On Monday, November 17, the US House of Representatives passed H.R. 5544, the Low Dose Radiation Research Act, which called for the National Academies to "conduct a study assessing the current status and development of a long-term strategy for low dose radiation research."

Coincidentally that was the same day that the National Academy of Sciences hosted a publicly accessible, all day meeting to determine if there had been enough new developments in radiation health effects research to justify the formation of a new BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) committee. If formed, that would be BEIR VIII, the latest in a series of committees performing a survey of available research on the health effects of atomic (now ionizing) radiation.

I had the pleasure of attending the meeting, which was held in the ornate NAS building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. There were about 20 presenters talking about various aspects of the scientific and political considerations associated with the decision to form BEIR VIII. Several of the presenters had performed experimental research under the currently moribund Department of Energy's Low Dose radiation research program.

That intriguing program was using modern genetics techniques to learn a great deal about the dynamic nature of DNA in organisms and about the ways that living tissues isolate and repair recurring damage that comes as a result of metabolic processes, heat, chemicals and ionizing radiation. It was defunded gradually beginning in 2009 and completely by 2011, with the money making its way to solar and wind energy research as the Office of Science shifted its priorities under a flat top line budget.

The agenda allocated a considerable amount of time for public comments. There were a couple of members of the audience interested in the science falsifying the "no safe dose" model who took advantage of the opportunities to speak, but so did a number of professional antinuclear activists from Maryland, Ohio, New York and Tennessee.

Need Better Results This Time

An epic struggle with important health, safety, cost and energy abundance implications is shaping up with regard to the way that the officially sanctioned science and regulatory bodies treat the risks and benefits associated with using ionizing radiation at low doses and dose rates for medical uses, industrial uses and power production.

We must make sure that this battle for science, hearts and minds is not as asymmetrical as the one fought in the period between 1954-1964. One skirmish in the battle worth winning will be to encourage the passage of the Low Dose Radiation Research Act and the annual appropriations that will enable it to function long into the future.

Here is a brief version of that lengthy prior engagement, where there were huge winners and losers. Losers included truth, general prosperity, peace and the environment. Partial winners included people engaged in the global hydrocarbon economy in finance, exploration, extraction, refinement, transportation, tools, machines and retail distribution. There were also big financial winners in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, oncology, and agriculture.

Rockefeller Funded Survey

During a 1954 Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees meeting, several of the trustees asked the President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) if his esteemed organization would be willing to review what was known about the biological effects of atomic radiation.

The board did not have to pick up the phone or send a letter to make that request. Detlev Bronk, who was the serving president of the NAS, was already at the table as a full member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees. The board agreed that, based on their interpretations of recent media coverage, the public was confused and not properly informed about the risks of radiation exposure and the potential benefits of the Atomic Age.

The tasking given to the NAS was to form a credible committee that would study the science and issue a report "in a form accessible to seriously concerned citizens."1

Aside: For historical context, that Foundation board meeting took place within months after President Eisenhower made his "Atoms for Peace" speech in December 1953. That speech to the United Nations announced a shift in focus of the Atomic Age from weapons development to more productive applications like electrical power generation and ship propulsion.

At the time the request to the NAS was made, the Rockefeller Foundation had been funding radiation biology-related research for at least 30 years, including the Drosophila mutation experiments that Hermann Muller conducted during the 1920s at the University of Texas. Foundation board members and supported scientists had been following developments in atomic science since the earliest discoveries of radiation and the dense energy stored inside atomic nuclei.

In March 1948, the Tripartite Conferences on radiation protection, a group that included experienced radiation researchers and practitioners from the US, Canada and the UK, had determined that the permissible doses for humans should be reduced from 1 mGy/day (in SI units) to 0.5 mGy/day or 3 mGy/week.

That reduction was not made because of any noted negative health effects, but to provide an additional safety factor.

In between these two extremes there is a level of exposure, - in the neighborhood of 0.1 r/day - which all experience to date show to be safe, but the time of observation of large numbers of people exposed at this rate under controlled conditions, is too short to permit a categorical assertion to this effect.2

End Aside.

Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation

The first NAS Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation committee began its work in April 1955. There were six subcommittees, each of which authored a section of the committee's report. The report was identified as a preliminary version that was to be followed with a more technically detailed report scheduled to appear within the next couple of years, if desired by responsible government agencies.

Unlike the documents supporting the permissible dose limits that came out of the Tripartite Commission mentioned in the aside above, the NAS BEAR 1 committee report, especially the section from the Genetics Committee, was professionally promoted and received extensive media coverage and public attention.

The NAS held a press conference announcing the release of the report and answering questions in Washington, DC on June 12. Among other media attention, that press conference resulted in no less than six related articles in the June 13, 1956 edition of the New York Times. Several additional articles were published during the following weeks. The selection of pieces included a lengthy article that started at the top of the right hand column of the paper and continued with another 20-25 column inches on page 17. Read full article here

As co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, David Scadden hopes to inspire his students to join the ranks of researchers who might one day cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or diabetes. But all too often these days, he is losing out to Wall Street, or other higher-paying pursuits.

"They are seeing their senior mentors spending more and more time writing grants and going hat in hand," Scadden said, in a phone interview. "That's not a good way to inspire the best and brightest."

It is an empirical fact that there's now far less money going toward research science than there used to be, due first and foremost to the decrease in government spending on such research. The budget of the National Institutes of Health is lower (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that at any point since 2000, and 22 percent lower than it was in 2003.

This has meant that the former star students who chose to spend their lives in a lab, working with stem cells or sequencing genomes, the kind of work that most experts believe will usher in the next great medical revolution, are more reliant than ever on a handful of Americans to fund basic research.

That source of funding, while vital, is unstable and relatively scarce.

"We're going to lose a generation of young scientists, and that's not something you can make up," said Dr. Laurie Glimcher, Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College.

Traditionally, researchers rely on a three-legged stool for funding.

While one leg is made up of government grants, another is made up of industry, which pays scientists to research treatments that can be the next billion-dollar idea. But when it comes to discovery science, whose outcomes are inherently unpredictable and which is often conducted without targeting a specific disease, industry tends to be risk-averse.

That leaves philanthropy.

Fiona Murray, a professor of entrepreneurship at M.I.T., published a paper in 2012 finding that philanthropy, both private and corporate, provides almost 30 percent of the annual research funds for leading universities. She also found that while federal funds have been declining, philanthropic funds have been increasing.

"The role of science philanthropy-gifts from wealthy individuals, grants from private foundations to scientific research, and endowment income earmarked for research-is an underappreciated aspect of philanthropy in higher education whose importance becomes clear by examining trends in funding university research," Murray wrote. "Industry contributions (usually regarded as the alternative funding stream for university research) amount to less than 6 percent of university research funding. In striking contrast, science philanthropy makes up almost 30 percent of university research funding and has been growing at almost 5 percent annually."

It's that funding that has made possible a series of breakthroughs that could have outsize clinical implications during the next few decades.

On the west side of harlem, in an unadorned building, some of the most exciting research in medicine is taking place, and almost all of it is being paid for by private donors.

The New York Stem Cell Foundation is supported in part through the Druckenmiller Foundation. The stem cell foundation's fellowship program is the largest dedicated stem cell fellowship program in the world, and they are one of the only two labs in the country working successfully on a procedure known somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Remember Dolly the sheep? It's that kind of science, but a bit further along, and instead of cloning mammals, scientists work to create cells, organs or tissues that can replace diseased cells in the human body.

The federal government, for political and ethical reasons, won't fund any of it.

Though President Obama reversed the Bush administration's position on funding stem cell research, no new embryonic stem cell lines can be supported because of something called the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which is renewed every year and prohibits federal funding for synthesizing new stem cell lines. (The Obama administration allows N.I.H. funding for research on new lines that were created with private dollars.)

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