faye Schilkey, and Geof Smith, experiments with human lung cells and different bacterial species, along with previous work by others on protozoa, yeast, and mammalian cells, show that growth is inhibited by a lack of radiation, contradicting the predictions of traditional hypotheses concerning the biological effects of radiation.
There has been an 80-year discussion about the health effects of radiation on humans and other biological organisms. High levels, or doses, obviously have adverse effects, and really high doses can kill. But low doses, those less than 20 rem (0.2 Sv) per year, have been extremely difficult to evaluate because their consequences are so minor that it’s impossible to see any effects in a general population where other every-day adverse health effects overwhelm anything from the radiation. But we need to know this low-dose region since environmental levels of radiation, and those associated with accidents like Fukushima, are in this range of low-doses. Not getting this right costs us billions of dollars each year.
At low doses, all organisms have cellular repair and response mechanisms that can keep adverse health effects from occurring, something that evolved 2 billion years ago as life itself was evolving to deal with much higher background radiation levels as well as free-oxygen that was accumulating on the atmosphere. Free-oxygen is a much greater danger to organisms, and to humans, than radiation (PNAS 2011).
This is timely research. The American Nuclear Society and the Health Physics Society are hosting an international forum of nuclear and radiation experts this week to evaluate whether existing low dose protection standards should be reconsidered. Our present absurdly-low standards have caused more harm than good with unintended consequences we could never have predicted, and this conference in Pasco, Washington Oct. 1-3 will dive head-first into this issue. In the 1950s, it was decided, in the absence of data, that low doses were bad, and that there was no threshold below which radiation did not result in adverse health effects. This hypothesis, called the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) dose hypothesis, was adopted throughout the world as a politically-conservative regulatory response to the rising use of radiation, the threat of atomic weapons, and the newly-emerging nuclear industry.
Russia and China actually used LNT to stop American above-ground tests of nuclear weapons. LNT states that any amount of radiation increases the risk of organisms to accumulate negative health effects. According to LNT, no radiation would be the best state for any organism, and the world adopted the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) approach to all issues involving radiation. This is not just an academic issue. In practice, ALARA became As Low As Technologically Achievable, and brought about extreme expense and unanticipated side-effects that have cost the world almost a trillion dollars over the last 60 years protecting against low levels of radiation with no demonstrable benefits.
On the other hand, the unwarranted fear of low doses of radiation has killed thousands, and destroyed millions of lives following WWII, the Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima accident through over-reaction, unnecessary forced evacuations, and the creation of large refugee communities (Japan Times). Many studies since 1950 have attempted to deduce the effects of low levels of radiation on organisms, especially humans. But the results have been difficult to interpret because it has been difficult to separate radiation effects from non-radiation effects. And you just can’t dose a bunch of people to figure it out. Therefore, if LNT is correct and no radiation is the best state for any organism, the obvious experiment would be to grow organisms in an environment that has almost no radiation and observe how they respond compared to the same organisms grown in background or higher levels of radiation (1, 2). This group of scientists designed and carried out a study to do just that – approach the problem from the other side of background, from as low a radiation environment as is possible to achieve on Earth (Castillo et al., 2015; Smith et al., 2011).
Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/09/29/do-small-amounts-of-radiation-matter/#6740949a4fef
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